Half-length Portrait of a Bearded Man in Historical Dress
1818–28
Medium
Brush and brown wash
Dimensions
sheet: 11 x 9 3/16 in. (28 x 23.3 cm)
Classification
Drawings
Department
Drawings and Prints
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Purchase, PECO Foundation Gift, 2008
Accession Number
2008.215
Tags
Art Historical Context
Richard Parkes Bonington, leading British Romantic artist of the early 19th century, created this *Half-length Portrait of aarded Man in Historical Dress sometime between 1818 and1828. Bonington, who tragically died young at age 25, was renowned for his luminous watercolors and oils inspired by nature and travel, often evoking the dramatic skies and light effects championed by J.M.W. Turner. This intimate drawing captures a bearded figure in period attire, rendered with Bonington's characteristic fluidity during his formative years studying in France alongside Eugène Delacroix. Executed in br...
About the Artist
Richard Parkes Bonington · 1802–1828
Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–1828) was a British painter and watercolorist who, despite dying at the age of twenty-five, produced a body of work that had a profound and lasting influence on French and British painting. Born in Arnold, near Nottingham, he moved with his family to Calais and then Paris in 1817, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under Antoine-Jean Gros and copied Old Mas...