Francesco Bartolozzi (1727–1815)

In 1773 the Royal Academy in London was only five years old, and Joshua Reynolds, its first president, was painting the people who had built it with him. One of them was Francesco Bartolozzi, a Florentine engraver who had come to England a few years earlier and become a founding member of the Academy. Bartolozzi made much of his living by engraving other men's paintings, Reynolds's included, in a soft stipple technique that carried those faces across Europe in the days before photographs. So there is a quiet circularity here. The painter is portraying the man whose trade was to copy him, and who would later turn this very portrait into a print. Reynolds kept the setting plain, a bust in a dark coat against shadow, all the attention on the face. The picture hangs today at Saltram House in Devon, an English country house Reynolds knew well.