.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The sitters were the children of Sir Thomas Rolt of Sacombe Park, Hertfordshire, and his wife Mary, daughter of Dr. Thomas Cox, Physician to King Charles II. Their grandmother, Mary Rolt, was the daughter of Sir Oliver Cromwell of Hinchingbrooke, Huntingdonshire, the Protector's uncle. Sir Thomas Rolt spent many years in India in the service of the East India Company and was for a while president of Surat, returning to England in 1682, and acquiring Sacombe Park in 1688 for £22,500. Edward Rolt, born in 1686, was educated at Merton, College Oxford and Lincoln's Inn and was subsequently successively Member of Parliament for St. Mawes (1713-1715), Grantham (1713-1722) and Chippenham (March 1722 until his death in December of that year). At Sacombe, he put in hand a grandiose building scheme commissioning Vanbrugh to design a fine house for him with a park and formal gardens. However, he seems to have tired of Vanbrugh before the house was built and commissioned James Gibbs to submit plans, dying before work was started. In 1708 he married Ann Bayntun whose mother Anne, eldest daughter and co-heir of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was sister to the celebrated Earl of Rochester and to Henry Hyde, 2nd Earl of Clarendon. He was succeeded by his eldest son Thomas at Sacombe, while his second son Edward, inherited Spye Park, from his maternal Uncle, John Bayntun, in 1771. The latter consequently appended the name Bayntun to his own and was a Member of Parliament for Chippenham between 1737 and 1780. He was also Groom of the Bedchamber to Frederick Prince of Wales between 1745 and 1746 and Surveyor General to the Duchy of Cornwall between 1751 and 1796.
Richardson, a pupil of John Riley (1646-91), was the most accomplished native portrait painter of his generation, with a clear intellectual grasp of the philosophy behind his art which emerges in his important writings. This particularly lively double portrait, which appears to date from the latter half of the 1690's, belongs to a fairly early stage in the artist's career. Full of freshness and charm the artist displays himself in a distinctly Baroque guise which goes considerably beyond what Riley usually achieved. The figure of Edward Rolt leaning against a plinth, holding a spear, seems to echo Sir Peter Lely's Portrait of a Youth holding a Shepherd's Houlette and Pipe, traditionally identified as Abraham Cowley (Dulwich Picture Gallery; see R.B, Beckett, Lely, London, 1951, illustrated pl. 38), which is itself reminiscent of Sir Anthony van Dyck's portraits of Seigneur d' Aubigny (National Portrait Gallery), and Philip, Lord Wharton (National Gallery of Art, Washington).
Richardson, a pupil of John Riley (1646-91), was the most accomplished native portrait painter of his generation, with a clear intellectual grasp of the philosophy behind his art which emerges in his important writings. This particularly lively double portrait, which appears to date from the latter half of the 1690's, belongs to a fairly early stage in the artist's career. Full of freshness and charm the artist displays himself in a distinctly Baroque guise which goes considerably beyond what Riley usually achieved. The figure of Edward Rolt leaning against a plinth, holding a spear, seems to echo Sir Peter Lely's Portrait of a Youth holding a Shepherd's Houlette and Pipe, traditionally identified as Abraham Cowley (Dulwich Picture Gallery; see R.B, Beckett, Lely, London, 1951, illustrated pl. 38), which is itself reminiscent of Sir Anthony van Dyck's portraits of Seigneur d' Aubigny (National Portrait Gallery), and Philip, Lord Wharton (National Gallery of Art, Washington).