Description

Double, three quarter length, frontal portrait of two young men. The boy holding a cricket bat wears a red waistcoat and breeches. The boy holding a ball wears a gold waistcoat breeches.

Display caption

Portrait of the Courtenay Brothers, c.1751 Circle of Thomas Hudson (1701-1779) MCC Collection: purchased, 1904 Oil on canvas TN.2009.2530 This ‘conversation piece’ portrait purports to shows two of scions of the Courtenay family of Powderham Castle. The picture is a half-length copy of one section of an enormous painting of the 3rd Duke of Marlborough and family in the Great Hall at Blenheim Palace. William Courtenay 10th Earl of Devon, carries a large oak cricket bat on his shoulder in the customary manner, as an imperious field marshal might be represented with a baton. Painted by fashionable society portrait painter and art collector Thomas Hudson; it shows William with his younger brother Henry at his elbow directing his gaze diagonally across the composition with his bowling arm. William was not a cricketer of renown but played one first-class match for Charles Lennox’s XI alongside Thomas Lord in 1797. Thomas Hudson studied under Jonathan Richardson, the portraitist and influential writer on art, whose daughter he married. He was the most employed portrait painter working in London in the 1740s but was eclipsed by the rise of Alan Ramsay and Joshua Reynolds.