Margaret King was a painter active in London between 1779 and 1787. [1]
King exhibited pastel portraits at the Royal Academy from addresses in Soho, beginning in 1779 and continuing until 1787. She was generally adjudged in the press as being possessed of a good deal of talent, and her work received favorable notices from the critics most years; one wrote, in 1784, that "Miss Margaret King, who stands first in merit, and almost alone, as an artist in crayons, has given us but one portrait, not finished with her usual care...." An attempt has been made to connect her to a Margaret King, portraitist and drawing teacher, who was recorded in Bath, Somerset between 1799 and 1819. Besides the sixteen pieces listed in the Royal Academy catalogues of various years, [1] two pastels, one of an unknown lady and one of Sarah Tatum, later Mrs. Nathaniel Still of Salisbury, are known to have survived. [2]
Sir Joshua Reynolds was an English painter who specialised in portraits. Art critic John Russell called him one of the major European painters of the 18th century. He promoted the "Grand Style" in painting, which depended on idealisation of the imperfect. He was a founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts and was knighted by George III in 1769.
Sir Thomas Lawrence was an English portrait painter and the fourth president of the Royal Academy. A child prodigy, he was born in Bristol and began drawing in Devizes, where his father was an innkeeper at the Bear Hotel in the Market Square. At age ten, having moved to Bath, he was supporting his family with his pastel portraits. At 18, he went to London and soon established his reputation as a portrait painter in oils, receiving his first royal commission, a portrait of Queen Charlotte, in 1789. He stayed at the top of his profession until his death, aged 60, in 1830.
John Russell was an English painter renowned for his portrait work in oils and pastels, and as a writer and teacher of painting techniques.
Ozias Humphry was a leading English painter of portrait miniatures, later oils and pastels, of the 18th century. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1791, and in 1792 he was appointed Portrait Painter in Crayons to the King.
John Raphael Smith was a British painter and mezzotinter. He was the son of Thomas Smith of Derby, the landscape painter, and father of John Rubens Smith, a painter who emigrated to the United States.
Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, also known as Adélaïde Labille-Guiard des Vertus, was a French miniaturist and portrait painter. She was an advocate for women to receive the same opportunities as men to become great painters. Labille-Guiard was one of the first women to become a member of the Royal Academy, and was the first female artist to receive permission to set up a studio for her students at the Louvre.
Rosalba Carriera was an Italian Rococo painter. In her younger years, she specialized in portrait miniatures. Carriera would later become known for her pastel portraits, helping popularize the medium in eighteenth-century Europe. She is remembered as one of the most successful women artists of any era.
Ellen Wallace Sharples was an English painter specialized in portraits in pastel and in watercolor miniatures on ivory. She exhibited five miniatures at the Royal Academy in 1807, and founded the Bristol Fine Arts Academy in 1844 with a substantial gift.
Events from the year 1792 in art.
Hugh Douglas Hamilton RHA was an Irish portrait-painter. He spent considerable periods in London and Rome before returning to Dublin in the early 1790s. Until the mid-1770s, he worked mostly in pastel. His style influenced the English painter Lewis Vaslet (1742–1808).
David Martin was a Scottish painter and engraver. Born in Fife, he studied in Italy and England, before gaining a reputation as a portrait painter.
Lucas Horenbout, often called Hornebolte in England, was a Flemish artist who moved to England in the mid-1520s and worked there as "King's Painter" and court miniaturist to King Henry VIII from 1525 until his death. He was trained in the final phase of Netherlandish illuminated manuscript painting, in which his father Gerard was an important figure, and was the founding painter of the long and distinct English tradition of portrait miniature painting. He has been suggested as the Master of the Cast Shadow Workshop, who produced royal portraits on panel in the 1520s or 1530s.
Jean Valade was a French painter and pastel artist of the Rococo movement, specializing in portraiture.
Margaret Sarah Carpenter was an English painter. Noted in her time, she mostly painted portraits in the manner of Sir Thomas Lawrence. She was a close friend of Richard Parkes Bonington.
Gustaf Lundberg was a Swedish rococo pastelist and portrait painter. He trained and worked in Paris and later was appointed court portrait painter in Stockholm.
Ann Mary Newton was an English painter. She specialized in portraits of children and worked in crayon, chalk, pastel and watercolour. Newton studied in England under George Richmond and in Paris under Ary Scheffer. Her works were exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art between 1852 and 1865.
Christian Horneman was a Danish miniature and pastels painter, mainly known for portraits. He was the father of the composer Emil Horneman and grandfather of C. F. E. Horneman, also a composer.
Catherine Read was a Scottish artist. Born in the early 18th century, she is most known for her work as a portrait-painter. She was for some years a fashionable artist in London, working in oils, crayons, and miniature. From 1760 she exhibited almost annually with either the Incorporated Society of Artists, the Free Society of Artist, or the Royal Academy, sending chiefly portraits of ladies and children of the aristocracy, which she painted with much grace and refinement.
Daniel Gardner was a British painter, best known for his work as a portraitist. He established a fashionable studio in Bond Street in London, specializing in small scale portraits in pastel, crayons or gouache, often borrowing Reynolds' poses.
Martha Isaacs, later Higginson was an English painter.