John Wootton before 1745(1745)
Medium oil on canvas
cyf Portrait of Sir Robert Walpole 1682 - 1764
English painter. He probably received some instruction from Jan Wyck in the 1690s, and he was possibly patronized from an early age by the aristocratic households of Beaufort and Coventry (as was Wyck), perhaps while working as a page to Lady Anne Somerset at Snitterfield House, Warwicks. However, there seems to be no real evidence for this save his early painted view of the house and the family's later acquisition of many of his works. Joseph Farington saw a painting of Diana and the Nymphs (1707; untraced) at Antony House, Cornwall, but Wootton's earliest extant dated work is the horse portrait Bonny Black (1711; Belvoir Castle, Leics). By this time he had begun to establish himself in London, having moved there before his first marriage, to Elizabeth Walsh, in 1706.
