Henry Anderton

T03543 MOUNTAIN LANDSCAPE WITH DANCING SHEPHERD C.1650–60

Oil on canvas 18 × 23 1/2 (457 × 597)
Inscribed ‘Anderton Fecit’ on rock, centre foreground
Bequeathed by Hugh Paget CBE 1982
Prov: ...; ? Marchioness of Bath (old label on frame); ...; acquired by the donor in Mexico
Exh: English Pictures from Suffolk Houses, Agnew, February–March 1980(1)
Lit: B. Buckeridge, ‘An Essay towards an English School’ in De Piles, The Art of Painting, 1754, p.355; M.H. Grant, The Old English Landscape Painters, 1, 1957, p.60, pl.17, fig.36

This is the only known signed work by a painter who according to Buckeridge's ‘Essay’ (written in 1706) was a pupil of the Serjeant Painter Robert Streeter (1625–79). He started as a landscape and still-life painter, but later, after he ‘fell to face Painting’, he is said to have rivalled Lely in portraiture. His most famous painting was a half-length of the Duchess of Richmond which, according to Mrs Beale's Diary (Vertue IV, Walpole Society, XXIV, 1936, p.173) was in 1677 in the collection of Baptist May, Keeper of the Privy Purse to Charles II. Virtually nothing else is known about him, except that ‘he studied some years after the antique’ in Rome.

This painting strongly reflects the influence of the Dutch Romanist school of landscape painting which Anderton would have studied during his stay in Italy, and was probably painted after his return home from abroad.

Published in:
The Tate Gallery 1982-84: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, London 1986