Master Henry Hoare

In 1788 the boy's father, Sir Richard Colt Hoare, left England for a second long tour of Italy. His wife had died three years earlier, when their son was not yet one, and he had just inherited Stourhead in Wiltshire, the banking family's estate with its celebrated landscape garden. Henry was three or four when Reynolds painted him in white muslin, at work in a garden. That was ordinary dress for a small boy of the period, who would be put into trousers a few years later at breeching. The portrait hung at Stourhead until the heirlooms sale of 1883, when the dealer Asher Wertheimer bought it and paid for a copy to fill the gap on the wall. The copy hangs there still.