Allan Ramsay portrait of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ discovered

The Guardian reports on the recent discovery of a portrait by Scottish artist Allan Ramsay of the Young Pretender, Prince Charles Edward Stuart. The portrait was painted in Edinburgh in 1745, the year of the unsuccessful Jacobite rebellion that was ruthlessly crushed the following year at the Battle of Culloden. The discovery was made by Bendor Grosvenor, a director of the Philip Mould Gallery in London and well known from the BBC’s Fake or Fortune? and from his own blog Art History News.

Some Recently Published Research on Portraits

Filippo Lippi: Portrait of a woman with a Man at a Casement, c. 1440. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A re-evaluation of Fra Filippo Lippi’s double-portrait in the Metropolitan Museum, New York

In an important new article in the Metropolitan Museum Journal, Katalin Prajda (Central European University, Budapest) makes a convincing case for re-identifying the sitters in Filippo Lippi’s well-known double-portrait, the so-called Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement. They have traditionally been identified as Agnola di Bernardo Sapiti and her husband, Lorenzo di Rinieri Scolari, based on the coat of arms under the male sitter’s hands, which is that of the Scolari family. Prajda questions this identification, particularly as there was a considerable age difference between the couple, somewhere between twelve and twenty-four years (Agnola was born c. 1422; Lorenzo’s exact birth-date is not known but he was born between 1398 and 1410). Moreover, the pictorial elements of the portrait are all subordinate to the female sitter; she is the focus of the painting and the dominant figure within it. Prajda therefore suggests that it is she who is the member of the Scolari family rather than her companion.