The Connoisseurs: Portrait of Peter Friell and a Companion, the former seated, examining a portfolio of prints and drawings, in an interior

The present work and its pendant, Mrs. Peter Friell and her Sister (private collection, England), were offered together in the Rev. Leycester Fisher and Stevenson Scott sales as by Zoffany. Although Zoffany was arguably pre-eminent in the art of the conversation piece in eighteenth-century Britain, Mortimer, who certainly knew Zoffany by the mid-1760s through the Society of Artists (for their connections, see John Sunderland, John Hamilton Mortimer his Life and Works, Walpole Society, LII, 1986, pp. 33-4) and his circle were familiar with the genre. It is interesting to note the similarities in subject between the present picture and Mortimer's Gentleman and Boy looking at Prints, painted circa 1763-4.