The son of a Yorkshire doctor, Hall studied at the Lincoln School of Art and under Verlat in Antwerp. In the winter of 1885/6 he settled in Newlyn, where he was a close friend of Stanhope Forbes, but about 1897 he moved to Liverpool. By the time our pictures were painted he was living at St Paul's Studios, West Kensington, which he left in 1911 to settle for the rest of his life near Newbury. He exhibited for fifty years at the Royal Academy (1887-1937), as well as showing at the Grosvenor and New Galleries and Suffolk Street. (For a fuller account of his career, see Painting in Newlyn 1880-1930, exh. Barbican Art Gallery, 1985, cat. pp.72-3).

James Douglas Fletcher (1857-1927) was educated at Eton and Balliol, and lived at Rosenhaugh House, Avoch, Ross-shire, and 26 Curzon Street, Mayfair. He served as a J.P. and as Deputy-Liutenant of his county. In 1909, aged fifty-two, he married Lilian Stephen, probably a cousin, and the portraits, which remained at Rosenhaugh until 1959, when the house was demolished, were no doubt painted to commemorate the marriage. Although their cool academic style looks back to Hall's Antwerp training, they are unusual works for an artist better known for landscapes in the English Impressionist tradition, humorous anecdotal subjects, and caricatures.