(Preston 1712–1787 Brighton)
Portrait of Richard Nevel, in a park,
oil on canvas, 50.8 x 35.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Sandford Collection, Sandford Hall, Whitchurch, Shropshire;
Pooele Collection, Marbury Hall, Whitchurch;
Bryan Cadworth Halsted Poole Collection, 1945;
Major J. D. Summers;
sale, Sotheby’s, London, 21 November 1979, lot 114, (as Edward Penny R. A.)

We are grateful to Brian Allen for confirming the attribution.

Arthur Devis is one of the most interesting portrait painters of Georgian England. He is the leading exponent of the 18th century ‘Conversation piece’. This decidedly English type of portraiture is of relatively small scale, depicted in an idealized park landscape. William Hogarth was an early artist who employed this manner. On the continent, the Venetian Pietro Longhi and the Dutchman Cornelis Troost followed this fashion. Devis also specialized in small-scale portraits of single figures such as the present painting. Born in Preston, Lancashire, he was apprenticed to the sporting painter Peter Tillemans. Apparently he was foremost employed to copy views of Italy by artists such as Giovanni Paolo Panini and Marco Ricci. Given this training, it is not surprising that Davis’ first work Hoghton Towers from Duxon Hill, Lancashire (1735, Private collection) was a depiction of a house in a park, also showing the artist’s interest in landscape painting. However, in 1745, he had established a studio in Great Queen Street, London, by which time he had acquired a considerable artistic reputation as a portrait painter of fashionable rococo conversation pieces. Devis received his greatest number of commissions for portraits between 1748 and 1758, and his portrait of English Society in the Arcadian Parks of the Kentian ideal or in idealized, spare and austere Georgian interiors are today viewed as fascinating cultural documents of the era.