Artwork Title: The Pybus family c.1769

The Pybus family c.1769

Nathaniel Dance Holland

The picture represents John Pybus Senior, a retired East India Company servant, and his wife Martha, née Small, with their children identified, from left to right as: Martha, Anne, John Junior, and Charles Small. The family is depicted full-length, exquisitely dressed in tones of pink and grey, in an idyllic English-landscape setting. The painting was brought to Australia in 1897 by descendants of the sitters and, from that point on, escaped the notice of scholars of both Nathaniel Dance and 18th-century British art. It is a source, therefore, of great excitement that this beautiful work has now emerged, newly cleaned, into the public sphere. ...No account books or sitters’ books of Nathaniel Dance’s survive from this period and it is therefore not possible to confirm the attribution or date of the painting through this means. However, as the age of the Pybus children is well documented, it is possible to establish the date of the painting within a period of 18 months. On the family’s return from India in May 1768, John was thirteen and a half; Ann, eleven and a half; Martha, 10; and Charles, one and a half. In the painting their childish features and appearance makes it extremely unlikely that they are any more than, at most, a year and a half older than these ages, dating the painting to no later than the end of 1769. Tantalisingly, we know that there was a conversation piece exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1770 which is as yet unidentified and may well prove in time to be this painting. Although the painting is unsigned and until now has been attributed to Dance on stylistic grounds and the family tradition of the former owners, John Pybus’s will of 1787 clearly refers to the family pictures by Dance’. (https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/a-nabobs-return-the-pybus-conversation-piece-by-nathaniel-dance-2/)
Uploaded on Nov 28, 2017 by Suzan Hamer

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