ANDIEN DE CLERMONT | Six scenes of elegant figures promenading in landscapes, each with medallions with putti, framed with drapery, ornamental architecture and floral garlands

The Radcliffe family, Hitchen Priory, Hertfordshire, by 1926;
Thence by descent within the family, until sold anonymously ('The Property of a Titled Gentleman'), New York, Christie's, 31 January 1997, lot 94 (sold as a screen).

H. Avray Tipping, English Homes, period IV, vol. II, 1926, p. 265, reproduced p. 416;
H. Avray Tipping, 'Hitchin Priory, Hertfordshire. The seat of Mr Delmé-Radcliffe. II', Country Life, vol. LVIII, no. 1503, 24 October 1926, reproduced p. 633, fig. 3 (in the hall of Hitchin Priory).

Andien de Clermont travelled to England from France in the early 18th century with the flower-painter Antoine Monnoyer (1670–1747), in whose Soho studio he trained. He was employed by a series of Francophile English patrons, executing inventive paintings and interior decoration in the new rococo taste. His commissions included painted interiors at Wilton for the 9th Earl of Pembroke in the late 1730s; a series of singerie scenes (monkeys imitating human behaviour) at Kirtlington Park for Sir James Dashwood in 1745; and a suite of five panels with overdoor canvases, in imitation of tapestries and borrowing certain motifs from Watteau, for the first Marquess of Rockingham, at Wentworth Woodhouse.¹ Although the pre-Union flags visible on some of the ships here would apparently indicate a date pre-1707, the 1740s are a more likely period of execution for the panels. Clermont returned to France in 1754. 1 See I. Roscoe, 'Andien de Clermont. Decorative painter to the Leicester House Set,' Apollo, vol. CXXIII, no. 288, February 1986, pp. 92ff.