Lot 246: c - * ANDREA SOLDI FLORENCE 1703-1771 LONDON

oil on canvas

46 1/2 by 57 1/2 in.; 118.5 by 146cm

Henry Lannoy Hunter (d.1768), of Beech Hill House, Berks., by descent in the family,
Ms. Mary Charlotte Hunter, Sale, London, Christie's, April 29, 1949, lot 40, as Zoffany;
There purchased by Gray.

This painting, rediscovered in 1995 when John Ingamells confirmed the attribution to Andrea Soldi, depicts the English merchant of Huguenot descent, Henry Lannoy Hunter, in Turkish dress kneeling on an oriental rug after a successful hunt. Among the architectural ruins in the background, a servant covers the horses to keep them warm. Painted between 1733 and 1735 while Soldi was travelling through the territories of the Ottoman Empire, this painting represents an important example of eighteenth century English artistic patronage as well as acting as a record of England's role in world trade in the eighteenth century.

Henry Lannoy Hunter (d.1768), of Beech Hill House, in Swallowfield, Berkshire, entered the Levant Company, which operated throughout the Ottoman Empire with offices in cities such as Constantinople, Aleppo and Smyrna. The Levant Company traded in wool and silks, spices, carpets, mohair yarn and other exotic merchandise. Soldi painted several portraits of members of the Levant Company between 1733-1736. These portraits represented the sitters in some cases as Turkish Pashas, dressed in elaborate furs or robes surrounded by exotic wares or hunting game. The gentlemen of the Levant Company were generally younger sons of gentry sent overseas with a desire to amass a quick fortune while also indulging in the high quality of life abroad. Soldi clearly captures this atmosphere of the "high life" of the Englishman abroad. Soldi also painted a portrait of Henry Hunter's father in law David Bosanquet, three quarter length seated, wearing a red velvet coat edged with fur and a turban, and the artist also produced a Portrait of Anna Maria Bosanquet, later Mrs Gaussen, full length wearing a pale blue dress, holding roses.

Andrea Soldi was born in Florence, but is first recorded painting portraits of merchants of the Levant Company in Constantinople and Aleppo. As an artist, little is known of his early artistic training, he was first critically noted by George Vertue, who reported that he arrived in England around 1735, having been encouraged by British merchants of the Levant Company who he had befriended and sketched "with much approbation" during his travels in Constantinople and Aleppo. This portrait clearly seems to date from the height of his Levantine period.

Soldi enjoyed considerable early success in London. Among his patrons, the most important were William Montague, 2^nd Duke of Manchester, and Thomas Belasyse, 4^th Viscount Fauconberg, both of whom commissioned a series of portraits. His Italianate style, with its precise, solid forms, strong coloring, and luxurious rendering of dress and drapery, all evident in this elegant portrait, distinguished him as one of the leading foreign painters active in London at the time. At the height of his career from the 1740s to the early 1760s, he was esteemed for his portraits and conversation pieces of the English gentry, military officers, churchmen, professionals, and his artistic contemporaries, including the sculptors Louis-François Roubiliac and Michael Rysbrack, and the architects James Gibbs and Issac Ware. George Vertue wrote of Soldi in 1751: "his portraits are freely & well drawn and his colouring true and very natural. he is certainly a painter of superior merit in the portrait way very light and airy" (see J. Ingamells, The Connoisseur, 1974, p. 185).