Portrait of the Earl of Northampton

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Portrait of the Earl of Northampton
Charles Compton, 7th Earl of Northampton.jpg
Artist Pompeo Batoni
Year1758
Type Oil on canvas, portrait painting
Dimensions237.7 cm× 149.2 cm(93.6 in× 58.7 in)
Location Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Portrait of the Earl of Northampton is a 1758 portrait painting by the Italian artist Pompeo Batoni. The sitter was Charles Compton, 7th Earl of Northampton, a young English aristocrat. He is shown against a Neoclassical backdrop referencing Ancient Rome. He is shown with a whippet on the chair beside him. [1] Northampton was short-lived and died five years after the painting at the age of twenty six. [2]

Batoni was a Rome-based painter who specialised in depictions of visiting Grand Tourists, primarily from Great Britain and Ireland. This work, along with Batoni's picture of Wyndham Knatchbull-Wyndham established him as the pre-eminent portraitist of the visiting elite. Northampton also commissioned a history painting from Batoni the same year, the now lost Hector's Farewell to Andromache. [3] Today the painting is in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, having been acquired in 1950. [4] [5]

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