Oil painting Thomas Baker

Object number

LDSAL311

Artist/Designer/Maker

Bridges, Charles - Artist

Production date

Circa 1730
18th century

Material

oil paint
canvas (paint canvas)

Technique

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

Height: 534mm
Width: 474mm

Location

Burlington House -

Content description

Baker is shown head and shoulders, looking slightly to the left, in a painted oval, wearing clerical dress with bands and a grey powdered wig, both with green highlights (which may be the result of blue pigment discoloured by the varnish). He has dark blue eyes, ‘his thin studious face expressive of deep research and shrewd intellect’. The background is plain dark brown.

Inscriptions

Inscription content

Thomas Baker

Oil on canvas portrait of Thomas Baker (1656-1740), in ebonised entablature frame.

Thomas Baker (1656-1740) graduated from St John’s College, Cambridge, and was appointed Rector of Long Newton, Durham in 1686. He had to relinquish his living in the Church of England four years later because he refused to take the oath of allegiance to the new king. As a non-juror he was thus deprived of all honours and official positions. His integrity was deeply respected by his fellow scholars so that, when in 1717 he was deprived of the Fellowship that he had held at St John’s since 1680, he continued to be allowed to reside in college. His work on a projected Athenae Cantabrigiensis, although never published, was his most important academic contribution, but his contemporary reputation was largely based on the treatise Reflections on Learning, published anonymously in 1700. He was at the centre of a large group of scholars in the early part of the eighteenth century but was never elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.