About This Artwork

Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories

Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories

Exhibition History

Preston, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Work by Lancashire Artists, 1937, no. 4.

London, Arthur Tooth and Sons, Recent Acquisitions, 1948, no. 2.

New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, The Conversation Piece: Arthur Devis and His Contemporaries, 1980, no. 13, cat. by Ellen Gates D’Oench.

Publication History

A.S. Turberville, ed., Johnson’s England: An Account of the Life and Manners of His Age, vol. 2, Oxford, 1933, ill. opp. p. 154.

Sydney H. Pavière, "Biographical Notes on the Devis Family of Painters," Walpole Society 25 (1936-37), p. 121, no. 4, pl. 41b.

“The Devis Exhibition: Eighteenth-Century English Painting,” Illustrated London News 190 (20 March 1937), p. 503 (ill.).

Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, Three Tours through London in the Years 1748, 1776, 1797, New Haven, 1941, ill. opp. p. 20.

Art News 47 (June 1948), p. 3 (ill.).

Sydney H. Pavière, The Devis Family of Painters, Leigh-on-Sea, 1950, pp. 34, 57, no. 131, pl. 1.

Sacheverell Sitwell, “The World of Arthur Devis,” Saturday Book 12 (1952), p. 96 (ill.).

Art Institute of Chicago, Paintings in The Art Institute of Chicago: A Catalogue of the Picture Collection, Chicago, 1961, p. 126.

Ellen Gates D’Oench, “Arthur Devis (1712–1787): Master of the Georgian Conversation Piece,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1979, pp. 71, 407, 419–21, 435, no. 152, fig. 55.

Susan Wise and Malcolm Warner, French and British Paintings from 1600 to 1800 in The Art Institute of Chicago: A Catalogue of the Collection (Chicago, 1996), pp. 212–14, ill.

Ownership History

By descent from the sitters to Major Henry Howard, 34 Nevern Square, London, to at least 1937 [Pavière 1936/7]; offered for sale, Christie's, London, 18 December 1931, lot 80, bought-in. Arthur Tooth and Sons, Ltd., London, by 1948 [see Art News 1948 and New Haven 1980]; sold to the Art Institute, 1956.