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Thomas Frye (1711/12-62)

A self-portrait dated 1760

Mezzotint | 50.5 x 36.5 cm (sheet of paper) | RCIN 654855

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  • A mezzotint self-portrait of Thomas Frye; bust length, full face, almost life size. He wears a wig, a white shirt and a braided coat. His right hand, holding a porte-crayon, rests on his drawing board. His left hand is raised to his head. Inscribed on the image: TF [monogram] Ipse; and below, in dotted letters: T. Frye Pictor Invt & Sculp / Hatton Garden 1760. The sheet has been cut within the platemark below.

    Frye’s self-portrait is one of the most dramatic prints of the period, the unusually large scale allowing him to capture the different textures of skin, hair, cloth, metal and paper using tone alone. Significantly, he shows himself holding not a mezzotint burnishing tool but a porte-crayon: he wished to emphasise his artistic genius rather than his technical skill. His pose, head in hand, was well established as a signifier of the ‘melancholic’ artistic temperament.

    Thomas Frye was born in Ireland but was working in London by the mid-1730s. In addition to his activity as a portraitist, miniature painter and printmaker, he was one of the founders and patentees of the Bow porcelain factory; his epitaph claimed that he was ‘the inventor and first manufacturer of porcelain in England’. The breathing of kaolin dust may, however, have destroyed his health and in 1759 he left London for Wales in an attempt to recuperate. On his return the following year he published a set of ‘Twelve Mezzotinto Prints, from Designs in the manner of Piazetta, drawn from Nature and as large as life’; these were followed in 1761–2 by six ‘Ladies, very elegantly attired in the fashion, and in the most agreeable attitudes’. As with the drawings of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (RCIN 990754, 990780), these heads were ‘character studies’ rather than portraits, though Frye too included a self-portrait among them.

    Text adapted from Portrait of the Artist, London, 2016
  • Medium and techniques

    Mezzotint

    Measurements

    50.5 x 36.5 cm (sheet of paper)

    50.2 x 35.3 cm (platemark)

  • Category
    Object type(s)
  • Alternative title(s)

    Thomas Frye, painter and engraver.


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