Attributed to John Michael WRIGHT (1617-1694, English)
Portrait of a Lady
oil on canvas
30 x 25 inches
Price: Sold
John Michael Wright was one of the most significant and individual British painters of the seventeenth century. Born in London in 1617, Wright trained in Edinburgh with the eminent Scottish portrait painter George Jamesone. When civil war broke out, Wright went to Rome, joining the artists’ Academy there in 1648 (the only British artist so to do). In Rome he accumulated a collection of artworks and books, later working in the Netherlands as an antiquary for Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria. Returning to London in 1656, Wright was employed by both Royalists and Parliamentarians. After the Restoration in 1660, Wright painted Charles II – who appointed him his ‘Picture Drawer’ in 1673 – and other members of the royal family.
Wright’s portraits are characterised by a certain elegant restrained realism in contrast to the suave glamour of Peter Lely (1618-1680. This portrait is incredibly fresh and bold; this is a quality which emerges from many unfinished portraits. Below are two examples by Anthony Van Dyck which are all the more coveted for their lack of finish as they provide a rare insight into his working method.
These seventeenth-century ‘unfinished’ works instigated a tradition of the fragment considered as the whole. This concept was fully realised by Romanticists – it is worth considering Samuel Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ a poem which generates much of its power and impact from its ending, or lack thereof. In the visual arts, painters of the late eighteenth-century such as Joseph William Turner left a number of paintings unfinished to great effect.