Provenance
The sitter's daughter, Matilda White Massy [1799-1883], Killakee, County Dublin, Ireland, who married Hugh Hamon, 4th Baron Massy; their son, John Thomas William Hamon, 6th Baron Massy [1835-1915], Killakee, County Dublin Ireland;[1] sale of his estate at Killakee (J.H. North & Co., Dublin, 16 February 1916, no. 622); bought by T. K. Laidlaw, Castleknock, Ireland;[2] (T.H. Robinson, London); (M. Knoedler & Co., New York, October 1919);[3] purchased 11 December 1919 by Thomas B. Clarke [1848-1931], New York;[4] his estate; sold as part of the Clarke collection on 29 January 1936, through (M. Knoedler & Co., New York), to The A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, Pittsburgh; gift 1942 to NGA.
[1] For the family genealogy see _Burke's Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage_, 104th ed., London, 1967, 1672. [2] The date of the sale appears in a cablegram from North & Co. in Dublin, dated 9 February 1916, to Charles Henry Hart in New York (typed copy, NGA curatorial file) and in a letter to Hart from Laidlaw, Castleknock, Ireland, dated 5 March 1916 (Charles Henry Hart Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.). No catalogue for the sale has been located.
[3] Letter, 29 April 1989, from Melissa De Medeiros, librarian, M. Knoedler & Co., in NGA curatorial file.
[4] The name of the seller and the date of purchase are recorded in a copy of _Portraits by Early American Artists of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Collected by Thomas B. Clarke_, Exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1928, annotated with information from files of M. Knoedler & Co., NY (copy in NGA curatorial records and in NGA library).
Accession Number
1942.8.28
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 76.2 x 63.5 cm (30 x 25 in.) | framed: 95.6 x 82.9 cm (37 5/8 x 32 5/8 in.)
Classification
Painting
Credit Line
Andrew W. Mellon Collection