page_title: John Michael Wright
section_title: Royal patronage
hierarchical_section_title: John Michael Wright / England / Royal patronage
caption_attribution_description: Sir Neil O'Neill
context_page_description: John Michael Wright was a portrait painter in the Baroque style. Described variously as English and Scottish, Wright trained in Edinburgh under the Scots painter George Jamesone, and acquired a considerable reputation as an artist and scholar during a long sojourn in Rome. There he was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca, and was associated with some of the leading artists of his generation. He was engaged by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, to acquire artworks in Oliver Cromwell's England in 1655. He took up permanent residence in England from 1656, and served as court painter before and after the English Restoration. A convert to Roman Catholicism, he was a favourite of the restored Stuart court, a client of both Charles II and James II, and was a witness to many of the political maneuverings of the era. In the final years of the Stuart monarchy he returned to Rome as part of an embassy to Pope Innocent XI.
  Wright is currently rated as one of the leading indigenous British painters of his generation, largely for the distinctive realism in his portraiture.
context_section_description: Charles II, who promoted a number of Roman Catholics at court, granted Wright a measure of royal art patronage. In 1661, soon after the coronation, he painted a spectacular, formalised portrait of the monarch, seated in front of a tapestry representing the Judgement of Solomon, wearing St. Edward's Crown, the robes of the Garter, and carrying the orb and sceptre. Wright was also commissioned to paint an allegorical ceiling for the King's bedchamber at Whitehall Palace, and he was further appointed in 1673 to the office of "picture drawer in ordinary", allowing him to exercise his right to sign his pictures "Pictor Regis". However, to his disappointment, he did not receive the coveted office of King's Painter, which was held in the 1660s by Sir Peter Lely alone. In contrast to Wright's sympathetic realism, and carefully observed landscape backgrounds, Lely had a more glamorous style, favoured by the court, and based on Van Dyck's pre-Civil War style. This prompted the diarist Samuel Pepys to remark, after an enjoyable visit to Lely's studio, "thence to Wright's the painters: but Lord, the difference that is between their two works".
  Unlike Lely, who was knighted, Wright never received significant recognition from King Charles. However, at least one admirer thought he did deserve it. In 1669, Wright and the miniaturist Samuel Cooper had met Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Cosimo later called at Wright's studio where he commissioned a portrait of the Duke of Albemarle from Wright. On 3 March 1673, perhaps some time after Wright had painted his state picture of Charles II (now in the Royal Collection), a strange letter was sent from an obscure "Mairie Lady Hermistan" (evidently a fellow Roman Catholic) to Cosimo, asking him to intercede with the King to grant Wright a baronetcy. However, nothing came of the request.
  As antipathy towards Catholics intensified in London from the late 1670s, Wright spent more time working away from court. He painted six family portraits for Sir Walter Bagot of Blithfield in Staffordshire in 1676/7. In 1678, he removed to Dublin for a number of years, perhaps due to the anti-Catholic hysteria generated by Titus Oates's Popish Plot. Here, still styling himself "Pictor Regis", he painted "The Ladies Catherine and Charlotte Talbot", which is today in the National Gallery of Ireland. He also painted two full-lengths portraits of costumed chieftains, the "Sir Neil O'Neill" (c. 1680), now in the Tate Collection, and the "Lord Mungo Murray" (c.1683), now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Sir Neil O'Neill was a fellow Roman Catholic, also in exile in Dublin. Wright portrayed him in the dress costume of an Irish chieftain, with suit of rare Japanese armour at his feet. The significance of this armour is that it is thought to be a coded symbol of a triumph over the persecutors of Roman Catholicism, of whom, at that time, the Japanese were notorious. The portrait of Mungo Murray (the 5th son of the Royalist Marquis of Atholl) is notable for being considered one of the first instance of Scottish tartan being portrayed in art.
caption: Sir Neil O'Neil (1680), Tate Collection
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