Lot Essay
The device of portraying an English or European subject in foreign dress was common in the eighteenth century and was practiced in particular by British artists treating their fellow subjects in India and by Liotard and French artists portraying their countrymen in the Levant. The subjects would have been unlikely to have worn the foreign dress, which the artist introduced rather as an allusion to their careers. In the present portrait the artist is clearly making such allusions in the particular rank of costume and by the inclusion of the Porcelain Tower, Nanking (completed in 1431). 'Chinese' examples of these fancy portraits are rare as westerners were in general excluded from China, with the exception of Portuguese and French Jesuits who had established themselves at the Court in Peking in the seventeenth century.