Portrait of the Earl of Northampton is a 1758 portrait painting by the Italian artist Pompeo Batoni. The sitter was Charles Compton, 7th Earl of Northampton, a young English aristocrat. He is shown against a Neoclassical backdrop referencing Ancient Rome. He is shown with a whippet on the chair beside him.Walsh & Lowe p.2 Northampton was short-lived and died five years after the painting at the age of twenty six.Bowron & Kerber p.60
Batoni was a Rome-based painter who specialised in depictions of visiting Grand Tourists, primarily from Great Britain and Ireland. This work, along with Batoni's picture of Wyndham Knatchbull-Wyndham established him as the pre-eminent portraitist of the visiting elite. Northampton also commissioned a history painting from Batoni the same year, the now lost Hector's Farewell to Andromache.Bowron & Kerber p.60 Today the painting is in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, having been acquired in 1950.
References
Bibliography Bowron, Edgar Peters & Kerber, Peter Björn. Pompeo Batoni: Prince of Painters in Eighteenth-century Rome. Yale University Press, 2007. Walsh, E.G. & Lowe, Mary. The English Whippet. Coch-y-Bonddu Books, 2004.