Guest, Thomas Douglas (McKechnie Section 2)

Recorded by Jackson (Dictionary), who owned a silhouette dating (she states) from the 1790s and signed ‘T. Guest, Junr. pinxit’. Foskett suggests that this artist was probably the son of the Thomas Guest recorded in the Council Minutes of the Royal Academy Schools on 31 March 1777, and possibly the Thomas Douglas Guest who entered the Royal Academy Schools on 23 December 1801, aged twenty-one, and was awarded a Gold Medal in 1805. Graves also records a ‘T. Guest, Junr.’ who exhibited at the Royal Academy as a miniaturist in 1801, and Foskett adds the address 76 St James's Street; Guest must therefore have been exhibiting before he had entered the Schools. Jackson's silhouette, dating from the 1790s, offers further evidence that ‘T. Guest, Junr' had become a professional artist before his days at the Academy Schools.

Foskett also includes an entry on a D. Guest, of whose work she had seen an example signed ‘D. Guest pinx./1804.’ This signature also she considers may be that of Thomas Douglas Guest.

From the addition of the word ‘junr’ to the signatures of ‘T. Guest’, both on a silhouette and on a miniature, it is evident that the artist's father, who had the same name, was still alive when the miniature and the silhouette were painted.

It seems possible that T. Guest the younger was indeed Thomas Douglas Guest, and that, after his spell at the Academy Schools, he avoided using his full signature, which would have been inconveniently long for the small space available on a miniature painted on ivory, and dropped his first initial, either for brevity or to avoid confusion with his father's name. It can only be said that both the silhouettes recorded by Jackson and the miniature exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1801 bore the same signature.

Jackson described the silhouette in her collection as finely painted on card, the lighter shades having been obtained with thinned pigment and without the use of body colour. This example was probably framed in pearwood.

No trade label has been recorded. Since it seems to me unlikely that Guest painted silhouettes after completing his course of study at the Academy Schools, I think it correspondingly unlikely that any silhouette signed ‘D. Guest’ (if this is the same artist) will be discovered.