Nancy Meade de Mierre OBE, Eastbourne, Sussex, before 1979; her sale
Phillips, London, 16 December 1997, lot 29A;
Private collection, United Kingdom.
Painted by George Knapton in the late 1740s, when the artist was one of the most desirable portrait painters active in London, these children were likely the progeny of a member of one of the many intellectual circles in which the artist operated.
The girl, apparently the younger of the two, wears a low-necked pastel pink silk gown fastened tightly from behind, which features a muslin apron to its front. Her cropped brown hair is covered by a lace cap that is adorned with a silk ribbon, which matches the pink of her gown. Her older brother, having been breeched, wears clothing more in keeping with adult wear, which includes a satin suit, made up of a waistcoat and coat, beneath which he sports a white chemise, tied at the neck with a black silk ribbon.
George Knapton served as an apprentice to Jonathan Richardson I, but also attended the St Martin’s Lane Academy. He took an early interest in Italy and connoisseurship associated with the Grand Tour, and so travelled to Italy in 1725, where he remained for seven years. He returned to England in 1732 to work as a portraitist, primarily in pastel but also in oils, and became a founding member of the Society of Dilettanti alongside others he had met in Italy in 1736.
He was a close acquaintance of the antiquary George Vertue (1684 – 1756) who, in 1750, assisted him in inspecting the art collections housed in the palaces of Kensington and Hampton Court, as well as Windsor Castle, after the Prince of Wales had requested a detailed survey of the royal collections for his own reference. Knapton gave up painting in 1760, but his connoisseurship was such that he was invited, in 1765, to become the Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, a post he held until his death in 1778.
