Lot 806 , Philip Mercier (1689/91-1760) Portrait believed to be Lady Mary Watson - Wentworth Milbanke, 29 x 24in.

Philip Mercier (1689/91-1760)
oil on canvas
Portrait believed to be Lady Mary Watson - Wentworth Milbanke, the sitter was the sister of the future prime minister
signed Ph Mercier Fecit and dated 1744 (mid left)
29 x 24in.
Estimate £7,000-10,000

Lady Mary Watson - Wentworth Milbanke was the mother of Lady Mary Watson - Wentworth, sister to the Prime Minster, Charles Watson - Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham and who married Lord John Gage.

Mercier was commissioned to paint members of notable Yorkshire nobility, of whom the Rockingham's were prominent

Provenance:
Purchased by the present owners at Edgar Horn's Auction Room, Eastbourne in 1973

The picture was inspected and verified as the work of Mercier in 1975, by the then acknowledged expert in the artist oeuvre - John Ingamells, who later included it in his Catalogue, published by the Walpole Society in 1978, where it is listed as no. 123 and in May 2016 by Brian Allen, Chairman of the fine art dealers Hazlitt.

The picture was one of the subjects on the BBC programme Fake of Fortune, in August 2016
Mercier, who was born in Berlin, the son of a Huguenot tapestry worker employed by King Frederick of Prussia, studied under Antoine Pesne and came to London in 1716 on the recommendation of the Court at Hanover. His early patrons in England were mostly aspiring Hanoverian courtiers and in 1729 he was appointed Principal Painter to Frederick, Prince of Wales, as well as to other posts in the Prince's household. However, he was not secure in this post for long and was eventually replaced by John Ellys in 1736. He lived in London (in Covent Garden) until 1739 when he decided to settle in York, where he remained until 1751, when, after living for a while in Portugal, he returned to London. Although in the early part of his career he concentrated on portraiture, from the mid 1730s he turned increasingly to painting 'fancy pictures', of which the present picture is a particularly good example, probably partly because of the weight of competition in the field of portraiture but also because of the commercial possibilities presented by the market for prints of such works.



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