BOSWELL, James (sitter); REYNOLDS, Sir Joshua (artist); HUTIN, G.W. (engraver)

Original stipple engraved plate by G.W. Hutin after Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of James Boswell, published by Abraham Wivell, circa 1825

137 x 202mm; [with:] a copy of the printed engraving

An exceptional survival: the original plate for the well-known engraving of James Boswell by G.W. Hutin, after Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portrait. Bearing the plate-maker’s mark ‘G.Harris / 51 Shoe Lane / London’.

Reynold’s portrait of Boswell was painted in 1785, and now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery:

Boswell wrote to Reynolds on 7 June 1785 explaining that, although he could not afford ‘any expensive article of elegant luxury’, he ‘would regret very much that there should not be at Auchinleck [the Boswell family seat in Ayrshire] my portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, with whom I have the felicity of living in social intimacy’. He accordingly proposed paying for such a portrait from his legal earnings over the next five years. Reynolds began the portrait on 5 July 1785 and there were sittings on 8 July and 15 August; on 10 September Boswell recorded in his diary, ‘Breakfasted with Sir Joshua and had my picture finished’. On that day Reynolds endorsed Boswell’s letter of 7 June, but the account was never settled and Reynolds eventually forgave the debt in 1791, the year Boswell’s Life of Johnson was first published with a fulsome dedication to him. Malone described the portrait as ‘a perfect and very characteristic likeness’. (npg catalogue)

Boswell himself aggressively promoted reproductions of the portrait, which was soon engraved and copied. This stipple engraving draws on the 1786 mezzotint, in particular in the atmospheric rural background.

The publisher Abraham Wivell (1786–1849) was also a portrait painter, and, remarkably, pioneer in the design of fire-escape mechanisms.

Good condition: some surface abrasion and rusing, not affecting the image itself.