Samuel Parr

Samuel Parr was one of the most celebrated and contentious classical scholars of his day — a Whig polemicist, educator, and public intellectual who was sometimes called the 'Whig Johnson' for his formidable conversational powers and combative opinions. George Romney's 1788 portrait, now at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, captures Parr at his intellectual peak. Parr had been a schoolmaster at Harrow and later ran his own school at Stanmore, training a generation of future public men. His opposition politics and fierce personality made him as many enemies as friends, but his reputation as a scholar was unassailable. Emmanuel College holds the portrait as a record of a figure connected to the Cambridge intellectual world. Romney's likenesses of scholars and intellectuals are among his most interesting, because the subjects themselves were interested in ideas of character and representation — they understood what portraiture was doing and engaged with the process.

Romney paints Parr with the same directness and absence of flattery he brought to other intellectual subjects. The face is the portrait's entire substance — no attributes, no background features, no symbolic props — just the modelled face as a record of individual character. The handling is assured, with the particular quality of observation Romney brought to subjects he found intellectually interesting.