William Hoare

William Hoare was born around 1707 in Eye, Suffolk. He was sent to London to study under the Italian painter Giuseppe Grisoni, and when Grisoni returned to Italy in 1728, Hoare went with him. He spent roughly nine to ten years in Rome, continuing his training under the history painter Francesco Imperiali and supporting himself in part by copying old masters, before returning to England around 1737 or 1738.

He settled in Bath in 1739 and became the city's most sought-after oil portraitist from 1740 to 1759, painting the aristocrats, politicians, and visitors who passed through the spa town, until Thomas Gainsborough's arrival changed the local market. Hoare worked in both oil and pastel, and his pastel portraits, in a manner indebted to Rosalba Carriera, are considered among his most distinctive work. In 1769 he was named a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and he exhibited with the Society of Artists of Great Britain in 1761 and 1762 and at the Royal Academy from 1770 to 1779.

Hoare died in Bath in December 1792. Sources disagree on the exact day: the Royal Academy and the specialist pastel scholar Neil Jeffares record 10 December 1792, Tate's biography gives 9 December 1792, and some secondary sources, including a museum catalogue entry and part of his own Wikipedia biography, give 12 December 1792.

Institutional assessments of Hoare are consistent rather than contested. Tate and other museum biographies describe him as a leading, fashionable portraitist in Bath during his mid-career years, and the Royal Academy and other museum records emphasize his status as a founding Academician, elected in 1769. Scholarly attention to his work concentrates on his pastels, catalogued in detail by the specialist Neil Jeffares, and on his role within the broader circle of English portrait painters descending from Jonathan Richardson. No exact, attributable quotations from named critics in major outlets could be confirmed from the sources reviewed; the available commentary is institutional and biographical rather than reviewer-driven, which is typical for an artist of his period.

Hoare's market is that of a historical British portraitist rather than a heavily traded contemporary or modern name: there is no catalogue raisonne, and his works circulate primarily through UK and international auction houses and specialist dealers rather than through any gallery or estate. Press coverage from 2009 reports that a portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, a Muslim scholar from present-day Senegal who was enslaved in Maryland before being freed and brought to England, sold at Christie's London on 17 December 2009 for GBP 491,200 (about USD 882,162), and that a subsequent public campaign sought, unsuccessfully, to keep the work in the United Kingdom before it was acquired by a private collector. This figure could not be independently reconfirmed against primary auction-house records for this profile, and auction databases show continuing sales activity into 2026, including a Sotheby's London sale on 2 July 2026, for which a realized price was not available at the time of writing. Collectors should treat the 2009 figure as the best-documented, but not certainly current, high, and confirm the present record independently. Most other recorded sales of Hoare's work fall well below GBP 491,200, consistent with a market shaped by British portraiture specialists and country-house provenance rather than broad international demand.

There is no catalogue raisonne for William Hoare, and no gallery or estate manages his market; authentication rests on provenance, connoisseurship, and, for his pastels, cross-reference against Neil Jeffares' published scholarship. His reported auction high is tied to the historical importance of a single sitter rather than to broad, repeat-sale demand for his portraiture generally, and that figure could not be independently reconfirmed for this profile, so collectors should treat it as indicative rather than certain and check for more recent results before relying on it. Sources also disagree on his exact date of death in December 1792, with variants spanning 9, 10, and 12 December, a discrepancy worth noting when cross-checking documentation for any work.