After his three-year studies in Paris he went on to Rome, where from late 1755 he came into the antique art enthusiast circle around Danish Johannes Wiedewelt, Italian Pompeo Batoni and German Anton Raphael Mengs.
His late years were affected by declining health; he died in Rome in 1787 at the age of 79, and was buried at his parish church of San Lorenzo in Lucina.
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He was again the subject of a major exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the National Gallery in London, and the Ducal Palace in Lucca in 2007-2008.
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Batoni befriended Winckelmann and, like him, aimed in his painting to the restrained classicism of painters from earlier centuries, such as Raphael and Poussin, rather than to the work of the Venetian artists then in vogue.
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Among them the following can be noted: the German Ernst Emmerling, the Englishmen John Steegman and Benedict Nicolson, the Italian Isa Belli Barsali, the American Anthony M. Clark and Edgar Peters Bowron.
The most valuable item in the collection was a portrait of Thomas Barrett-Lennard, 17th Lord Dacre, with his wife and daughter by Pompeo Batoni which was valued at £2.5m.
After leaving Paris they visited the major cities of Italy, including Rome and Florence, where Fitzherbert commissioned portraits of himself and his companion from Thomas Patch and Pompeo Batoni respectively.
There is also a painting by Pompeo Batoni entitled Portrait of Charles Compton, 7th Earl of Northampton which features a similar Whippet-like dog.
Pompeo Targone | Pompeo Posar | Pompeo Giustiniani | Pompeo Coppini | Pompeo Aldrovandi | ''Charles Compton, 7th Earl of Northampton'' by Pompeo Batoni |
Paintings by Velázquez, Titian, Poussin, and Claude Lorraine, as well as an unrivalled series of 18th-century family portraits by artists such as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Vigee-Lebrun, Batoni, Angelica Kauffman, Ramsay, Van Loo, and Hogarth.