JOHN BOGLE

Bogle was the son of a Scottish excise officer. In the 1760s, he trained at the recently founded Foulis Academy in Glasgow and was then briefly based in Edinburgh. In 1770 he moved to London where he was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy, returning to Edinburgh in 1800. Described by a contemporary as ‘a little lame man, very proud, very poor and very singular'. 

Bogle excelled in painting portrait miniatures on a larger scale with compositions which were unusually ambitious for a miniature painter of the 1780 and 90s. He appears to have enjoyed imbuing his sitters with a sense of relaxed nonchalance, often painting them from the side and seated. The closest image to the present work would be the portrait of ‘Portrait of the Dutch Governor of Trincomalee’ in the Victoria and Albert Museum dated 1780 [P.83-1910]. This is most likely a portrait of Iman Willem Falck (1736-1785), who was the Dutch colonial governor who served as the 32nd Governor of Zeylan (Ceylon) during the Dutch period in Ceylon.

Scots living or passing through London seemed to flock to Bogle, where he carefully recorded their features, clothing and surroundings – and this was likely the case with this officer, who may have been in the Glasgow Lowland regiment of the 70th.