JACOPO AMIGONI (VENICE 1675-1752 MADRID)

A colourful character whose ‘acquaintance was sought by all the great men of that age’, Carew Hervey Mildmay was fond of society, and it was said that his 'lungs, and memory, and tongue [would] never wear out' (H. Walpole, The Letters of Horace Walpole: 1759-1769, III, Philadelphia, 1842, p. 385). Mildmay spent his early career at the Hanoverian Court, where he became a great favourite of the Princess Sophia of the Palatinate (1630-1714), mother of the future George I of England. Upon his return to England, Mildmay was elected Member of Parliament for Harwich, and in 1709 was appointed as the private secretary to Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751) during his term as Secretary of State of the Tory government of Queen Anne, for whom he was once selected to perform a minuet, possessing a gift for dancing. He retired from public life in 1715, preferring to ‘preserve the character of an independent country gentleman’, and made his home at the estates inherited from his father, Marks in Essex and Hazelgrove in Somerset.

Mildmay sat for Amigoni during the painter’s soujourn in England, where he worked between 1729 and 1739. Depicted at half-length and glancing directly out toward the viewer, the sitter is here presented with an easy informality of attire and pose which distinguishes it from many works of the same period in Amigoni’s oeuvre. Mildmay was evidently an interested patron of the arts, and several portraits by expatriate artists in England, including the present work, can be associated with his commissions. A full-length portrait of Mildmay, dressed in loose fur lined red velvet coat and cap, painted in 1733 by the Dutch artist Herman van der Mijn, shows the sitter standing by an elaborately gilded harpsichord and with a fox hound by his side (London, Government Art Collection).