Charles Lennox Cumming-Bruce in Turkish Dress

Andrew Geddes, 1783–1844

1817

Oil on panel

Yale Center for British Art

This is a portrait of Charles Lennox Cumming-Bruce in Turkish dress, set against the Roman ruins at Baalbek. Charles Lennox Cumming (1790–1875), the younger son of a baronet, married the granddaughter of the “Abyssinian traveler,” James Bruce, in 1822 and assumed the name Cumming-Bruce of Roseisle and Kinnaird. While the classical architecture in the background of this painting is identifiable as the Roman ruins at Baalbek (in present-day Lebanon), the significance of these ruins to the sitter is unclear; nothing is known of his early life or presumed travels. However, the portrait was completed only three years after Thomas Phillips’s portrait of Lord Byron, and, given the fashion at this time for “Turkish” dress, it would not have been n