Rose and Crown Club

[4] According to John Smibert's biographer Richard Saunders, the club was initially "a bawdy assembly of younger artists and cognoscenti, which met weekly"[5]: 869  and apparently held its meetings at the Rose and Crown public house.

[6] in addition to Vertue, members included Bernard Lens III,[7] Christian Friedrich Zincke, William Hogarth, Peter Tillemans,[8] Marcellus Laroon the Younger and Michael Dahl.

An unfinished Hogarthian conversation piece[9] painting in the Ashmolean Museum attributed to the Scottish painter Gawen Hamilton (another member), An Assembly of Virtuosi, shows a group of fifteen men, including eight who are identified in an etching of the painting by R. Cooper, published by W. B. Tiffin (1829),[10] and it has been suggested that this is a group portrait of the Rosacoronians.

The Rose and Crown Club remained in existence until 1745 and held its last meeting at the Half-Moon Tavern.

[13] Bignamini notes that The meetings and annual feasts of the Virtuosi of St Luke and of the Rose and Crown Club had come to a definitive end in 1745.

A Conversation of Virtuosis at the Kings Arms (in Bond Street ), Gawen Hamilton , 1734–35. Not his group portrait of the club described in the text, but showing several members, including: Vertue, Dahl, Rysbrack, Kent and Hamilton himself.