Portrait of Father John Gahagan, bust-length, in van Dyck costume - a head study

This is an interesting addition to the small group of life-size ad vivum portrait studies that had so important a place in Mengs's practice as a portraitist. Only two other such studies for portraits of British sitters are known, those of Lord Cowper and Henry Lyte, respectively at Yale and in a German private collection (exhibited at Kenwood, Anton Raphael Mengs and his British Patrons, 1993, nos. 7 and 11). This study is noticeably more vivacious than either of the pictures that followed it; one, which was finished by Maron and supplied to the 7th Lord Arundell of Wardour in 1774 (sold in these rooms, 9 December 1994, lot 93), the other, apparantly fully autograph, is in the Museum Carolino Augusteum, Salzburg (S.Rttgen in the catalogue of the exhibition cited above, fig. 17, where dated circa 1756-8).