Allan Ramsay

Alastair Smart

Allan Ramsay, Court painter to King George III, was one of the major portrait painters of the eighteenth-century British school. Born in Edinburgh, he was also an important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment; his Dialogue on Taste merits an honoured place among eighteenth-century belles lettres. This book, by the world's foremost authority on Ramsay, gives an entirely fresh account of Ramsay's life and sheds new light on his artistic and intellectual development. A classical scholar and master of several modern languages, Ramsay was unquestionably the most erudite artist of the age. His friends included such celebrated men of letters as David Hume, Adam Smith, Horace Walpole, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell; he also came to know the French philosophes Voltaire, Diderot, d'Holbach and Rousseau (whose portrait he painted). Alastair Smart describes Ramsay's early years, his artistic training in Scotland, England and Italy, his rise to prominence as the leading portrait painter in England, his two marriages, his travels abroad, and his appointment as painter to the King. He discusses Ramsay's ideas, especially as revealed in the Dialogue on Taste. He analyzes the various phases in Ramsay's development as a painter and explores his relationship to such established painters as Hogarth and Highmore and to the younger painters Reynolds and Gainsborough. Smart's extensive discussions of Ramsay's major works are accompanied by numerous reproductions of his paintings, many appearing for the first time. Smart's biography of a remarkable Enlightenment figure - the fruits of sustained research over many years - fills a considerable gap in our knowledge of British eighteenth-century art.