ATTRIBUTED TO CHARLES JERVAS (DUBLIN C. 1675-1739 LONDON)

Montague Blundell, son of Sir Francis Blundell and his wife Anne Ingoldsby, sat in the House of Commons from 1715-1722 as one of the representatives for Haslemere in Surrey. On his father’s death in 1707 he had inherited his baronetcy, and he was subsequently elevated to the peerage of Ireland first as Baron then Viscount Blundell. In 1709, he married Mary Chetwynd (see lot 128), with whom he had three daughters and one son. Montague Blundell junior pre-deceased his father, so the Viscount's titles died with him. Depicted here in classical outdoor setting, the sitter is shown in relatively relaxed costume, with his fashionably wide-skirted coat unbuttoned over a loose white shirt. This décontracté style is added to by his choice of a knotted wig, a design that began to appear at the beginning of the Eighteenth Century to replace inconveniently heavy wigs. In 1709, the French political theorist Henri de Saint-Simon reported that on the death of the prince of Condé reluctant mourners showed their lack of respect by attending in "perruques nouées (knotted wigs)", which were clearly considered indecently informal for state occasions.