Richardson’s First Portrait

Abstract There are five extant and authentic portraits of Samuel Richardson, all painted, as far as we can tell, between the early 1740s and the mid-1750s.1 The period spanned by the paintings thus correlates almost exactly with Richardson’s career as a novelist, which begins with Pamela in 1740 and ends with the final volumes of Grandison in 1754. And the fact that the portraits were all painted in the middle decades of the eighteenth century means that the production of these images coincides with a new and unprecedented level of debate about the function and meaning of portraiture. Thus at the time when Richardson was commissioning his own paintings, it was possible for the first time for such images to participate in two very different visual discourses and draw resonance from them both: from formal public portraiture on the one hand, to intimate private likenesses on the other. In fact Richardson’s five portraits mark an extraordinarily precise trajectory between these two extremes, from Highmore’s ‘feigned oval’ half-length now in the National Portrait Gallery, which may have been intended to hang in a literary ‘gallery of worthies’, to the small full-length portrait the same artist painted for Richardson’s friend Lady Bradshaigh, which includes within it an image of its intended spectator.2 The latter is one example of the portrait as private ‘relic’; another, equally intense, is the first of the five, Hayman’s conversation piece of the novelist and his family, now in Tate Britain (Figure 2.1).