Opie, John

1761–1807, English portrait and historical painter. Opie showed a remarkable talent as a young man. He became the protégé of the poet John Wolcot, and enjoyed a brief popularity as a fashionable portrait painter in the Reynolds tradition. In 1786 he began a series of seven pictures for Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. His portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft is in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

See A. Earland, John Opie and His Circle (1911).