John Wollaston the Younger

John Wollaston ( 1742 1775) was an English painter who specialised in portrait painting and was active mostly in British North America. He was one of a handful of painters to introduce English Rococo styles of painting to Britain's North American colonies.

Biography Little is known of Wollaston's early life. He is believed to have been the son of a painter, born in London. Some sources give his father's name as John Wollaston; others, citing Horace Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting in England of 1765, suggest that his father's name was John Woolston, and that he later changed his name to Wollaston.

Similarly, little is known about his artistic training; Charles Willson Peale, in a letter dated 1812 and written to his son Rembrandt, mentions that Wollaston trained in London with a drapery painter, but nothing else has been recorded.

Stylistically, Wollaston's work bears some similarity to portraits by Thomas Hudson and Allan Ramsey, among others, and it has been suggested that his teacher was Joseph van Aken, who completed the drapery in paintings by these and other artists of the period. An engraving was produced after it by John Faber the Younger. A handful of other paintings dating to before his trip to the colonies also exist, including a portrait of an unidentified officer of the Royal Navy now in the National Gallery of Art.

Wollaston's influence on younger artists was felt primarily in Philadelphia; there, painters such as Robert Feke, John Hesselius, and Benjamin West imitated his technique and compositions in their own output.

Today, Wollaston's portraits can be found in many museum collections; among these are those of the National Gallery of Art; and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

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