Simon Lord Lovat

William Hogarth (1697 - 1764)

RA Collection: Art

Portrait of Simon Fraser, eleventh Lord Lovat, Jacobite conspirator, sat at a desk on which rest his 'Memoirs'. After his arrest in 1746 Lovat was brought to London for trial. On the way he stopped briefly in St Albans, where William Hogarth arranged to meet him at the White Hart Inn and to interview and draw him. The result of the meeting was this famous print, published while Lovat was lodged in the Tower of London. The print was much in demand and was the source of numerous contemporary copies.

On 9 April 1747 he became the last man in England to be beheaded. The crowd for Lovat's execution was huge, and Paulson compares it with Hogarth's depiction of the execution of the idle apprentice Tom Idle in plate eleven of his Industry and Idleness (17/3534).