Description
A founding member of the Royal Academy and one of the leading fashionable portrait painters of his generation, Francis Cotes was a pioneer of pastel painting in England. Here, in her marriage portrait, the young Lady Mary Radcliffe is regal in a Turkish-inspired, peacock blue mantle decorated with gold and trimmed with ermine. Pearls and feathers adorn her hair and a décolleté scarlet bodice reveals an expanse of porcelain skin.
Provenance
Colonel Herbert Hall Mulliner [1861-1924], Birmingham (?-1924); (sale, Christie's, London, July 18, 1924, no. 2) (1924); (P. & D. Colnaghi, London) (after 1924-by 1937); (sale, Mensing & Fils, Amsterdam, April 27, 1937, no. 148) (1937); (A. Seligmann & Rey, Paris, sold to Edward B. Greene, Cleveland, OH) (1937); Edward B. Greene, Cleveland, OH, given to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (1937-1946); Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (1946-)
Accession Number
1946.463
Medium
pastel on laid paper lined with canvas
Dimensions
Image: 60.7 x 45.7 cm (23 7/8 x 18 in.)
Classification
Drawing
Credit Line
Gift of Edward B. Greene
Tags
Drawing Neoclassical & Romantic (1751–1850) Pastel Canvas Paper British
Background & Context
Background Story
Francis Cotes (1726-1770) was an English portrait painter known for the pastel portraits that made him one of the most popular portrait painters of the mid-18th century, before his transition to oil portraits in the 1760s. The portrait of Lady Mary Radcliffe from 1755 depicts the sitter in the elegant, pastel manner that distinguishes Cotes's best pastel portraiture from the more formal oil portraits of his contemporaries. The 1755 date places this in Cotes's pastel period, when he was producing the pastel portraits that are his most accomplished works.
Cultural Impact
Portrait of Lady Mary Radcliffe is important in the history of English portraiture because it demonstrates the pastel manner that Cotes brought to English portrait painting. Pastel portraits were a relatively new phenomenon in mid-18th-century England, and Cotes was one of the first English painters to specialize in pastel portraiture, creating elegant, refined portraits that combined the immediacy of pastel with the formal requirements of the portrait tradition.
Why It Matters
Portrait of Lady Mary Radcliffe is Cotes's elegant pastel portraiture: the sitter rendered in the refined, pastel manner that made him one of the most popular portrait painters of mid-18th-century England. The 1755 portrait shows the pastel manner at its most elegant—immediate, refined, and formally accomplished.
