Johannes Josephus Zauffaly was born on 13 March 1733 at Frankfurt in Germany. His father was architect to the Prince of Thurn and Taxis. He ran away from home at the age of 13 and went to Rome, where he studied art for nearly twelve years. There, he developed a decorative Rococo style that incorporated minute, realistic detail. He travelled to England in 1758 and experienced problems from the moment he arrived, due to the fact he was initially unable to master the English language. He worked firstly in Covent Garden, painting clock-faces and then graduated to painting scenery in the nearby theatres. His talent was spotted and he was rescued from grinding poverty by the actor David Garrick. From which point, he never looked back. Zoffany had a great love of the theatre and was noted for his portraits of prominent actors and actress in the roles they played, as in his Garrick as Hamlet and Garrick as King Lear. This genre is sometimes known as the ‘theatrical conversation piece’, a sub-set of the ‘conversation piece’ genre that rose with the middle class in the eighteenth century. (The conversation piece painting was a relatively small – and therefore inexpensive – informal group portrait, often of a family or a circle of friends; a type of painting that had developed in the Netherlands and France and became popular in Britain after 1720. The term ‘conversation’ was applied to any informal small group). Zoffany has been dubbed by one critic ‘the real creator and master of this genre’ and ‘a thoroughly bad painter’ simultaneously – which necessitates a low opinion of the ‘conversation piece’ genre. His portrait groups of dramatic celebrities are, perhaps, the most highly esteemed of his works, have considerable technical merit and show much shrewd insight into character. Zoffany occasionally portrayed his friends or fellow artists as characters in his chosen narrative, often with sarcastic or ironic overtones. In 1764 he was introduced to Queen Charlotte and over the next ten years, earned the favour of the royal family, painting them in charmingly informal scenes – including one, Queen Charlotte and Her Two Eldest Children (1764), in which the queen is depicted with her children in her dressing room. King George III himself nominated Zoffany as a founder member of the Royal Academy and at least a dozen of his works may be found in the Royal Collection. His 1765 Portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart aged eight, holding a bird’s nest may be found in the collection of the Mozarteum at Salzburg. In 1772 Zoffany travelled to Italy with an introduction from King George III to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. During his seven-year stay, he painted the Tuscan royal family for the Empress Maria Theresa and was awarded a barony of the Austrian Empire. He also executed The Tribuna of the Uffizi (1780). That celebrated work depicts a group of connoisseurs admiring paintings and sculptures in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. When he returned to England, he learned that the vogue for conversation pieces was over, and the Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough had pretty much cornered the portraiture market. He travelled out to India in 1783 and lived at Lucknow in India for two and a half years, staying much of the time with his friend Claude Martin. On his way back to England, he was shipwrecked off the Andaman Islands. Lots having been drawn among the starving survivors, a young sailor was duly eaten. Zoffany may thus be said with some confidence to have been the first and (probably) last Royal Academician to have practised cannibalism. On his return to England, he saw the play The Death of Cook at Covent Garden, which may well have inspired him to produce his dramatic painting The Death of Cook in Hawaii. Why it remained unfinished is not known but it subsequently came into possession of Captain Cook’s widow, whose executor and residuary legatee, John Leach Bennet, presented it to Greenwich Hospital upon her death in 1835. It has been noted that Zoffany’s positioning of Captain Cook in the composition is somewhat at odds with eyewitness accounts of the great explorer’s death. The emphasis on the pose of the dying hero was a popular motif in late-18th-century history painting and Zoffany had the example of Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe as a reference point. The heroic, yet suffering Cook and the idealised ‘savage’ who murders him, confront each other. They are both revealed as noble in Zoffany’s moment of classical tragedy. He knew many of Cook’s friends and may also have painted his portrait. Zoffany’s remarkable Self-portrait as David with the head of Goliath (1756) may be found in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia. Having spent the last 20 years of his life in England, Zoffany died on 11 November 1810 at Strand-on-the-Green and was buried in Kew churchyard. A Blue Plaque marks his former residence.