With the decline of history painting, the prestige and practice of “the great style” passed by default into the category of portraiture, for the landscape painters were not in the running to support it. In tracing the parallel evolution of the elevated and human portrait it is necessary to avoid the facile conclusion that the first Georgians preached a doctrine of fine art that they could not practise. The two modes are interconnected. In other words they made out of the ideal of informality an aristocratic one. Informality, what Vertue called a “natural, easy style”, is elevated by “grazia” and “decoro”. Thomas Hudson (1701-1779) presents, in 1746, to the Foundling Hospital a portrait of his architect, Theodore Jacobsen that throws an interesting light on the transformation of the great style into an informal one. The pose clearly derives from the “Craggs Monument” in Westminster Abbey by Giovanni Baptista Guelfi. Its main source is the Photos or “Longing” Statue in the Conservatori Museum, an obvious model in the Classical Antiquity for a funerary monument. But Guelfi made use of another famous masterpiece on the Capitol, the marble Satyr attributed to Praxitele, with its torso leaning on a pedestal and one arm akimbo. It was the Photos arrangement of the legs, however, that captured the imagination of the Georgians. They are ellegantly crossed,with the bent one resting on its toes. What had originally been noted and used in an elegiac context now became the symbol of well-bred negligence. Whereas Craggs is clothed in a classical drapery, Jacobsen is dressed like a gentleman of fashion and looks alertly at the spectator. Thereafter every major fashionable portrait painter of the age took up the pose, while some, like Gainsborough and Reynolds used it repeatedly. At the end of October 1737, Vertue made his longest entry on the most informal of al...
