Half-length portrait of Thomas Gray in profile. Gray wears a powdered wig and dark coat and vest. He gazes through a window at a landscape. Visible in the distance is St. Giles’s church at Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, England. The church is the setting of his Gray’s An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. The author is buried in St. Giles’s Churchyard
A half-length portrait of Mason in profile facing left. The esteemed poet is portrayed holding a manuscript of his epitaph for his wife’s grave in Bristol Cathedral
Description:
Title from 2005 Christie's appraisal., Attributed to Falconet based on dealer correspondence in object file and confirmed by Christie’s appraisal. Dealer correspondence notes it is a slightly different version of a Falconet reproduced in Ketton-Cremer’s Thomas Gray (1955)., and William Mason was an esteemed poet, and biographer of Thomas Gray and editor of his letters. Mason was among Horace Walpole’s chief correspondents.