Sir Brooke Boothby - by Joseph Wright Brooke Boothby lies, punningly, beside a brook, opening himself up to nature. His pose, finger to his face, suggests a delicate sensibility. It's a flamboyant departure from the conventions of the society portrait in which people in wigs would sit or stand authoritatively - they certainly didn't lie down. Boothby's relaxation is an act of intimacy with the viewer. He has nothing to hide or hold back. He is as pure as a rustic stream, not in society but in nature that is, he rejects the formal and indirect relationships of cultivated modern life in favour of a direct and authentic act of communion, as if this were the Golden Age and we were all shepherds together. As if his pose did not make this plain enough, in an untamed woodland with open country and the glowing sky behind him, he holds a work by Rousseau, whose arguments for simple living and a return to nature shook 18th-century Europe and were holy writ for the French Revolution. People read a lot in 18th-century art. Reading is an image of introspection, and Rousseau was a man dedicated to promoting feeling and sensitivity through books. The edition of Rousseau on which Boothby rests his gloved hand - presumably the book he himself published - is a sensual object, bound in calf skin, a book not of hard facts but tender emotions. Through this book we are invited to see the landscape itself as loving and meaningful, a place to dream and escape the shallow world of the city. Yet if Brooke Boothby is an early Romantic, he is not any kind of savage, noble or otherwise. He is a gentleman, fashionably dressed in broad-brimmed hat, ruffled collar and elegant suit. Any sentiment Boothby espouses will be a well-dressed one and the revolution will not overturn standards of tailoring. ㏕opFoto