Mrs. Thornton

Thornton from 1751 by John Hoppner is an early portrait dating from before the artist's establishment as one of London's leading portraitists. The work documents a female sitter from the Georgian gentry in the more formal manner of the mid-eighteenth century. Hoppner's oil handling favored warm flesh tones over silvery grey half-shadows, producing an immediate vivacity that reflected his admiration for Reynolds and Gainsborough. The Rococo era saw a proliferation of new subject types—fêtes galantes, genre scenes, decorative mythologies—that moved painting away from the high moral purpose of the preceding century toward intimate pleasure.

The female portrait demonstrates the more formal treatment of Hoppner's early work, before the development of the atmospheric breadth that would characterize his mature technique.