Gawen Hamilton

Probably John Gough Nichols (1806–1873), Holmwood Park, Surrey;

By descent to his son, John Bruce Nichols (1848–1929), Holmwood Park, Surrey;

By whose Executors sold ('By Order of the Executors of John Bruce Nichols, Esq., deceased,... and have been removed from Holmwood Park, near Dorking, Surrey'), London, Christie's, 19 July 1929, lot 21 (as attributed to William Hogarth), for 105 guineas to Mason;

Sir Alec Martin (1884–1971);

By whom gifted to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in 1960.

F. Davis, '18th-century Homage to Nicolas Poussin', in Illustrated London News, 19 March 1960, p. 468;

R. Verdi, Nicolas Poussin. Tancred & Erminia, exh. cat., Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Birmingham, 1992–3, pp. 33, 66–67, no. 20, reproduced (as attributed to Gawen Hamilton);

C.J Chen, The Early Georgian Conversation Piece, doctoral diss., Rutgers University, NJ, USA, 2001, vol. 2, pp. 637–639 (as rejecting the attribution to Gawen Hamilton).

Birmingham, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Nicholas Poussin. Tancred & Erminia, 14 October – 3 January 1993, no. 20 (as attributed to Gawen Hamilton).

This painting shows a group of connoisseurs admiring Nicolas Poussin's (1594–1665) Tancred and Erminia, an important French baroque painting which the artist Sir James Thornhill (1675 or 1676–1734) had acquired in France in 1717. The figures for this painting loosely derive from Gawen Hamilton's A Conversation of Virtuosis...at the Kings Arms, whose identities were described by the antiquary George Vertue and thus can be identified as probably depicting (from left to right) Michael Dahl (1659–1743), James Gibbs (1682–1754), Bernard Baron (1696–1762), John Wootton (c. 1682–1764) and John Michael Rysbrack (1694–1770).¹

¹ Oil on canvas, 87 x 111 cm.; https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw00352/A-Conversation-of-Virtuosisat-the-Kings-Arms