Lot 37: Richard van Bleeck

Richard van Bleeck
c.1670-c.1733
portrait of mrs mytton of halston nee letitia owen (1696-1755)
full length, wearing white, seated in a landscape with her two young daughters, Letitia and Anna by her side, two lambs in the foreground
oil on canvas
236 by 146 cm., 94 by 57 1/2 in.
Letitia Owen was the daughter of Roger Owen of Condover, and wife of Richard Mytton (1688-1731) of Halston Hall, Shropshire. Anna Maria, her daughter, married Sir Charlton Leighton, 3rd Bt.. Halston Hall was the seat of the ancient Shropshire family, the Myttons, who are perhaps best known through 'Mad Jack' Mytton, the eccentric and colourful huntsman, who inherited Halston Hall at the age of two in 1796. The grand staircase was large enough and 'sufficiently wide and easy of gradient to have rendered possible the extraordinary freak undertaken by the celebrated John Mytton of taking a hunter up the stairs and into the bedroom', and on one occasion he resolved to cure a bout of hiccups by setting fire to his nightshirt.
The core of Halston was built by Richard Mytton (1661-1718) in 1690, and his son Richard refitted the 15th century Chapel and added a pretty Georgian tower. The Myttons had been a major Shropshire family since the 14th century, and they acquired immense wealth through three generations of fortunate alliances, most sucessfully Thomas Mytton, who in the 15th century accumulated 32000 acres of Wales and gained a link to the princely line of Powis. Richard Mytton's nephew, John Mytton II (1737-1783) was the epitome of the rich and cultivated mid-eighteenth century Englishman, and made the Grand Tour with James Grant (the amateur architect), the Hon. Thomas Robinson, and Thomas Wynn. The Myttons lived at Halston until the entire estate was sold to Edmund Wright in 1837 to pay debts largly run up by Mad Jack Mytton, who had sold all the contents of the house and, though it was entailed, as much of the estate as he could.
Provenance:
J.L. Greenway, sold Christie's, 29th November 1929, lot 60