Rose and Crown Club

The Rose and Crown Club was a club for artists, collectors and connoisseurs of art in early 18th-century London, England.

A Conversation of Virtuosis at the Kings Arms (in Bond Street), Gawen Hamilton, 1734–35. Not his group portrait of the club described in the text, but showing several members, including: Vertue, Dahl, Rysbrack, Kent and Hamilton himself.

History

The Rose and Crown Club "for Eminent Artificers of this Nation"^[1][2] was formed by 1704, when the engraver George Vertue was admitted;^[3] while it lasted, the club was among the more important of clubs for artists and connoisseurs.^[4] According to John Smibert's biographer Richard Saunders, the club was initially "a bawdy assembly of younger artists and cognoscenti, which met weekly"^[5]: 869 and apparently held its meetings at the Rose and Crown public house.^[6] in addition to Vertue, members included Bernard Lens III,^[7] Christian Friedrich Zincke, William Hogarth, Peter Tillemans,^[8] Marcellus Laroon the Younger and Michael Dahl.

The members of the club were known as the 'Rosacoronians'. An unfinished Hogarthian conversation piece^[9] painting in the Ashmolean Museum attributed to the Scottish painter Gawen Hamilton (another member), An Assembly of Virtuosi, shows a group of fifteen men, including eight who are identified in an etching of the painting by R. Cooper, published by W. B. Tiffin (1829),^[10] and it has been suggested that this is a group portrait of the Rosacoronians. The group includes Hamilton himself, Michael Dahl, John Vanderbank, the architect William Kent, and John Michael Rysbrack the sculptor.^[11] Vertue listed the painter and engraver Gerhard Bockman as a member in 1724.^[12]

The club was well connected with the older-established Virtuosi of St Luke (c. 1689–1743), with which it is sometimes confused, although it was less prestigious.^[2]

The Rose and Crown Club remained in existence until 1745 and held its last meeting at the Half-Moon Tavern.^[13] Bignamini notes that

The meetings and annual feasts of the Virtuosi of St Luke and of the Rose and Crown Club had come to a definitive end in 1745.^[14][15]