Portrait of Hugh Hope (c. 1810): Art, History and Details

Portrait of Hugh Hope (c. 1810) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Henry Raeburn (Scottish, 1756–1823).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Henry Raeburn created this likeness of fellow Edinburgh native Hugh Hope before Hope departed for India, where he worked as a civil servant for the renowned East India Company (a British joint-stock company founded in 1600 to trade in the Indian Ocean). This painting hung in the drawing room of Hope’s estate, Pinkie House in Scotland, until 1928. Although greatly influenced by his English predecessor Joshua Reynolds, Raeburn worked in a looser style, more like the work of his younger contemporary Thomas Lawrence. This portrait is painted directly on the canvas without any preliminary drawing, giving it an informal, spontaneous air.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of Hugh Hope
• Date: c. 1810
• Creator attribution: Henry Raeburn (Scottish, 1756–1823)
• Culture: Scotland
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 94.5 x 82 x 8 cm (37 3/16 x 32 5/16 x 3 1/8 in.); Unframed: 75 x 61 cm (29 1/2 x 24 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1991.133

A detail from the museum

Sir Henry Raeburn was the portrait painter for King George IV of Scotland.

Collection credit

Gift in honor of Jane Taft Ingalls on the occasion of the Museum's Seventy-fifth Anniversary

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. "The Year in Review for 1992." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 2 (1993): 38-79.
• Herries, Amanda. Henry Raeburn: The Mirror of Scotland. Kirkcudbright, Scotland: Kirkcudbright 2000 Ltd., 2024.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.