George Knapton was born in London in 1698. He was the son of a prosperous bookseller. Following his training under Jonathan Richardson, he attended the St Martin’s Lane Academy, then run by John Vanderbank. He worked in Rome from 1725 to 1732, where he also pursued his archaeological interests. His report on excavations in Herculaneum was published in 1740. He was a founding member of the Society of Dilettanti, the dining club for English gentlemen returning from the Grand Tour of Italy, established in London in 1732. The Dilettanti combined revelry and witty irreverence with serious study of antiquity. They sponsored archaeological expeditions, assembled celebrated antiquities collections, and elevated classical art and architecture as models of refined taste and style. The society, initially led by Francis Dashwood, contained several dukes and was later joined by Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight, among others. The club quickly became wealthy and influential, through a system in which members had to pay it 4% of their income in any year in which they received certain forms of windfall, such as a marriage. The society aimed to ‘correct and purify’ the public taste of the country; from the 1740s, it began to support Italian opera, and from the 1750s, it was the prime mover in establishing the Royal Academy. It also funded scholarships for youths to go on the Grand Tour, or for archaeological expeditions such as that of Richard Chandler, William Pars and Nicholas Revett, the results of which they published in Ionian Antiquities, a major influence on neo-classicism in Britain. Knapton was the society’s official painter and he executed 23 oil portraits of the group’s members, paintings that are considered to be his best work. They include Charles Sackville as Julius Caesar, Sir Brownlow Sherrard as Poseidippos, Samuel Savage dressed as to go to a Venetian masquerade and the notorious Sir Francis Dashwood in the habit of a Franciscan friar, moving with a chalice in his hand towards the groin of the Medici Venus. The society was dedicated to ‘encouraging, at home, a taste for those objects which had contributed to their entertainment abroad.’ The group’s name introduced the word dilettante (from the Italian dilettare, ‘to delight’) into English and celebrated the interests of the amateur. From informal gatherings in Italy to ceremonial meetings in London, the Dilettanti cultivated a sense of kinship and conviviality. Seria ludo (Serious Matters in a Playful Vein), one of the group’s principal toasts, expressed its blend of the learned and the lively. The death knell for the society’s influence on matters artistic was inadvertently sounded by Richard Payne Knight in his condescending testimony to the Parliamentary Select Committee charged with enquiring into the provenance of the Elgin Marbles, recommending against their purchase for the nation in the face of the testimony of such noted artists as Joseph Nollekins and John Flaxman. Social dissensions then emerged and it was easy enough for the painter James Barry to dismiss the whole idea of the private collecting the Dilettanti indulged in, ‘filled with the vanity, self-importance, and rarity of their own acquisitions’. Knapton was also a well-known art connoisseur and fashionable society portraitist. His portrait of The Princess of Wales with her Eight Children is in the Royal Collection. In 1765 he was appointed Keeper of King George III’s pictures, having previously catalogued the Royal Collection. Among his other patrons were Frederick, Prince of Wales and his sitters included Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, and the composer Georg Frederic Handel. Knapton’s paintings vary in quality, but the elegant and lively style of his best portraits resembles that of Hogarth. He was also a gifted pastel artist. His familiarity with this medium is reflected in some of his oils, for example his Portrait of Lucy Ebberton (Dulwich Picture Gallery, London) reveals his expertise with soft colours and delicate handling of silky textures. Francis Cotes was his pupil. Knapton died in 1778. His portraits The Reverend Nicholas Tindal and Admiral Sir John Norris may both be found in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. There has over the years been a degree of confusion over paintings Knapton produced and those painted by his contemporary Thomas Hudson. Knapton’s portrait A Graduate of Merton College, Oxford, (c.1754/55; above) may be found in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.