Edward Howard (1744–1767)

Edward Howard (1744–1767) was an English nobleman who died at only twenty-three, and his 1766 Batoni portrait at the Victoria and Albert Museum was painted just a year before his early death. The portrait thus acquired a particular poignancy it could not have had when painted: the young man's life ended almost as soon as his Grand Tour was concluded. Howard came from a distinguished aristocratic family, and the V&A's acquisition of this work placed a Grand Tour portrait in a museum explicitly committed to design and decorative arts — Batoni's painting qualifying as a document of eighteenth-century aesthetic culture. The youth and early death of the subject give this portrait an elegiac quality retrospectively, though Batoni's image itself projects the standard confident ease of a young man of rank.

Oil on canvas from Batoni's mature Grand Tour format. A twenty-two-year-old sitter would receive his most luminous flesh rendering, with the fresh precision he reserved for young male aristocrats. The fashionable 1760s dress — perhaps a blue coat, elaborately embroidered — is rendered with the material precision that made his portraits prized as fashion documents.