Anyone who has ever visited Butler Library’s main reading room on the 300 level likely has looked up and seen the two life-size royal portraits that have hung high on the south wall for more than fifty years. Donated by alumnus Edmund Astley Prentis in 1949, these paintings were presented to the University as portraits by unknown artists of Columbia’s eponymous founder King George II and his wife. However, new research has now been published about these paintings, and the names of the artists and the sitters have been properly identified for the first time.
To learn more about these eighteenth-century British portraits of Prince Frederick Louis and Princess Augusta, read the essay written by Roberto C. Ferrari, Curator of Art Properties, and published in the Spring/Summer 2016 issue of the Historians of British Art Newsletter. You can download the PDF for free through Columbia University Academic Commons by going to http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/