STUDIO OF POMPEO BATONI (LUCCA 1708-1787 ROME)

While visiting Rome on the Grand Tour in 1750, Thomas Barrett-Lennard and his wife sat to Batoni for a beautiful but unusual group portrait, which incorporates a posthumous likeness of their only child Barbara Anne, who had not long passed away, aged nine (Essex County Council, Chelmsford). According to Horace Walpole, her features were taken from a miniature that the couple had brought with them on their travels (see H. Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England (1760-1795), eds. F.W. Hilles and P.B. Daghlian, London, 1937, p. 19). Walpole and Barrett-Lennard were friends; the latter was a keen amateur architect and archaeologist who became fascinated by the Gothic Revival, and with Walpole's assistance, remodelled the early-Tudor family seat of Belhus, Essex.

These paintings relate to another pair of portraits depicting the same sitters, with slight variations in the costume; in the prime pair, Thomas Barrett-Lennard wears a pale yellow waistcoat, and his wife wears a mauve dress with a dark blue mantle (private collection; see E.P. Bowron, Pompeo Batoni: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, New Haven and London, 2016, I, p. 148, nos. 125-6). The present pair were probably painted in the artist's studio for other members of the Barrett-Lennard family.