Lot Essay
The two figures copied after engravings by George Bickham, the piper from his 1743 frontispiece to A Short History of the Highland Regiment. D.S. Howard writes in A Tale of Three Cities, p. 112, "The engravings had become popular...for they were identified with martyrs of the day - on 18th July 1743, four riflemen of the Regiment were shot in the Tower for mutiny". A combination of Jacobite feeling and fascination with the elaborate costume of the Highlanders seems to have fueled the fashion for these subjects.