Anecdotes of painting in England : with some account of the principal artists and incidental notes on other arts
Horace Walpole's 1765 Anecdotes of Painting in England, printed by Thomas Kirgate at Strawberry Hill, is a scholarly art-history volume compiled for connoisseurs and collectors, with portraits engraved after George Vertue's records. The plates are oval-framed head-and-shoulders engraved portraits of English painters and sculptors, set on plain paper with lettered names beneath; a designer might take their tight oval vignettes, periwig-era costume, and dense hatched engraving as a model for formal, period-styled portrait framing.
