James Pettit Andrews (c.1737–1797)

Samuel Drummond painted this portrait of James Pettit Andrews, a historian and antiquary born around 1737 who died in 1797. Drummond was one of the most sought-after portrait painters of his era, supplying likenesses of leading personalities to The European Magazine and London Review, and his sitters ranged from Walter Scott to Elizabeth Fry to Marc Isambard Brunel. Andrews, best known today for his historical writings on England, would have been a figure of some cultural standing, exactly the kind of subject Drummond gravitated toward during his prolific career at the Royal Academy.

Drummond came to painting through an unusual route. He spent his teenage years working Baltic trade routes at sea before training at the Royal Academy Schools from 1791, and that practical, observational background seems to have sharpened his eye for character. Within a few years of entering the schools he was exhibiting regularly, eventually showing over three hundred works at the Royal Academy. Burlington House, home of the Royal Academy, is a fitting location for a portrait by someone so central to its world. Drummond was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1808, and his portraits consistently show a direct, unfussy approach to likeness that made him a trusted recorder of British intellectual and public life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.