I love the decision of this man to pay lots of money to have his portrait done trying to work while his daughter bothers him with a doll.
Christopher Anstey with His Daughter (c. 1776), by William Hoare
Sep 18, 2026 · 5:16 PM UTC
William Hoare
Christopher Anstey and his daughter Mary Ann, circa 1776
Oil on canvas
49 3/4 in. x 39 3/4 in. (1265 mm x 1010 mm)
National Portrait Gallery, London, England
@NPGLondon
H/T @SeekAfterBeauty
A small girl in a white dress and a frilly white cap holds up a doll whose hair is a tower of feathers. Beside her a man in a dark blue coat sits at a desk, quill in hand, looking out as if the interruption were expected. An inkwell sits to the left. A closed book sits to the right. Behind him, a shelf of books disappears into brown shadow.
The painting is Christopher Anstey and his daughter Mary Ann, oil on canvas, about fifty inches by forty, painted around 1776 by William Hoare. It belongs to the National Portrait Gallery in London, where it hangs in Room 18. Hoare was the first fashionable portrait painter to settle in Bath. He had trained in London and Rome, moved to Bath in 1739, and later helped found the Royal Academy with Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. Christopher Anstey was a poet who lived in that same city. In 1766 he published The New Bath Guide, a comic poem in rhyme that made fun of the visitors, the doctors, and the extreme fashions of the spa town. That book made him famous. Mary Ann, born in 1763, was his eldest daughter. She would have been about thirteen when this was painted.
The doll is not a nursery toy in the ordinary sense. Fashion dolls were sent from Paris so dressmakers could copy the latest styles. The piled hair and feathers are the joke. In The New Bath Guide Anstey had already laughed at women whose hair was shaved and then rebuilt into “a horrible monster, to cover her ears.” Hoare puts that joke in the child’s hands and sets it next to the father who wrote it.
The portrait stayed with the Ansteys. A label from about 1830 records that it was to pass through the poet’s sons and then to a nephew. It came down to Caroline Mary Sambourne-Palmer, born Anstey, who left it to the National Portrait Gallery in 1940.
Mary Ann has hold of her father’s coat and is showing him the doll. Anstey is mid-sentence on the page. Mary Ann demands her father’s attention, unconcerned that he is working. Most portraits of the period are carefully staged: stiff, formal, and humorless. This double portrait is full of movement, humor, and affection, which is the right choice for a man who made his living as a humorist.
