Portrait of William Jones of Ramsbury (d. 1766), three-quarter-length, wearing a red dress coat and white gold-embroidered waistcoat, in a landscape

This elegant portrait of William Jones is a very fine example of Francis Cotes’s work during the late 1750s and early 1760s. The sitter is fashionably dressed in a red dress coat trimmed with gold and a white embroidered waistcoat. Cotes achieved a prominent reputation as a portraitist during his short lifetime, one which rivalled that of his contemporaries Sir Joshua Reynolds, Allan Ramsay and Thomas Gainsborough. Contrary to aesthetic developments during the second half of the 18th century, his work retained much of the calm formality which had characterized portraiture in the first half of the century. Cotes seems to have avoided the ideals of the ‘Grand Style’, which Reynolds so vocally championed from the 1760s onwards. Instead, he paid meticulous attention to the clothes of his sitters and maintained a decorum and reserve in his likenesses. Cotes pioneered the use of pastel as a medium for portraiture (see lot 22) and the clarity and sharpness he achieved in the medium was transferred to his oil paintings.

The present painting descended in the family of the sitter until 1953. Later, when the painting passed through the gallery set up by the legendary art dealer Joseph Duveen, they added the present Louis XV-style ornate frame. This gilded style was dubbed the 'Pinkie', after the frame the Duveen Brothers supplied for the portrait, which shares he same moniker, of Sarah Goodin Barrett Moulton in a pink bonnet by Thomas Lawrence (The Huntington, San Marino, inv. no. 27.61). The pairing of French Régence and Rococo frames with British portraits revealed Duveen's ambition to provide his clients, especially Americans, with not only pictures, but entire interiors, integrating well with the French decorative arts Duveen also sold. The present frame was reused by the Duveen Brothers; as it is first recorded with a Portrait of Emma Hart, later Lady Hamilton, in the sale of the Late Lord Michelman in 1926 (see N. Penny and K. Serres, 'Duveen and the Decorators', The Burlington Magazine, June 2007, pp. 405-406, fig. 38). The frame was than reused to house a painting of Mrs. Kitty Calcraft (Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, inv. no. 840002300), as the inventory number '28390' on the frame's reverse matches that of her portrait in the Duveen Stockbooks (see Stock Book Box 23, Duveen Brothers Records, 1876-1981,The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession no. 960015). This frame must have joined with the present portrait in the Duveen Brother's care, although no records of this union appear to survive.