Robert Fagan (London 1761-1816 Rome)

A painter, archeologist, art dealer and eventually diplomat, Robert Fagan led a colourful life. Born in London to Irish parents, and admitted at the Royal Academy School in 1781, aged twenty, an early inheritance allowed him soon to depart for Rome, making his way through Flanders and Paris before settling in Italy in 1784, where he would remain his entire life. Adopting a continental neoclassical style influenced by Andrea Appiani and François-Xavier Fabre, he quickly became a fashionable portraitist for the elegant grand tourists who wished to be immortalised against picturesque Roman landscapes. He also dealt in works of art, on one occasion smuggling out of Italy the two Claude masterpieces belonging to Gasparo Altieri which he later sold to William Beckford. During the French invasions of Italy, he had to flee Rome for Sicily and Florence. In 1809, he was named British Consul-General for Sicily and Malta, and became the confident of Caroline of Naples and the Two Sicilies.
It is probably through his activities as a relentless archeologist that Fagan met Sir Andrew Corbet Corbet, himself an excavation-savvy English expatriate who had settled in Rome around 1792 in 'a style of considerable eminence Lady Corbet having a Conversation every Wednesday evening; which was frequented not only by all the British, but by many of the first Roman Nobility' (J. Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701-1800, cited by Avery, 2002, op. cit., pp. 52-3). In 1792, Hester Corbet became godmother to Estina, the daughter the painter had with his beautiful Italian first wife Anna Maria Ferri. Two years later, Fagan and Corbet were working together on the antique sites of Laurentum, or Campo Iermini, north of Ardea, along with a distinguished if unexpected partner: Prince Augustus Frederick, the sixth son of George III and later Duke of Sussex. The portrait is thus a testament to the artist's friendship with the sitters and to their shared passion for the Roman past, indicated by the Temple of Minerva Medica in the background. In terms of scale, ambition and quality, this is one of the finest works in Fagan's extant oeuvre.