Oil painting, 'Alexander Pope', attributed to Jonathan Richardson the elder

Side-on portrait of Alexander Pope, who is wearing a dark brown robe.

Bequeathed by Rev. Alexander Dyce

Bequeathed by Rev. Alexander Dyce, 1869
The Reverend Alexander Dyce :
South Kensington Museum Art Handbooks. The Dyce and Forster Collections. With Engravings and Facsimiles. Published for the Committee of Council on Education by Chapman and Hall, Limited, 193, Piccadilly, London. 1880. Chapter I. Biographical Sketch of Mr. Dyce. pp.1-12, including 'Portrait of Mr. Dyce' illustrated opposite p.1.

Science and Art Department of the Committee of Council on Education, South Kensington Museum.A Catalogue of the Paintings, Miniatures, Drawings... Bequeathed by The Reverend Alexander Dyce. London, 1874. A 'Note' on page v comments, 'This catalogue refers to the Art portion of the Collection bequeathed to the South Kensington Museum by the Reverend Alexander Dyce, the well-known Shakespearian scholar, who died May 15, 1869'. The Catalogue. Paintings, Miniatures, &c. by Samuel Redgrave notes of the 'Oil Paintings', 'The strength of Mr. Dyce's valuable bequest to Department of Science and Art does not lie in [this] portion ... which is in its nature of a very miscellaneous character. The collection was made apparently as objects offered themselves, and without any special design.' Dyce's main interest was in literary subjects, and this is reflected in many of the paintings he bequeathed to the V&A.

Historical significance: Jonathan Richardson, the elder (1665-1745) was born in London, and was a pupil of John Riley from about 1688 to 1691. He was much influenced however by Sir Godfrey Kneller's portrait style. He had set up his own portrait practice by 1700, and became the principal and busiest native-born painter of his time. He published with his son Jonathan Richardson the younger, who was an amateur portrait painter, The Theory of Painting, Science of a Connoisseur, and The Art of Criticism in 1715 and 1719, and the even more influential An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy etc. with Remarks in 1722. He owned one of the greatest collections of old master drawings assembled in England.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) initially achieved success with is first separately published poem in 1711, The Essay on Criticism, followed by The Rape of the Lock in 1714, his translations of the Iliad and Odyssey 1715-26, the Duciad 1728, and the Essay on Man 1733-4. there are many portraits of him - some nineteen major types are identified - and several by Richardson, for example in the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge (signed and dated 1742, head and shoulders, three quarter view). There are two portraits, also attributed to Richardson and almost identical to the present work, both in the National Portrait Gallery (1179 and 561) - in one Pope is wearing a bay wreath and it is similar to an anonymous drawing of 1737 in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. An anonymous portrait of Pope, again almost identical to the present work, is recorded in the Department File for this object as sold at Christie's 13 April 1923.

The canvas has been cut down on all four sides. The painted oval frame is incomplete, and eighteenth-century 'three-dimensional' lettering in the spandrels (only visible in infra-red photography) is also fragmented; the inscription is 'Pd' (at top right), 'our' (bottom right), and 'all' (bottom left).

The attribution to Richardson dates at least from the Dyce Bequest, and there seems no reason to doubt it. Richardson knew the Pope family, and first met Pope himself in about 1716. The title-page of Pope's Letters, published in 1737, has an etched portrait of the author by Richardson, inscribed 'Amicitiae Causa' [for friendship's sake]. One of the National Portrait Gallery portraits (561), with the sitter wearing a dark red fur-lined coat, is described by J. Kerslake (National Portrait Gallery: Early Georgian Portraits, 2 Vols, 1977, I, pp.212-222) as a poor version of a number of oil portraits of the same type, and notes the best as the picture of 1738 now at Petworth House which belonged to, and was probably commissioned by, the eminent collector Dr Mead. The Petworth painting was engraved by Thomas Holloway in 1797 for the first volume of the Joseph Warton edition of the Works of Pope, which was also in the Dyce Bequest (D.7713) along with much other material relating to Pope.

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