Public Domain
Yale Center for British Art
Hogarth kept this portrait by him: it passed at his death to his widow, Jane Hogarth, and was with the printseller and writer Samuel Ireland by 1786; Leigh, Sotheby & Son sold it in 1801 as “Hogarth’s own Portrait, with Pallet”, and it was later at Rossie Priory with Charles Kinnaird, eighth Lord Kinnaird. The museum dates the canvas to about 1735, the year Parliament passed the copyright statute — “Hogarth’s Act” — that guarded his prints from pirated copies. It reached New Haven with the collection of Paul Mellon, whose gift the gallery records in the credit line.