Black and white chalk on laid paper

43.4 by 30.6 cm., 17 by 12 in.

Provenance:

Henry Scipio Reitlinger (1882-1950) (L.2274a)

This is one of a small group of about fifteen black and white chalk portrait drawings drawn by Wright of Derby in the late 1760s, while he was in Liverpool. They are all known monochrome head and shoulder portraits and appear influenced by the mezzotints of the Irish artist Thomas Frye. His fellow Irishman Robert Healy (1743-1771) produced similar monochrome portraits in pastel.

The group includes three self-portraits, two in Derby Museum and one in the Art Institute, Chicago. Others are in the Speed Art Gallery, Louisville, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, the Metropolitan Museum, New York and the Yale Center for British Art. A study of a boy reading was sold at Sotheby’s on 14^th July 2010, lot 52 for a hammer price of £260,000.