JAMES LATHAM (1696-1747) A Portrait of an Architect...

JAMES LATHAM (1696-1747)
A Portrait of an Architect and his Son
Oil on canvas, 90 x 110cm
In a fine carved and gilded eighteenth-century frame

Provenance: Private collection for at least the last two decades.

Something of a speciality of James Latham, the leading portrait painter in Dublin for much of the first half of the eighteenth century, was the double portrait in a landscape-shaped canvas. This trademark compositional form was an unusual, though not unprecedented, format. Examples comparable to the present work include a family group at Fota, County Cork, Two Ladies of the Leslie Family (private collection) and Bishop Clayton and his Wife (National Gallery of Ireland). Here Latham depicts an architect sitting at a table covered by a richly textured fabric who is pointing out a design to a young boy, presumably his son. The architectural drawing includes a star-fort, presumably suggesting that the sitter was a military architect. Intriguingly, in this gesture combining paternal and professional solicitude, Latham anticipates by at least two decades Sir Joshua Reynolds portrait of the architect James Paine and his son (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

Latham was born in Tipperary, but, by 1724, he is recorded as a member of the Antwerp Guild of Painters and on his return home he brought a quite new European sophistication to Irish portraiture. Anne Crookshank’s acute comments on Latham’s manner of painting could have been written with this robustly characterised, but elegantly executed, piece of portraiture specifically in mind: ‘There is nothing sour-faced about Latham. He puts on his paint with direct firm strokes, he enjoys colour when it comes his way and tone when it doesn’t, he has a strong feeling for form and all his sitters are alive and vigorous but the details are often applied with unexpected delicacy’.