Unusually for an eighteenth-century painter, Henry Walton did not turn to art out of financial necessity: born into a wealthy Norfolk farming family and baptised at Tivetshall St Mary in 1746, he moved to London at nineteen with a private income that meant he had no pressing need to earn his living by painting at all. It was only in 1770, five years after arriving in the capital, that he began formal training at the Maiden Lane Academy in Covent Garden, becoming a pupil of the German-born painter Johann Zoffany, one of the most sought-after artists working in England at the time.
Walton built a considerable reputation through the 1770s as a painter of portraits, conversation pieces and miniatures, his sitters including the historian Edward Gibbon, author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, whom Walton painted in 1773, as well as the writer and clergyman William Gilpin and Lord Cornwallis. He was elected a fellow of the Society of Artists in 1771 and a director the following year, and by the 1780s had achieved further success with genre paintings such as A Girl Buying a Ballad and Plucking the Turkey, works whose close observation of everyday domestic incident has prompted comparisons with the French painter Jean-Siméon Chardin, and raised the possibility, never definitively confirmed, that Walton travelled to France. He moved back to his native East Anglia around 1780, concentrating increasingly on portraiture, and by the early 1790s had established a further career as a picture dealer and adviser to major private collectors, including Lord Fitzwilliam, a role that drew on the same discerning eye evident in his own painted work.
The paintings by Walton held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, a genre scene and a landscape, reflect the range of a career that moved between fashionable London portraiture, closely observed domestic genre in the Chardin tradition, and the quieter life of a Norfolk landowner and connoisseur in his later years.