Catalogue No. 63

Artist: Brown, Mather
Portrait of a Gentleman

1761-1831
Half-length, wearing a blue jacket over a buff waistcoat and white cravat. Oil on canvas 30 ins by 25 ins

Collection Details
With Leggatt; previous history and date of acquisition by Lord Faringdon not recorded.

Literature
D Evans, Burlington Magazine, cxiii, 1971, p.534, fig.30.

Background
The previous attribution to Hoppner is clearly impossible.  The artist remained anonymous until the publication of Miss Evans’s article (op cit).  She demonstrates that a series of 26 portrait drawings, in pencil, in the National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, can be attributed to Mather Brown.  One of these drawings is clearly the preliminary study for the Buscot portrait.  Miss Evans describes it as related to Brown’s style of c.1792.