Richardson was one of England’s most successful portraitists and art theorists when he painted this likeness of himself in about 1728. He is particularly known for a series of self-portraits made in the decade subsequent to his retirement from professional life. This painting dates to the very beginning of that period and shows him in a confident mood, ready to face the public. Unconventionally for an 18th-century portrait in this format, he wears his hat on his head rather than under his arm, as if stepping into the outside world. Mrs Greville bought the picture in 1916 for £200 and it was one of her very first acquisitions.
Second wife of William Simpson (1742–1808), a director of the Royal Bank of Scotland. The warm, low light suggests a pause during an evening walk and the sitter’s affinity with nature. A pendant portrait of William by Raeburn remains in the possession of his descendants. Purchased by McEwan for £2,500 in 1869, it was the first of four pictures by this important Scottish artist to enter the collection.
Based on erotic Venetian renaissance and French rococo models, this picture is one of several slightly different versions of this composition by Reynolds. Rarely content merely to repeat a pictorial idea, the artist incorporated small but significant modifications into each reprisal of the subject. This restlessness extended to his experimental approach to the physical make-up of his pictures, which has resulted here in severe cracking. Mrs Greville, like other collectors of her day, was prepared to overlook this disfigurement for the sake of possessing an original Reynolds, paying the large sum of £7,410 for this painting in 1917.
Sons of W.H. Pattisson of Witham, Essex. Lawrence began to paint this portrait of William Henry Ebenezer (1801–32) and his brother Jacob Howell (1803–74) in 1811, although it was not completed until 1817 when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy and admired for the ‘sportive play’ of its brushwork. The wild setting refers to the boys’ feeling for nature, as does the integration of the donkey into the group, which the artist asked Mrs Pattisson to send to his London studio especially. On the picture’s completion, the treatment of the faces was felt to ‘bespeak gentle dispositions and minds of a high order’. Mrs Greville paid £12,000 for the piece in 1918.
