When painting royals and nobility, Zoffany only occasionally got beyond the superficiality of his subjects' clothes and settings.
"Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed" at the RA argues for a revaluation of this accomplished, beady-eyed and witty painter.
It's Henry Knight, army captain and amateur architect, immortalized in the portrait he commissioned Johann Zoffany to paint in 1770.
"Joyous" is not a word you think of about paintings of large groups, but this is an atmosphere Zoffany could capture in his treatment of crowds.
The big guns of the group are Zoffany (a German immigrant who was bankrolled by George III), Thomas Gainsborough, Joseph Wright of Derby and Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Late in his life Zoffany traveled to India, and the works from that period seem to be the weakest suggesting that he may well have been losing the technical mastery that pervades even works that are uneven as credible portrayals of people.
Rather, as seen in the exhibition, Zoffany displays his considerable skills following Hogarth's lead in creating a number of paintings that depict famous actors, among them the star of London's stage, David Garrick, appearing in theatrical roles for which they were noted.
It's worth contemplating that the most powerful and substantive works are not those in which Zoffany awes us with his considerable skill at painting frothy fabrics and other accoutrements of the era's formal portraiture, but rather the substantive studies of interesting sitters.
Zoffany seems to have had a restless streak that kept him on the move, from Rome back to Germany, back to Italy, and then, by late 1760, to England, where he settled briefly and turned into a central observer and participant in the art and culture of his time.
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