Portrait of a Man with a Turban
Date1760
Designed and engraved by
Thomas Frye
(ca. 1710 - 1762)
OriginEngland, London
MediumBlack and white mezzotint
DimensionsOH: 20 7/16" x OW: 15 1/2"
Credit LineMuseum Purchase
Object number1983-279
DescriptionLower margin: "T. Frye Pictor Inv.t & Sculp,t/ Hatton Garden 1760"Label TextBetween 1760 and 1762, Anglo-Irish artist Thomas Frye designed, engraved, and published two ambitious sets of life-sized mezzotint portraits entitled “Fancy Heads” featuring lavishly and exotically attired men and women in engaging poses. This print as from the first series. The artist does not identify the individuals in his “Fancy Heads” series. Inspiration for the portraits are thought to have been drawn from the fashionable gentleman and ladies who populated the theater, masquerades, and pleasure gardens of Georgian London. Frye is noteworthy for his command of the medium, his use of dramatic lighting, and the unusual positions in which his sitters' heads are posed. Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797), portrait painter famous for this experiments with candlelit subjects and shadows and light, based a number of figures in his paintings on Frye's portraits such as this man with a turban.
Frye marketed his prints, which were expensive and published in limited editions, quite extensively in the London press. Prints by Frye were advertised in the Virginia Gazette on September 17, 1771 (Purdie & Dixon) for sale in Williamsburg. The advertisement reads:
“To be Sold any Time betwixt this and October Court for ready Money, Sundry fine prints done by Mr. Fry[e] and some Election Pieces by Hogarth, the Property of a Genleman[sic] gone to England. They may be seen at any Time on applying to Benjamin Bucktrout.”
Thomas Frye was one of the most significant artists working in mezzotint engraving in the eighteenth-century. He was born outside Dublin around 1710, and moved to England at age twenty to work as a painter and engraver. He gained notoriety as the manager at the Bow Porcelain Factory, where he helped develop a recipe for bone china. After resigning his position at Bow, he returned to the medium of mezzotint. Frye’s mastery of this this engraving process is displayed through his ability to achieve dramatic variation in tone, characterized by velvety depths and luminous highlights, that render his subjects both sensitive and shockingly life-like.
1760
