We are grateful to Brian Allen for his endorsement of the painting upon physical examination on 15 April 2026. Allen, a former Director of Studies at the Paul Mellon Centre, and Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, edited John Ingamell’s manuscript catalogue of Mercier’s work for publication. We must also thank Jonathan Ferguson, Keeper of Firearms & Artillery at the Royal Armouries, for his assessment of the sitter’s fowling piece. 

 

Painted in England between c. 1724-26, this outstanding rediscovered work by the young Phillipe Mercier joins but a handful of few surviving oils which altogether represent the artist’s first decade of practice. Now ranking amongst the very earliest of the artist’s known works, the present painting is a superlative example of the highly punctilious handling of the anglicised fête galante which Mercier refined after Watteau, an enchanting amalgamation that initiated the decades-spanning Conversation Piece into Britain. This full-length portrait painted ‘at little’ almost certainly depicts a Hanoverian courtier, who plays at the role of sportsman, holding a fowling piece and accompanied by his gun dog. In quality and design, the portrait constitutes a small-scale counterpart to the Schutz marriage portrait [1] and Viscount Tyrconnel and his Family [2], painted in the same period. The work previously formed part of Robert and Elsie Tritton’s outstanding collection of English conversation pieces at Godmersham Park, Kent, and was attributed to Mercier by Christie’s in 1983. Yet so discoloured were the old varnish layers that Mercier’s signature remained entirely obscured, until conservation treatment carried out by Haveron Fine Art has since revealed: ‘Mercier Pinxit’. 

 

This exceedingly rare early canvas can be closely dated to the narrow period of 1724-26, since the preceding paintings largely constitute ‘somewhat clumsy essays in Watteau’s manner’ (Ingamells, p. 148), while the brushwork of the later Conversation Pieces is markedly fluid, closer to Mercier’s predominant career style. It was only in about 1725 that Mercier began to convert the Watteauesque format for his own purposes, adapting the mode for group portraits suited to the English aristocracy. The Tate’s Schutz group is exemplary, and the figures are of such a similar modelling that the gentleman to the furthermost left is almost one and the same as ours. It is probable that our subject was also a Hanoverian courtier, and may well have been associated with Baron Schutz, who was one of Mercier’s three primary patrons at this time [3]. Indeed, the fowling piece (of 1720-25 in design) is identifiably German in manufacture. It may well have been brought over with the sitter from the court at Hanover, where Mercier painted prior to arriving in England. The sitter’s dress includes a brown jacket braided in silver, worn over a pale silver or white silk waistcoat with corresponding socks, along with a bicorne hat and powdered wig. A Germanic formality of pose is apparent upon comparison with the flair of Mercier’s later Hales portrait (1744), of a similar compositional arrangement [4]. The pose is not without elegance: the gentleman leans one arm on a tree stump, and rests the other assuredly on his hip. His fashion, not immediately suited to country pursuits, is highly comparable to that seen in the Tyrconnel group. 

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However, such is the quality and ambition of the Schutz and Tyrconnel groups that it is somewhat inconceivable that they should have emerged without previous attempts to resolve this new format. We must therefore consider the possibility of the present work as being their immediate predecessor, a preliminary attempt to translate Watteau’s style for portrait commissions, which was later expanded to accommodate whole groups. The slight rigidity in pose and comparative restraint of brushwork would support this. The Conversation Piece dated by Ingamells to c. 1720-25 contains foliage of a very similar nature to ours, as well as a statue with similarities to a dolphin fountain in an untraced pendant painting to our picture [5]. This counterpart painting is only known to us by having examined the 1983 Christie’s catalogue, in which it was (counterintuitively) separated as the consecutive lot. This untraced portrait shows a woman in full-length holding a riding crop, resting her arm on a stone fountain modelled as a dolphin. Looking inwards at her husband from the right, it is of the same dimensions, and was also owned by the Trittons at Godmersham Park. Nevertheless, Mercier’s authorship of both portraits is attested by the newly revealed signature to the centre left of the canvas edge, underneath the foliage, which reads, ‘Mercier pinxit’.

 

PHILIPPE MERCIER (Berlin 1689/91-1760 London):

Mercier was the son of a French Huguenot tapestry-worker émigré in Berlin, where he was born in about 1689 or 1691. According to Vertue, he studied at the Berlin Akademie under the French-born Prussian Antoine Pesne, who no doubt influenced Mercier’s French propensity. Afterwards he spent some time working in Italy and France, and was patronised by the Hanoverian court. He thereabouts painted Frederick, Prince of Wales, and first came to England around 1716 with a portrait of the Prince. He lived at 40 Leicester Square with his new wife Margaret Plante, whom he married at St-Martin-in-the-Fields in 1719, and their children were born soon after. In the early years of 1720-25, Mercier produced etchings after Teniers, Pesne, Watteau, and his own works. We can gather something of his commercial inclination, as in 1724 he sold a collection of pictures which he had ‘collected abroad’ (Ingamells, p. 147). 

 

The year 1725 saw Mercier begin work of far considerable ambition, whose conception lay partly in the fête champêtre evidently gleaned from his reproduction of Watteau. His earliest dated canvas, and first (perhaps most ambitious) Conversation Piece was the exceptional marriage portrait made for Baron August Schutz. Another outstanding Conversation Piece came that year or the next, with Viscount Tyrconnel and his Family, painted for Belton House, Lincolnshire. In 1728 Mercier acted as the steward of the St Luke’s Club, and after Prince Frederick arrived in England, he was appointed Painter to the Prince of Wales; he was made Page of the Bedchamber in March, and Library Keeper in January 1730. Royal commissions included four state full-lengths of Frederick and his three sisters, in contrast with the Music Party (1733), which shows the royal children making music in the grounds of Kew Palace [6]. He also taught the princesses to draw, and some of their drawings survive from Mercier’s own collection. 

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Mercier benefitted for some time from the favour of Prince Frederick, whose preference for the artist’s French ease was a clear reaction against the perceived formalities of his father, George II, who was disinclined to the visual arts. Mercier was involved in some of the Prince’s practical jokes, and they shared a mutual interest in theatre. However, the pair’s friendship soured at some stage in the mid-1730s, with a rumoured quarrel, and Mercier was deprived of his Court appointments in 1736-38. He had remarried the widower Dorothy Clapham in 1735, herself a miniaturist and print seller on Great Windmill Street, London, from 1761-68. The couple had a daughter named Charlotte, who studied under her father to become a pastellist (and occasional model), but later became dissolute. Mercier spent some time working in Covent Garden, but following his disfavour with the Prince of Wales seemingly retreated northwards, sustaining himself with gentry portraits. He settled in Yorkshire by 1740, and began a period of renewed vigour producing portraits in the more profitable scale of full-life for prominent gentry families.

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A third, distinct period of Mercier’s practice came in the form of his ‘fancy pictures’, fanciful genre pictures derived from Chardin and the Dutch tradition, whose subjects included blowing bubbles and shucking oysters. These were images designed for mass print form, and Vertue notes their commercial success. Mercier still traveled to find work on portraits, and visited Ireland in 1747, as well as Edinburgh in 1750. He returned to London in 1751, where he continued to produce fancy pictures, but appears to have spent some time in Portugal from 1752, painting portraits for the British merchants docked there. He eventually returned to London with his family and continued producing single-figure genre scenes for print. He exhibited at the Society of Arts in 1760, and died that July.

 

NOTES:

 

[1] Tate Britain (T03065); Ingamells cat. no. 85

[2] National Trust Collections, Belton House (436045); Ingamells cat. no. 16

[3] Viscount Tyrconnel and Samwell of Upton were also influential patrons. 

[4] Sir Edward Hales is also shown with his dog in a landscape, holding a fowling piece in his right hand. It is conceivable that Mercier revised the arrangement first devised here. YCBA (B1974.3.15); Ingamells cat no. 49

[5] Duke of Northumberland, Syon House; Ingamells cat. no. 218 

[6] National Trust Collections, Cliveden House; Ingamells cat. no. 38 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING:

 

Martin Eidelberg, ‘Philippe Mercier as Draughtsman’, Master Drawings 44, no. 4 (Winter 2006) pp. 411-449

Ellen D’Oench, The Conversation Piece: Arthur Devis and his Contemporaries (New Haven, C.T.: Yale Centre for British Art, 1980)

Ellis K. Waterhouse, ‘Conversation Pieces and Fancy Pictures: Mercier and Hayman’, in Painting in Britain, 1530-1790 (London: Yale University Press, 1994)

John Ingamells, ‘A Catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings and Etchings of Philip Mercier’, The Walpole Society, 46 (1976) pp. 1-70

John Ingamells, ‘A Hanoverian Party on a Terrace by Philip Mercier’, The Burlington Magazine 118, no. 880 (July 1976) pp. 511-515

John Ingamells, Philip Mercier 1689-1760: An exhibition of Paintings and Engravings (London: Fleming and Humphreys, 1969)

John Ingamells, ‘Philippe Mercier’, in The Dictionary of Art, Vol. 21 (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 147-49

Sir Philip Sassoon, Loan exhibition of 18th century English conversation pieces (London: s.n., 1930)