Roy Precious - Antiques & Fine Art has dated this 17th Century Portrait Painting to the 17th Century.
He would appear to have been far more interested in conveying intelligence than rivals such as Lely, and here, as always, we sense that the sitter is of an alert and enquiring mind.
Inscribed upper left "Mary, Daughter of George Dodding Esq. A.D. 1677."
This is almost certainly a portrait painted to mark Mary's marriage to Thomas Preston.
The surname Dodding was first found in Somerset at Doddington, which predates the Norman Conquest dating back to c. 975 when it was first listed as Dundingtune. By the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, the village was known as Dodington.
There are other places similarly named in the Domesday Book but this is the only pre-Conquest village making it of Saxon origin. In early days, some of the family were found much further north in Cumberland at Kirk-Oswald where the estates of Kirk-Oswald were granted by Elizabeth I to the Dodding family.
MARY DODDING was the daughter of George Dodding Esq. of Conishead Priory; he was the son of Colonel George Dodding, (who had raised and commanded one of the Lancashire Regiments of Foot for Parliament during the Civil War, mainly recruited around Cartmel and Grange-over-Sands)
Colonel Dodding was the son of Miles Dodding Esq, of Conishead Priory, Lancashire.
Mary married Thomas Preston M.P. for Lancaster in, it is thought, 1677. Thomas was born in 1646 and died in 1697. He is buried at Cartmel, Cumbria. Mary's birth and death dates are not known, but the marriage was brief as Thomas married again and had two children from that union. There were no offspring from his earlier marriage, so it is very probable that Mary died in childbirth as was very common.
JOHN MICHAEL WRIGHT (May 1617 – July 1694) was a portrait painter in the Baroque style. Described variously as English and Scottish, Wright trained in Edinburgh under the Scots painter George Jamesone, and acquired a considerable reputation as an artist and scholar during a long sojourn in Rome. There he was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca, and was associated with some of the leading artists of his generation. He was engaged by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, to acquire artworks in Oliver Cromwell's England in 1655. He took up permanent residence in England from 1656, and served as Court Painter before and after the English Restoration. He was a favourite of the restored Stuart court, a client of both Charles II and James II, and was a witness to many of the political manoeuvres of the era.
Wright is currently rated as one of the leading indigenous British painters of his generation, largely for the distinctive realism in his portraiture. Perhaps due to the unusually cosmopolitan nature of his experience, he was favoured by patrons at the highest level of society in an age in which foreign artists were usually preferred. Wright's paintings of royalty, aristocracy and gentry are included amongst the collections of many leading galleries today.
SIZE: 35.25 x 30.25 inc. frame.
PROVENANCE: latterly in a private collection in Sidmouth, Devon.
Roy Precious - Antiques & Fine Art has dated this 17th Century Portrait Painting to the 17th Century.
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Portrait of Mary Dodding 1677, by John Michael Wright.
