basire's

Updated: May 10, 2025

Ireland, in his Hogarth Illustrated, gives us as the simple fact the following: "Hogarth being told, after his friend's death, that a portrait was wanted as a frontispiece to his works, sketched this from memory." According to the inscription on Basire's plate, it represents Fielding at the age of forty-eight, or in the year of his death.

Austin Dobson - Fielding