Victoria Hepburn, Graduate Research Assistant in the Department of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art, will discuss Marcus Richard Fitzroy Thomas, the previously unnamed boy in Reynolds’s portrait of Charles Stanhope, third Earl of Harrington. The Yale Center for British Art’s retitling of the painting in May 2022 marked the first time in its 240-year exhibition history that both sitters were named. This talk will outline recently updated research into Thomas’s life and will explore how the recovery of his identity may bear upon a new interpretation of the portrait.
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Hepburn, a PhD candidate in Yale’s Department of the History of Art, is a specialist in mid-nineteenth-century British art. In 2019, she was co-curator, with Judith Stapleton and Tara Contractor, of the YCBA’s exhibition Unto This Last: Two Hundred Years of John Ruskin. She is currently a graduate research assistant in the Department of Paintings and Sculpture at the museum.