Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B1981.25.361
Gallery Label:
This portrait of the twenty-five-year-old Dr. John Lloyd was painted for the sitter’s father and namesake, who from 1730 to 1744 was the “renter” or rent collector of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, during the period when Hogarth undertook his earliest attempt at grand history painting there. This portrait was apparently undertaken in acknowledgment of some now-forgotten service rendered by the elder Lloyd in connection with Hogarth’s paintings for St. Bartholomew’s, or else by Dr. Lloyd’s maternal grandfather, Thomas Hillier, who was a “lithotomist” (bladder surgeon) at the hospital. Hogarth was evidently close to the Lloyd family and is known to have presented them with a set of proofs of his Marriage A-la-Mode (1745). Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016
