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 14th July
2010, lot 52 for a hammer price of £260,000.