PHILIP MERCIER (BERLIN 1689/91-1760 LONDON)

This painting depicts a scene from the epistolary novel, Pamela, by Samuel Richardson (1740). A best-seller in its day, and now widely recognized for its significance in the development of the English novel, artists including Francis Hayman and Joseph Higmore took up the plot as a subject for narrative painting. Philip Mercier is known to have painted the theme on at least two other occasions (see J. Ingamells and R. Raines, ‘A Catalogue of Paintings, Drawings and Etchings of Philip Mercier’, The Walpole Society, XLVI, 1978, p. 45, nos. 174 and 175).