ABSTRACT
This chapter describes life and work characters into context and provides a narrative for social relationships within eighteenth-century systems of patronage. Interestingly, Dr William Hunter words refer to a type of patronage that had been on the wane from the middle of the century and that had hardly been completely responsible for his own security and social status. Edge Pine portrait of Dorothy Baillie is closely related to a form of female portrait that became popular during the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly among the fashionable bluestocking circle in London. Pine also painted his portrait, although the two are not pendants in the conventional sense of marriage portraits. James Barry was striving to impose an ideal of classicism that valued the heroic individual, isolated and estranged from human relations, while Hunter promoted the practice of anatomy as an important progressive element of the curriculum of artistic training.
