Poet hudson7/24/2023 There was indeed a portrait underneath, and the illusionistic print was of a real doctor, not Dr Mudge but the famous Devon doctor, John Huxham (1692 – 1768). The mystery was solved, but not in the way that the Mudge family had believed. He very kindly sent me a copy of the 1979 press-release. I contacted Dr Jacob Simon, who curated the exhibition with Dr Ellen G Miles, and asked him what the outcome was. The entry ended on a cliffhanger, as the painting was being x-rayed as the catalogue went to print. The only clue was the name Fisher on the bottom of the print. Thomas Mudge was known to be a clockmaker his brother Dr John Mudge FRS MD (1721 – 1783) did not actually qualify as a doctor until 1781, which is far too late for the apparent date of the engraving. The print had the letters MD below the image. The cataloguer said that further technical examination was needed to prove the story, or confirm the attribution. I like to find examples of Hudson’s sense of humour and Miss Irons’s portrait seemed a good one. He painted over her face the scroll having the portrait of (?)Thomas Mudge saying he would put some sense into her head somehow & that Thomas Mudge was the wisest man he knew.’Īs the cataloguer says, ‘the result is almost like a still-life a remarkable joke which to modern eyes verges on the surreal.’ I haven’t been able to find an image of the original, so you will have to bear with my dramatic reconstruction (with apologies to Christie’s and the National Portrait Gallery). When the picture came home she did not think it did her justice & returned it to Hudson to have it improved. The original portrait was one of Miss Irons, well-known beauty. 66 is extraordinary, the portrait of a young woman, Miss Irons (AH Wright Collection), where Hudson appears to have painted a trompe l’oeil engraving of a doctor over the sitter’s face.Ī label on the back of the painting, written when the portrait belonged to the Mudge family in the Nineteenth Century, reads: ‘A picture with scroll over face by Hudson, Sir Joshua Reynolds Master. I’ve been rereading the 1979 Thomas Hudson catalogue for the exhibition at Kenwood House.
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