Alexander Pope at the age of seven

an unknown artist
ca. 1695

Inscription, top left: inscribed A.Pope. Anno Aetatis / 7

This painting of Pope as a boy is one of three Pope portraits in the Osborn Collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale. The family priest William Mannock said of the young Pope,

He was a child of particularly sweet temper and had a great deal of sweetness in his look when he was a boy. This is very evident in the picture drawn for him when about ten years old, in which his face is round, plump, pretty, and of a fresh complexion.—I have often heard Mrs. Pope say that he was then exactly like that picture, as I have been told by himself that it was the perpetual application he fell into, about two years afterwards, that changed his form and ruined his constitution. The laurel branch in that picture was not inserted originally, but was added long after by Jervas. (Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).

William Kurtz Wimsatt notes that at Christie's on 21 October 1960 a portrait described as “Van Loo Portrait of a Boy, said to be Alexander Pope, aged 7, bust length, in blue dress, white shirt, red bow and red cloak—in a painted oval—29 in. by 24 in.” was acquired by James M. Osborn of New Haven, Connecticut. Wimsatt postulates that the portrait may have been by Simon Dubois (1632–1708) (The Portraits of Alexander Pope, Yale University Press, 1965).

—by Allison Muri, September 2018