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 | | Batoni would have been fully aware of the importance of satisfying his client, as Udny's Aberdeenshire links must have meant that he knew two key members of the foreign community in Rome, the Abbé Peter Grant, influential in Papal circles, and James Byres of Tonley, doyen among ciceroni. |
 | | For the background Batoni repeated that of his portrait of an Irish sitter, Otway Cuffe, 3rd Lord Desart (Clark, no. 336; New York, private collection), with a column on the left and on the right the Temple at Tivoli -- one of the sights outside Rome which most serious visitors sought to see. |
 | | The portrait demonstrates that even at a time when Batoni is known to have been fully stretched by commissions from patrons of the importance of the Emperor Joseph II, he had the artistic energy to paint this fluent, sympathetic and evidently appropriate portrait of a discerning Scottish visitor to Rome. |
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