Talks

Art in Context | Joshua Reynolds's Portrait of Charles Stanhope and Marcus Richard Fitzroy Thomas

Victoria Hepburn, Graduate Research Assistant in the Department of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art

Art in Context

Presented by faculty, staff, student guides, and visiting scholars, these gallery talks focus on a particular work of art in the museum’s collections or special exhibitions through an in-depth look at its style, subject matter, technique, or time period.

About this program

Victoria Hepburn discusses the recent identification of Marcus Richard Fitzroy Thomas as the previously unnamed boy in Reynolds’s portrait of Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington. The Yale Center for British Art’s retitling of the painting marks the first time in its 240-year exhibition history that both sitters are named. This talk outlines current research into the life of Marcus Richard Fitzroy Thomas and explores how this new knowledge may bear upon an interpretation of the work.

About Victoria Hepburn

Hepburn, a PhD candidate in Yale’s Department of the History of Art, is a specialist in mid-nineteenth-century British art. In 2019, she was co-curator, with Judith Stapleton and Tara Contractor, of the YCBA’s exhibition Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin. She is currently a graduate research assistant in the Department of Paintings and Sculpture at the museum.

Top image
Sir Joshua Reynolds RA, Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington and Marcus Richard Fitzroy Thomas (detail), 1782, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection