George Vertue was born in 1684 at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, London. At the age of 13, he was apprenticed for seven years to a heraldic engraver of French origin, whose business failed three or four years into Vertue’s articles. He then studied drawing at home, later becoming an engraver for seven years under Michael Vandergucht. In 1711 Vertue was among the first members of Godfrey Kneller’s London Academy of Painting in Great Queen Street. His plate of Archbishop Tillotson, after Kneller, commissioned by Lord Somers, established his reputation as an engraver; and he was soon in an excellent practice, engraving portraits after Dahl, Richardson, Jervas and Gibson. In portraiture alone, he executed more than 500 plates. In 1717, he was appointed Engraver to the Society of Antiquaries and his burin was employed upon many interesting statues, tombs, portraits and other subjects of an antiquarian nature. What sets Vertue apart, is that fact that from about 1713, he avidly researched the history of British art and collected many anecdotes about his contemporaries. Vertue’s writings included: On Holbein and Gerard’s Pictures (1740); Medals, Coins, Great Seals, Impressions, from the Elaborate Works of Thomas Simon (1753); Catalogue and Description of King Charles the First’s Capital Collection of Pictures, Limnings, Statues, &c. (1757); Catalogue of the Collection of Pictures belonging to King James II., to which is added a Catalogue of Pictures and Drawings in the Closet of Queen Caroline (1758); Catalogue of the Curious Collection of Pictures of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (1758) and Description of the Works of that Ingenious Delineator and Engraver, W Hollar. Vertue was a member of the Rose and Crown Club, with William Hogarth, Peter Tillemans and other artists and connoisseurs, and he kept some records of its activities. Vertue died in London on 24 July 1756, and was buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. The series of 34 portrait drawings he produced depicting English painters may now be found in the collection of the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University in America, having been acquired in 1949. The drawings once formed part of a collection of 470 prints and drawings in two folio volumes from the library of the aristocratic art historian and man of letters Horace Walpole (1717-97). He acquired many of these portraits from the artist’s widow in 1758 and subsequently augmented the collection with additional prints and other drawings. In addition to the portraits, Walpole also acquired Vertue’s manuscripts or ‘Notebooks’, numbering nearly 40 volumes, which recorded accounts of the lives of English painters and constituted a major resource for Walpole’s mammoth five-volume study Anecdotes of Painting in England; with some account of the principal artists; and incidental notes on other arts; collected by the late Mr George Vertue; and now digested and published from his original Mss. Walpole began work on the book in 1759 and published it at his Strawberry Hill Press between 1762 and 1771. Walpole stated that the ‘chief business’ of this work ‘must be to celebrate the arts of a country which has produced so few good artists.’ His narrative, nevertheless, also reveals something of his views on the nature and proper pursuits for artists in England: he commemorated portraiture as a distinctly national genre and frequently promoted the merit of art produced by amateurs over that produced by academic professionals. His presentation of the history of English art as a series of anecdotes highlighted the importance he placed on individual biography. Although transparently honest, Vertue was not a stickler for detail, or factual verification. Walpole depended on his work heavily, even to the extent of repeating his mistakes. Following Vertue’s lead, Walpole valued portraits as embellishments to his text. He employed several printmakers (Alexander Bannerman, Thomas Chambars, Charles Grignion, John Miller, and Anthony Walker) to engrave portrait plates, principally after Vertue’s drawings, as illustrations to the work. Many of the drawings have annotations by Vertue, Walpole, or both. Most are signed with Vertue’s monogram, ‘VG’ which is often reinforced in ink, probably in Walpole’s hand. Although the name of George Vertue is entirely unknown to our own age, he is a figure of immense importance in the history of British art. Without his tenacity, our understanding of the evolution of art in these islands, in the two centuries prior to his death, would be negligible.