Description
Full length, frontal portrait of a young gentleman in black waistcoat and breeches in front of a three stump wicket, holding a thin cricket bat. The figure at the wicket holds a black cloak. Volcano, possibly Mount Vesuvius near Naples, Italy, in background.
Display caption
Thomas Hope of Amsterdam playing cricket with his friends, 1792
Jacques Sablet (1749 – 1803)
MCC Collection: purchased, 1968
Oil on canvas
M.1968.TN.45
Thomas Hope was the son of an English father long established in Amsterdam as a banker, and a Dutch mother, and he is shown playing cricket in the Roman Campagna. Hope devoted much of his youth to an extended grand tour, which lasted almost ten years, and was aged 22 when the Swiss-born Sablet was commissioned to paint him. In 1796, when Holland was occupied by the French, Hope left for England where he became one of the most successful designers of furniture and interiors of the Regency period.
Born in Lausanne, Jacques Sablet studied in Paris before moving to Rome in 1775, where he made his name painting portraits and scenes of the Campagna. A year after painting Hope, Sablet fled Rome as anti-French sentiment grew.