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Historical Portraits are the leading dealer in historical portraiture and in the twenty years they have been established, interest in portraiture has enjoyed something of a renaissance. Its first birth came with the arrival of Van Dyck and Holbein to these shores almost five hundred years ago. Ever since British patrons have shown the most consistent enthusiasm for the genre in which the greatest painters in Britain and America have worked. Artists who might elsewhere in Britain have been commissioned to produce religious or history paintings were forced by the economics of the national taste to concentrate on painting portraits. At Historical Portraits we hope we may have played no small part in this re-assessment of British and American portraiture. Connoisseurship in this field is still developing in comparison with other schools and genres, and the discoveries made by Historical Portraits continue to advance our understanding of the painters and their subjects. Most famously, Historical Portraits revealed the only life portrait of Prince Arthur, the ill-fated brother of Henry VIII, and recently we identified the haunting portrait of Lady Mary Villiers by Sir Anthony Van Dyck as an important forgotten work from the collection of Charles I. The marriage of artistic talent and power is a potent one, and among our most keenly sought subjects are the Stuart monarchs and courtiers, the beauties of the age of scandal and the parliamentarians and empire-builders of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At any time our stock might include a portrait of King Charles II or one of his mistresses by Sir Peter Lely, George Washington by Gilbert Stuart or Lady Emma Hamilton by George Romney. Recent sitters are also much sought, and there is a steady demand for life portraits of great Prime Ministers such as Sir Winston Churchill, famous figures in the arts and members of the Royal Family. Value matches demand, and good portraiture has kept its worth more securely than other genres in recent years. The work of some painters, such as Thomas Gainsborough or Sir Joshua Reynolds, has always held its own in the higher echelons of the art market, but other artists are now being recognised for their acuity in depicting an epoch. We now view leisured society before the war through the painting of Philip de Laszlo or Sir Alfred Munnings, for example, as much as we see the Regency through the painting of Sir Thomas Lawrence, and their popularity has grown accordingly. We are closely associated with national museums and institutions, and we work with curators in helping to fill important gaps in their collections, both private and public. Recent sales include works to the National Portrait Galleries of England, Scotland, Ireland and America, the Tate Gallery, the National Trust, English Heritage and numerous provincial museums in Great Britain and the United States. We pride ourselves on painstaking research, which is not only the bedrock of our business as dealers but a service that we are pleased to offer to clients. We routinely undertake insurance valuations, as well as advising clients on acquiring pictures from sale at auction and on building a collection. An extensive list is kept of clients’ requirements, and, using our extensive contacts among private and commercial sources, we are able to notify them when a particular subject has become available. Questions of attribution, identity and provenance are examined with the same rigour, and our opinion is invariably published with the support of the principal authority in the field. Find out more about historical portraits at the Historical Portraits web site. |
