Sir John Shaw and his Family in the Park at Eltham Lodge, Kent

CC0 Public Domain Designation

Painting and Sculpture of Europe

1761

Arthur Devis
English, 1712–1787

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Artist: Arthur Devis
Title: Sir John Shaw and his Family in the Park at Eltham Lodge, Kent
Place: England (Object made in)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1761
Medium: Oil on canvas
Inscriptions: Artr Devis. fe. / 1761 (lower left)
Dimensions: 134.3 × 199.1 cm (52 3/4 × 78 3/8 in.)
Credit Line: Gift of Emily Crane Chadbourne
Reference Number: 1951.206
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/75393/manifest.json

“Eighteenth-Century England,” Life 5 (October 25, 1948), p. 30, ill.
Sydney H. Pavière, The Devis Family of Painters (Leigh-on-Sea, 1950), pp. 29, 34, 60, no. 146.
Art Institute of Chicago, Paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago. A Catalogue of the Collection (Chicago, 1961), p. 127.
Ellen Gates D’Oench, “Arthur Devis (1712-1787): Master of the Georgian Conversation Piece,” Ph.D. Diss., Yale University, 1979 (Anne Arbor, Mich., University Microfilms, 1984), pp. 308, 379, no. 251, fig. 150.
Beth Fowkes Tobin, Colonizing Nature. The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760-1820 (Philadelphia, 2005), pp. 82-83, fig. 4.
John Priestley, Eltham Palace (Chichester, 2008), fig. 13.

London, Free Society of Artists, 1763, no. 53, as “A Family with a View of a Gentleman’s House”.
Detroit Institute of Arts, English Conversation Pieces of the Eighteeenth Century, 1948, no. 21, as “A Family in a Park” by Joseph Francis Nollekens.
New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, The Conversation Piece: Arthur Devis and his Contemporaries, 1980, no. 39.

Presumably commissioned by the principle sitter, Sir John Shaw, 4th Baronet (died 1779), Eltham Lodge, Kent. William and Sutch by 1926 [see exhibition catalogue New Haven 1980 and letter of 22 August 1979 from Ellen D’Oench in curatorial file]; sold to Leggatt Brothers, London, 1926 [according to sources cited above]; sold by Leggatt Brothers to Emily Crane Chadbourne, Washington, D.C., 1926 [according to sources cited above]; on loan to the Art Institute 1932-1951; given to the Art Institute, 1951.

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