Londoners found much to marvel at in the Royal Academy of Art’s 1780 exhibition. The first annual exhibition held in the academy’s imposing new home in Somerset House, it showcased nearly five hundred pieces of art. The paintings, always the stars of the show, were in a grand exhibition room. There, bookended by enormous new portraits of King George III and Queen Charlotte, paintings were hung nearly floor to ceiling on the thirty-two-foot-high walls. Landscape paintings and portraits of nobles jostled for attention alongside historical paintings and imagined scenes from Shakespeare’s plays.
To make sense of the crowded display, catalogs were given with admission that assigned each painting a number and detailed its artist and title. Number 202 in the catalog was the work of twenty-two-year-old Joseph Wright, a promising, award-winning Royal Academy student notable for being one of the first Americans to study there. Number 202, Mrs. Wright Modelling a Head in Wax, was his debut entry into the annual exhibition. “Mrs. Wright” was his mother, Patience Wright, the celebrated American wax sculptor who ran a popular London wax museum. She also was a notoriously passionate supporter of the American cause for independence from Britain, now in its fifth year of armed conflict. So passionate, in fact, that she was rumored (correctly) to be a spy.
If that weren’t controversial enough, this was more than simply a portrait of her at work. Busts of King George and Queen Charlotte watched her work, and what she modeled was the decapitated head of King Charles I. It was, as everyone who saw it knew, a portrait of regicide.
Joseph Wright’s painting was just one of many portraits in the show, but it was one of the most widely remarked upon pieces that year. As one observer put it: “By what lethargy of liberty it happened I do not know,” but the undeniable truth remained that there was “a picture of Mrs. Wright modelling the head” of England’s king famously executed by his own subjects for anyone to see, with “their Majesties contemplating it.” If Wright hoped for fame with this first exhibition, he achieved his goal. His portrait of his mother caused quite a stir. Patience Wright’s fame was already widespread. Her likeness circulated in popular London magazines and prints, making her image known as well as her name.
And here on the walls of the Royal Academy for anyone willing to pay two shillings to see was this easily identified woman, as famous for her pro-American politics as her wax creations, symbolically enacting violence against one monarch while threatening another. The portrait’s political implications were obvious. Displayed where it was—in a space that celebrated royal largesse—it created a sensation.