Portrait of Sir Henry Mainwaring (1726-1797), half-length, in a green coat and red waistcoat, holding a tricorne in his left hand

Batoni’s talents as a draughtsman and a colourist, combined with his ability to capture the physiognomy of his sitters and the different surface textures of their dress, secured his reputation as the leading portraitist in Rome in the mid-eighteenth century. For nearly half a century, he recorded the visits of international travellers on the Grand Tour in portraits that remain among ‘the most remarkable artistic achievements of the period’ (E.P. Bowron, Oxford Art Online).

Sir Henry Mainwaring, 4^th Bt. (1726-1797) was the posthumous son of Sir Henry Mainwaring, 3^rd Bt. of Over Peover, Cheshire, and thus inherited the baronetcy on his birth. His mother Diana was the only child of William Blackett of Newby, eldest son of Sir Edward Blackett, 2^nd Bt. of Newcastle, M.P. respectively for Ripon and Northumberland, who purchased Newby near Ripon in the early 1690s and his wife Diana, daughter of Sir Ralph Delaval, Bt. of Seaton Delaval. The widowed Lady Mainwaring’s second husband was the Rev. Thomas Wettenhall, whose son would inherit the estate the Mainwarings had held since the Conquest, with its remarkable seventeenth-century stable block. Mainwaring matriculated at Oriel College in 1744 and presumably remained at Oxford until receiving his M.A. in 1747. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, he delayed setting out on the Grand Tour for over a decade.

He travelled with a younger neighbour, George Harry, Lord Grey, subsequently 5^th Earl of Stamford (1737-1819). A diary documents their tour: they may have been in Rome in the autumn of 1759, before wintering in Naples in 1759-60, but returned to or arrived in Rome on 9 February 1760, were in Florence in June and by way of Venice reached Turin in November. This portrait is referred to in two letters from the agent Thomas Jenkins, who arranged Mainwaring’s purchases in Rome: on 28 November 1761 he stated that with other pictures ‘Your Portrait by Pompeo Battoni’ was in case number 4 which he had despatched on 18^th September, while on 14 August he wrote:

I have entered Your account as Creditor with me Sept. the 3^d_. 1760. Eighty one pounds that is the forty zechins for Your Portrait by Pompeio I had already set down as separately received (Dunham Massey Papers).

This establishes that the picture had been paid for by that date, when Jenkins submitted a bill for three pictures, attributed respectively to Guercino, Veronese and Reni, as well as books and maps. Mainwaring and Grey sat to Nathaniel Dance, himself a former pupil of Batoni, for a double portrait, which his descendants retained until 2005. Jenkins’ correspondence with him establishes that he commissioned Nathaniel Dance’s Aeneas and Venus (sold in these Rooms, 23 May 1994, lot 238), as well as works from the landscape painters Samuel Delane and Robert Crone, the miniaturist Teresa von Maron, Mengs’ sister and drawings after antiquities by William Mossman. He also acquired ‘two cases of marbles’, possibly including two chimneypieces ordered from Dance’s brother George.

Many of Batoni’s most accomplished portraits date from the years round 1760, despite the logistical complications caused by the outbreak of what would be termed the Seven Years War in 1756; outstanding masterpieces include the John, Lord Brudenell (Northamptonshire, Boughton House) and the Charles 7^th Earl of Northampton (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum) of 1758, the Richard Milles (London, National Gallery) and the Louisa Grenville (Chevening) of 1761, about which Mainwaring was informed in a letter of 27 November that year in a gossipy letter from the connoisseur Daniel Crespin.