BATH, UK.- The Holburne Museum of Art presents "Pickpocketing the Rich: Portrait-painting in Bath 1720 - 1800," an exhibition on view through 15th September 2002. This exhibition is the first to take a broad view of portraiture in this most classical of English cities. The key to understanding the eighteenth-century art world in Bath lies in its links with the activities of the spa and with the retail luxury trade. Never before or since, perhaps, have art and pleasure so intermingled as in the Georgian spa resort which at its height attracted 20,000 fashionable members of society each year.

During the course of the century, 160 artists opened businesses in Bath. They included Thomas Gainsborough, Joseph Wright of Derby, William Hoare, Thomas Barker and Thomas Beach, and the teenage prodigy Thomas Lawrence. The exhibition will show the full range of Georgian portraiture from full-length portraits in oil to miniatures, silhouettes and profiles painted on glass.

Arriving in 1759, Gainsborough set up his studio near the Pump Room, sharing a street door with his sister’s millinery shop. Perfume wafted across the corridor to mingle with the smell of the drying oil paint of paintings such as The Byam Family. Artists gained recognition and publicity by painting such celebrities as Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the actors David Garrick and Sarah Siddons, ’Beau’ Nash, Alexander Pope and the musicians Thomas Linley junior and senior.

Business was particularly good for the makers of smaller portraits: people passing through the resort were eager to sit for inexpensive, portable pictures - miniatures in watercolour or cheap silhouettes - that they could send home or give away to new friends as keepsakes. Artists would charge a shilling entrance fee to visit their studios, where visitors would sometimes be entertained by musicians and singers. Prices for portraits ranged from a few shillings for a head-and-shoulders sketch by a newly arrived artist to 100 guineas for a full-length Gainsborough portrait in oils.
 
Pickpocketing the Rich will be the largest exhibition ever held at the Holburne. The guest curator will be Dr Susan Sloman and the exhibitions follows on from the great success of Love’s Prospect: Gainsborough’s "Byam Family" and the 18th-century Marriage Portrait in the spring of 2001. Pickpocketing the Rich will be accompanied by an exhibition of work by living portrait painters from Bath and the south-west, to show that the tradition is still alive today.

"If I pick pockets in the portrait way two or three years longer … I intend to turn a serious fellow." Thomas Gainsborough, 1783.