For much of the nineteenth century, Joseph Highmore's reputation was quietly absorbed into that of a far more famous contemporary: several of his most accomplished paintings, including Mr Oldham and His Guests and The Angel of Mercy, were reattributed to William Hogarth, and it was not until 1969 that scholars correctly identified an oil sketch of a family group in Van Dyck costume, now held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, as Highmore's own work rather than Hogarth's, despite Hogarth having produced nothing comparable in this particular sketch technique during his career. Born in London in 1692, the third son of a coal merchant, Highmore trained first for the law before joining Sir Godfrey Kneller's Great Queen Street academy in 1713, also attended, a generation apart, by the sitter of several other portraits in the gallery's collection.
Highmore built a substantial and successful portrait practice through the 1720s and 1730s, working for aristocratic and middle-class patrons alike, and became a close friend of the novelist Samuel Richardson, whose portrait he painted more than once and whose bestselling 1740 novel Pamela inspired Highmore's own celebrated series of twelve narrative paintings, produced between 1741 and 1743 and now divided between Tate Britain, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the National Gallery of Victoria. Art historians rank this series, alongside comparable work by Hogarth and Francis Hayman, among the founding achievements of British narrative painting, and Richardson himself was pleased enough with the results to reference Highmore directly in a footnote to his next novel, Clarissa. Highmore also supported Thomas Coram's Foundling Hospital, donating a painting that remains in its collection, and retired from painting at seventy to write on art history and criticism, before his death in Canterbury in 1780.
The specific painting held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings carries a genuinely remarkable provenance of its own: its first recorded owner was the antiquary and collector Samuel Ireland, father of the notorious Shakespeare forger William Ireland, who believed the work to be by Hogarth and recounted an elaborate, likely apocryphal anecdote to explain its supposed origin; a later owner was the art historian Edward Croft-Murray, keeper of drawings at the British Museum and formerly a member of the wartime Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives programme responsible for recovering looted art in Italy. This double history, of misattribution corrected by later scholarship and ownership by two genuinely colourful figures in the story of British art collecting, makes the painting a particularly rich addition to the gallery's holdings of early Georgian portraiture.