This sensitively observed study is an extremely rare survival from the period of Skirving’s residence in Italy. Skirving travelled to Rome in 1787 and remained there until 1794 producing a number of powerful works including a spectacular pastel portrait of the artist, dealer and painter Gavin Hamilton now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. The present engaging drawing demonstrates Skirving’s debt to continental draughtsman, particularly the work of French artists such as François-Xavier Fabre, and underscores his importance as a major neo-classical artist.
Archibald Skirving began his career as a junior clerk in the Edinburgh customs office. He is likely to have spent a period at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh, where Charles Pavillon was master from 1768 to 1772. In 1777 Skirving moved to London where he had various letters of introduction, including one to John Hamilton Mortimer. He is recorded exhibiting work at the Royal Academy in 1778, where he is described as a miniature painter lodging ‘at Mrs Milward's, Little Brook Street, Hanover Square’ but Skirving met with little success in London and returned to Scotland.[1]
Skirving left for Italy in 1786, settling in Rome and becoming a member of the large English community. Once in Rome he practiced as a portraitist, particularly in miniature, and acted as agent for a number of visiting tourists. Francis Garden, Lord Gardenstone described Skirving, ‘a young painter of merit [who] comes from the neighbourhood of Edinburgh’ and gave him a number of commissions, including making miniature copies of paintings by Caravaggio.[2] In 1790 ‘Mr Skirving – Crayons – Palazzo del Babuino’ was listed among the British artists in Rome. This places him at the heart of the British community in the Campo Marzio, close to the Caffé degli Inglesi and the present, informal study is likely to be of a British sitter. In 1792 Skirving met Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo the banker and author. Forbes was travelling with his wife, Elizabeth and a daughter, also called Elizabeth.[3] Forbes described Skirving as ‘a very ingenious artist’ and his journal records that Skirving introduced him to the Italian landscape painter, Giovanni Battista Lusieri. The present, informal drawing belongs to a group of studies Skirving made towards the end of his stay in Italy, including a study of Father James McCormick and a profile study of An Unknown Gentleman signed and dated 1793.[4]
The present drawing is closest to Skirving’s masterful portrait of British Tourists in Rome also dated 1792; a work which has long been regarded as a powerful demonstration of Skirving’s abilities as a draughtsman as well as his debt to the Continental artists he encountered in Rome. Similar in style to the present drawing, the ambitious sheet shows a husband and wife in profile with a frontal portrait of their son, which demonstrates Skirving’s sympathy and interest in children.[5] The precise technique – particularly the strong lateral hatching – the isolated portraits, the sitters are detached from their surroundings, has invited comparison with the later portrait drawings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres of visitors to Rome. Whilst Ingres did not visit Italy until the following decade, Skirving almost certainly knew other French artists resident at the French Academy, including Fabre who was in Rome from 1787 until 1793 [6]
The precise date of the present drawing – 28th May 1792 – ties it to the exact moment Skirving was spending with Sir William Forbes and his family and the subject is almost certainly Forbes’s eleven year old daughter, Elizabeth. Shown standing frontally, wrapped in a travelling cloak the informal study suggests a degree of intimacy. Forbes became an important patron and friend of Skirving and later supported him back in Britain. The physiognomy of the girl also corresponds to that of Elizabeth Forbes, who went on to marry Colin Mackenzie of Portmore and to be painted as a young married woman by Henry Raeburn, a picture now in the Scottish National Gallery.
This engaging sketch is a welcome addition to Skirving’s small Roman oeuvre. The masterly drawing, executed with economic precision and a technical confidence which Skirving refined for his grander portraits, demonstrating his skill and importance as a neo-classical draughtsman in the 1790s.
References
- For Skirving see: Stephen Lloyd, Raeburn’s Rival: Archibald Skirving 1749-1819, exh. cat., Edinburgh (Scottish National Portrait Gallery), 1999.
- Francis Garden, Lord Gardenstone, Travelling Memorandums, Edinburgh, 1802, III, pp.152-3.
- For Forbes see ed. John Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701-1800, New Haven and London, 1997, pp.364-5.
- See Stephen Lloyd, Raeburn’s Rival: Archibald Skirving 1749-1819, exh. cat., Edinburgh (Scottish National Portrait Gallery), 1999, pp.18-22.
- Eds. Andrew Wilton and Ilaria Bignamini, Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century, exh. cat., London (Tate Gallery), 1996, cat. no. 55, p.103.
- See Stephen Lloyd, Raeburn’s Rival: Archibald Skirving 1749-1819, exh. cat., Edinburgh (Scottish National Portrait Gallery), 1999, pp.18-22.
