Black Watch Tartan 1750's

[OC Richard]

Yes it's Hugh Montgomerie (later the 12th Earl of Eglinton) signed and dated by the artist John Singleton Copley.

The painting hangs in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

https://collections.lacma.org/node/236420

The painting owned by the National Museums Scotland is an unsigned and undated copy. That artist changed the angle of the sword, making the two paintings easy to distinguish.

Here's the unsigned and undated copy in Scotland. It is sometimes listed as "by an unknown artist" and sometimes "after Copley" but sometimes it's incorrectly listed as being by Copley himself. Note how crudely the hand holding the sword is painted- just a huge blob of flesh-coloured paint, and how bad the anatomy of that arm is, like a boneless rubbery appendage. Also the basket hilt of the sword shows incorrect foreshortening, and doesn't make much structural sense. With the face, note that the eyes are a bit wonky.



For comparison, here's the signed at dated original, a beautifully executed portrait by perhaps the leading portraitist of that time.