Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723) was the leading portrait painter in England for almost forty years, serving as Principal Painter to five successive monarchs from Charles II to George I. Born Gottfried Kniller in Lübeck, the son of a portrait painter, he trained in Amsterdam under Ferdinand Bol, a pupil of Rembrandt, before travelling to Italy, where he began painting portraits and refined the style that would define his English career. He arrived in London around 1674 to 1676 and quickly established himself, above all after painting Charles II, going on to succeed Sir Peter Lely as the dominant portraitist of the age.
Kneller was appointed Principal Painter jointly with John Riley on the accession of William III and Mary II in 1689, becoming sole holder of the title on Riley's death in 1691, and he was knighted the following year. His output was vast: he ran a large London studio employing numerous assistants and is said to have accommodated as many as fourteen sitters in a single day, documenting effectively everyone of consequence at the English court across four reigns. Among his most celebrated works are the "Hampton Court Beauties," commissioned by William III to complement Lely's earlier "Windsor Beauties," and, above all, his series of Kit-Cat Club portraits: some forty-eight likenesses of leading Whig politicians and men of letters, painted in a new format measuring thirty-six by twenty-eight inches that became known as the "kit-cat" size and remains a standard portrait format to this day. In 1715 George I created Kneller a baronet, an honour without precedent for a painter in England and one not repeated for over a century, and from 1711 he served as governor of the first English academy of painting, in Great Queen Street.
Although the productivity of Kneller's studio inevitably resulted in variation in quality across his enormous output, at his best, and particularly when responding to a sitter who engaged him, he was capable of real psychological penetration alongside his customary fluency and grand manner. John Mitchell Fine Paintings' portrait by Kneller, of George Clarke, exemplifies the confident, assured characterisation for which his finest work remains admired, and represents the dominant tradition of English court and society portraiture at the turn of the eighteenth century.