Page 27 - Francis Cotes - A winning end-game

Fig 10. FRANCIS COTES, Thomas Crathorne and his wife
Isabel, Huntingdon Library and Art Gallery.

leaning on the back of chair, gazing down Fig 11. JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier
approvingly at a sketch of Cupid in his wife’s and his Wife, Metropolitan Museum, New York.
sketchbook: but Thomas had died three years
before, and this was in fact a memorial picture, work-box, tea-set or sketch-book, gleaming on
a memory of love.5 The depiction of a couple the table (Fig. 11. Metropolitan Museum,
sharing a project as equals, whether in play, like New York).
the Welbys, or in intellectual interests, remained
rare, an outstanding, late example being Jean- Portraits were widely shown and discussed,
Louis David’s beautiful Lavoisier and his wife, seen in the artists’ show rooms, hung in family
with their scientific instruments, rather than her homes, and now exhibited at the Royal
Academy. Likeness was the first pre-requisite
5. A similar horizontal Double portrait of a lady and gentleman was but the pose chosen, and the setting, were a way
later cut in two: one half is in in Boston, Museum of Fine Art.
Johnson op.cit., 31, 98-99

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