The portrait of his wife - paintings by Robert Fagan

The artist's first wife, Anna Maria Ferri, circa 1790-92. (One of his first portraits, and not actually entirely finished; note the hands.)

Robert Fagan (circa 1761, London - 26 August 1816, Rome), English artist, archeologist, and art dealer, resident in Italy. The son of an Irish banker, in 1781 he was enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy Schools. But he soon left England for the continent, traveling to France and Italy, before settling in Rome in 1784. In 1790 he married seventeen-year-old Anna Maria Aloisia Rosa Ferri, whose father was in the employ of a Roman cardinal; Fagan, always known for his extravagance and ill-mannered behavior, was apparently very "hard up" at the time of his marriage. The couple's daughter, Esther Maria, or Estina, was born two years later, but the marriage was evidently an unhappy one. Fagan worked as a portraitist, mostly for those on the "Grand Tour", but also as a dealer, illegally exporting large numbers of antiquities and Old Masters, while building up his own personal collection. The French occupation of Rome in 1798 imposed an immense strain upon his family life, a strain which is believed to have been the cause of his wife's increasing ill health; she died in August 1800.

The artist with his second wife, Maria Flajani, 1803.

Six months later Fagan remarried, to another young Italian woman, Maria Ludovica Flajani, daughter of the Pope's physician, with whom he had two further children. In 1809, while residing in Palermo, he was appointed consul general for Sicily and Malta. But over the next few years he was dogged by increasing financial problems. In 1815 he returned briefly to England, before moving back to Rome the following year where, at the age of fifty-five, he committed suicide by jumping from a window. His young widow sold off his collection of antiquities to the Vatican museums.

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This unfinished sketch, circa 1794, depicts the artist's daughter, Esther Maria/Estina (1792-1859), the child of his first marriage, held by her nurse before an Italianate landscape. In August of 1809, Estina married William Baker, heir to the estate of Bayfordbury, Hertfordshire.