JOHN HAMILTON MORTIMER, A.R.A. (EASTBOURNE 1740-1779 LONDON) AND THOMAS JONES (TREVONEN, POWYS 1742-1803 PENCERRIG, POWYS)

Painted on a grand scale, the present work relates to a painting of the same subject by Mortimer and Jones at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, painted circa 1770, which is landscape in format. Here, the composition has been reduced on the right, directing more focus to the dramatic arrangement of figures, reminiscent of those of Nicolas Poussin, testifying to his influence on English taste of the period.

Trained under the portraitists Thomas Hudson and Robert Edge Pyne, and himself active as a portrait painter, John Hamilton Mortimer was one of the most versatile English subject painters of his generation, and a significant influence on his fellow pupil under Hudson and lifelong friend, Joseph Wright of Derby. Although he did not travel to Italy himself, he studied pictures by the great masters of the seventeenth century with close attention. Mortimer collaborated with a number of artists during the 1760s and early 1770s, no doubt as a result of friendships formed in the drawing schools of the Society of Artists, but it was arguably his collaboration with landscape artist Thomas Jones that produced the most successful results, before the latter's departure to Italy in 1776.