Kew Observatory - Kew Observatory in Art

Kew Observatory in Art

The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford has a portrait, Peter Rigaud and Mary Anne Rigaud, by the eighteenth-century painter John Francis Rigaud. His portrait of his nephew and niece, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1778, shows Stephen Peter Rigaud (1774 – 1839) (who became a mathematical historian and astronomer, and Savilian Chair of Geometry and Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford) and his elder sister. In the picture, painted when they were aged four and seven, they are playfully embracing each other in Richmond Park; the building in the background is Kew Observatory, where their father Stephen Rigaud, was Observer.