Portrait of the Engraver Francesco Bartolozzi

When the Royal Academy of Arts opened in London in 1768, its rules shut engravers out, treating them as copyists rather than true artists. One man was admitted anyway, counted among the painters: Francesco Bartolozzi, a Florentine who had built a great reputation with a delicate dotted method called stipple. Pellegrini painted him in 1794 and showed the canvas at the Academy the same year. Bartolozzi, by then in his late sixties, is seen at his engraving, and the portrait treats that labour as work of the mind rather than the hand, with no flourish and no allegory. Bartolozzi had drawn the younger Pellegrini to London, and you can feel that debt in the care of the likeness. Pellegrini had meant to send the picture to Florence, where Bartolozzi was born, but was persuaded to leave it to the Accademia in Venice, which received it in 1834.