EARLY 20TH CENTURY, RE-USING LATE 18TH CENTURY OIL-ON-COPPER PANELS

The pearled tablets display laurel-wreathed, scalloped and figurative medallions in the manner of Roman ceilings designed in the 1760s by George III's Rome-trained architect Robert Adam (d.1792), and illustrated in The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1773-9. The scenes of sporting children evoke lyric poetry and concepts of 'love awakening' and relate to those executed by John Hamilton Mortimer (d.1779) for a ceiling designed in the early 1770s by the architect James Paine for Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire. (E. Croft-Murray, Decorative Painting in England, vol.11, 1970, fig.77). This French fashion for depicting children at adult activities also recurrs in Sir Joshua Reynolds' Infant Academy, 1782; and in the contemporary engravings issued by Francesco Bartolozzi after Lady Diana Beauclerk.