Lot 782: Robert Edge Pine (?London ?1720/30-1788 Philadelphia)

Robert Edge Pine (?London ?1720/30-1788 Philadelphia) A group portrait, thought to be Richard Bentley (1708-1782), his son by his first wife, his second wife and their daughters on a portico, before an organ and draped curtain, a landscape beyond oil on canvas, oval 44¼ x 60¾ in. (102.3 x 154 cm.) in an English 18th century carved frame

102.3 x 154 cm.

18th century

An annotated photograph in the Heinz Archive, National Portrait Gallery, London, identifies this group portrait as the family of the writer and artist, Richard Bentley. In 1750, Bentley, who was survived by two sons and three daughters, met Horace Walpole and soon after moved with his second wife and family to a cottage at Teddington, near Strawberry Hill. He joined Walpole and John Chute to form a committee on taste to renovate Walpole's house in the 'Gothick' style. During these years, Bentley produced innovative architectural drawings for Strawberry Hill, painted landscapes, and made ingenious illustrations for the first anthology of Thomas Gray's poems (1753), designs that were deemed by Hanns Hammelmann to be a 'turning-point in British decorative art' (H. Hammelmann, Book Illustrators in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. T.S.R. Boase, London, 1975, p. 14). Robert Edge Pine was the son of a well-known engraver and printseller, John Pine (1691-1756). Once considered to have the potential to rival Reynolds as a portrait painter, Pine was a strong, perhaps temperamental character, whose support for the American cause in the War of Independence lost him a great deal of work in England. In 1784 he moved to Philadelphia where, for the brief four years until his death, he met with considerable success.