Adam's HOMAN POTTERTON A LIFETIME OF COLLECTING 7th September 2021

98 92 ROBERT HUNTER (FL.1752-1803) Portrait of a Gentleman, Wearing a Brown Coat Oil on canvas, 74 x 61cm (29 x 24”) Signed and dated 1762 bottom right € 5,000 - 8,000 Robert Hunter, widely regarded as the principal Irish portrait painter of his time, was a native of Ulster, but little of his family and early years are known. The earliest reference to his artistic activity comes with an 1752 advertisement in Faulkner’s Dublin Journal for engravings after his portrait of Tom Ech- lin. As he painted Sir Charles Burton, Lord Mayor of Dublin (1752–3), the following year, he was by then becoming established as an important portraitist in the city. His portrait of Burton was afterwards engraved in mezzotint by J. McArdell; and ten years later, in 1763, the Dublin Society awarded him a premium of ten guineas for a full-length portrait of Lord Taaffe, which was engraved in mezzotint the same year by John Dixon. He contributed six works, including a “Susanna and the Elders,” to the exhibition of the Society of Artists in George’s Lane in 1765, and was then living in Bolton Street. He regularly contributed to the exhibitions of the Dublin Artists down to 1777, and again, for the last time, in 1800. Strickland noted that Hunter was for many years at the head of his profession as a portrait painter and had a large and profitable practice but after the arrival of Robert Home in 1780 his vogue declined. He was a renowned collector of Old Master paintings and held an exhibition and sale of his pictures in 1792. “Sleator’s Gazetteer” for 12 March 1763, contains verses on the merits of Hunter as a portrait painter. After lauding his great genius and matchless merits the writer concludes with the lines: “Could Hoga- rth, Reynolds, view the bold design, They’d gladly weave their richest wreaths with thine.” Strickland mentions that ‘an excellent example is the “Portrait of a Gentleman” which was formerly at Bellevue, Co. Wicklow, and was sold in 1906, a work which might almost pass as a Reynolds or a Cotes. W. B. S. Taylor (“Fine Arts in Great Britain and Ireland”) says “he took excellent likenesses and his practice was extensive; he was truly a gentleman in feeling, and had he practised his art at a time or in a country where the arts were better understood, he would have been very eminent in his profession.”