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for John Michael Wright
John Michael Wright
English (c. 1617-1695)
English painter. He was the son of James Wright, a tailor, and from 1636 to 1641 was apprenticed to the Edinburgh portrait painter George Jamesone. In the early 1640s he left Scotland for Rome, where he painted his earliest known portrait, Robert Bruce, 1st Earl of Ailesbury (Tottenham House, Wilts, Marquess of Ailesbury priv. col.). He was soon sufficiently prosperous to collect books, prints, paintings, gems and medals, some of which were listed by the English amateur painter Richard Symonds in the early 1650s, when the collection included works attributed to Mantegna, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian and Correggio. Wright probably worked as a copyist and dealer, but his own work was sufficiently admired for him to be elected to the Accademia di S Luca in 1648. In 1653/4 he won a place in the suite of Archduke Leopold William of Austria, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, and left Italy for Flanders.
In 1656 Wright arrived in London from Dunkirk. The entry recording his arrival in the official register of visitors noted that he had also worked in France. He soon established a thriving practice and by 1658 was referred to in William Henderson’s Art of Painting as one of the best artists in England. This reputation was not undeserved, for his portraits of the late 1650s reveal an original and distinctive manner, combining the realism of Jamesone with a Roman taste for allegory and an elegance that may owe something to his time in France. In 1658 he painted, probably posthumously, Oliver Cromwell’s favourite daughter Elizabeth Claypole as Minerva (London, N.P.G.), and in the following year Col. John Russell (Ham House, Surrey, NT), in a style that shows an awareness of the work of William Dobson, but with a French elegance to which Dobson never aspired. As a Catholic, Wright had high hopes of patronage with the return of the Stuarts in 1660: he was commissioned to paint the ceiling of Charles II’s bedchamber in Whitehall and, according to John Evelyn, an overmantel of St Catherine for the Queen’s Privy Chamber. The ceiling, Astraea Returns to Earth (Nottingham, Castle Mus.), owes a debt to the Baroque ceilings of Pietro da Cortona.
As further evidence of royal favour, the King granted Wright the rare privilege of holding a number of lotteries for paintings in his collection, which took place between 1662 and 1666. This suggests that Wright may have had financial difficulties in the 1660s, and there is no doubt that the court and fashionable patrons preferred the languid sensuousness of Sir Peter Lely to Wright’s more realistic and individual portraits. Towards the end of the decade Wright’s fortunes improved. He painted the charming double portrait of the children Lady Catherine Cecil and James Cecil, 4th Earl of Salisbury (c. 1668; Hatfield House, Herts) and in 1669 was visited by Cosimo III de’ Medici, later Grand Duke of Tuscany, who commissioned a portrait of George Monk, 1st Duke of Albemarle. In 1670 Wright was commissioned to paint 22 full-length portraits of the judges who had arbitrated over the disputes caused by the Fire of London in 1666; the paintings were completed between 1671 and 1675 for £36 each. They were hung in the Guildhall, London, where they were admired by Evelyn as good likenesses, but were severely damaged in the 18th century. Only two survive. In 1673 Wright painted one of his finest works, the Family of Sir Robert Vyner (England, priv. col., see exh. cat.), in which Sir Robert, his wife and two children are posed informally in a realistic garden, probably drawn from nature. Two years later he was at Blithfield, Staffs, painting six family portraits for Sir Walter Bagot, one of which, a tender and informal double portrait of Lady Mary Bagot and her Granddaughter, is in Wolverhampton Art Gallery. This commission is recorded in correspondence between Sir Walter and Wright, in which the latter unsuccessfully attempted to raise the agreed price from £140 to £200. He worked in Dublin in 1679 and 1680, a visit that resulted in one of his most striking portraits, that of Sir Neil O’Neill in Irish Dress (London, Tate).
In February 1685 James II succeeded to the throne and, almost immediately, sent an embassy to the Vatican under Roger Palmer, Earl of Castlemaine (1634–1705), with Wright as Steward. They arrived in Rome at Easter 1686, and Wright immediately began designing the settings, carriages and costumes required and commissioning artists and craftsmen to execute them. The large portrait of Charles II Enthroned, which dominated the official banquet given in Rome by Castlemaine, may have been the one painted by Wright in 1676 (London, Royal Col.). Wright recorded the procession, banquet and audience in An Account of His Excellence Roger Earl of Castlemaine’s Embassy …to His Holiness Innocent XI, which was published in Italian in 1687 and English the following year. The unsuccessful embassy left Rome in June 1687 and arrived in London in October. The expulsion of James II in 1688 dashed Wright’s hopes of further preferment, and he lived in London in relative poverty for the rest of his life.
David Rodgers. "Wright, John Michael." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T092340 (accessed May 2, 2012).
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