Portrait of Jane Hoskyns (c. 1778–1780): Art, History and Details

Portrait of Jane Hoskyns (c. 1778–1780) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is George Romney (British, 1734–1802).

The work and its context

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

The sitter married Sir John Read in 1774, who also sat for a portrait by the artist in 1788. Born in Lancashire, Romney first apprenticed in his father’s cabinetmaker’s shop. He worked in the north of England until 1762, when he settled in London. There he became a successful portraitist, alongside Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. As with many successful portraitists, his heart lay elsewhere and he dreamed of making history paintings, but his plans for grandiose compositions rarely advanced beyond drawings.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of Jane Hoskyns
• Date: c. 1778–1780
• Creator attribution: George Romney (British, 1734–1802)
• Culture: England, 18th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 102 x 89 x 10.5 cm (40 3/16 x 35 1/16 x 4 1/8 in.); Unframed: 69.8 x 59 cm (27 1/2 x 23 1/4 in.)
• Collection: P - British before 1800
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1916.1041

Collection credit

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Wade

Further reading listed by the museum

• Ward, Thomas Humphry, and W. Roberts. Romney; A Biographical and Critical Essay, with a Catalogue Raisonné of His Works. London, United Kingdom: T. Agnew & Sons, 1904.
• Underhill, Gertrude. "Some Recent Acquisitions of The Cleveland Museum of Art." Art and Archeology, The Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of Art, XVI (1923): 130.
• Milliken, William Mathewson. The Twentieth Anniversary Exhibition of the Cleveland Museum of Art. New York, NY: The Art news, 1936.

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.