Portraits and the Artist: Richard Rothwell’s Roman Adventures

Abstract

Richard Rothwell was an Irish portraitist who was successful in London
in the late 1820s. Despite this achievement he felt he had to leave London
to acquaint himself with the Italian Masters and see what trends were in
demand in Rome in the early 1830s. This chapter analyses how the Italian
experience affected his creativity and examines the reasons for his proclivity
towards genre and landscape over portraits in works produced up to
his death in 1868. Attention is paid to the Rothwell holdings in the National
Gallery of Ireland and the National Museum of Northern Ireland.
The reasons for the negative reaction to Rothwell’s “Italian” art on his return
to England are examined while it is also argued that he may have
retained his initial success as a portrait painter had he never gone to Italy.