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Philippe Mercier

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Philippe Mercier
John Faber the Younger, Philip Mercier, 1735, mezzotint after Mercier's untraced self-portrait, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Born1689
Berlin, Brandenburg-Prussia
DiedJuly 18, 1760(1760-07-18) (aged 70–71)
London, Kingdom of Great Britain
EducationAntoine Pesne
Known forPainting and etching
MovementRococo
Patron(s)Frederick, Prince of Wales

Philippe Mercier (also spelled Philip Mercier; 1689 – 18 July 1760) was an artist of French Huguenot descent from the German realm of Brandenburg-Prussia (later Kingdom of Prussia), usually defined to French school.[1] Active in England for most of his working life, Mercier is considered one of the first practitioners of the Rococo style, and is credited with influencing a new generation of 18th-century English artists.[2]

Life

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Mercier was born c. 1689–1691 in Berlin, the son of Pierre Mercier (died 1729, Dresden), a Huguenot tapestry-worker.[3] He studied painting at the Akademie der Wissenschaften of Berlin[4] and later under Antoine Pesne, who had arrived in Berlin in 1710. Later, he travelled in Italy and France before arriving in London—"recommended by the Court at Hannover"—probably in 1716. He married in London in 1719 and lived in Leicester Fields.

He was appointed principal painter and librarian to the Prince and Princess of Wales at their independent establishment in Leicester Fields, and while he was in favour he painted various portraits of royalty, and no doubt many of the nobility and gentry. Of the royal portraits, those of the Prince of Wales and of his three sisters, painted in 1728, were all engraved in mezzotint by John Simon, and that of the three elder children of the Prince of Wales by John Faber the Younger in 1744. This last (entitled Playing Soldiers[5]) was a typical piece of Mercier's composition, the children being made the subject of a spirited, if somewhat childish, allegory in their game of play. Prince George is represented with a firelock on his shoulder, teaching a dog his drill, while his little brother and sister are equally occupied in a scene that is aptly used to point a patriotic moral embodied in some verses subjoined to the plate, of which the concluding couplet is as follows:

Illustrious Isle where either sex displays
Such early omens of their future praise!

Faber also engraved six plates of "Rural Life" after Mercier, and several other subjects of his have survived him.

In 1733, Mercier painted a Portrait of 'Frederick, Prince of Wales, playing a violoncello, and his Sisters'. National Portrait Gallery, London. There is an alternative version of the painting in the Royal Collection. In the painting 'The Sense of Hearing', 1744, women are playing violin, violoncello, harpsichord, and flute. Yale Collection for British Art.

Mercier became involved[when?] in a scandal of some sort[clarification needed] and he lost favour. He left London around 1740 and settled in York, where he practised portrait painting for over ten years, before returning to London in 1751. In 1752, Mercier went to Portugal at the request of several English merchants. He did not long remain there, however, but came back to London, where he died in 1760.

In August 2016, Mercier's painting Portrait of a Lady (1744) was one of the subjects for episode 19 in the 5th series of the BBC Television series Fake or Fortune?[6]

Mercier's daughter Charlotte was also an artist in her early life, before turning to a life of dissolution and dying in the St James Workhouse two years after her father's death.[7]

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Selected works by Philippe Mercier

References

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  1. ^ Bataille 1930, p. 409, Bénézit 2006, p. 340, Ingamells 1996, p. 147, and Hopkinson 2016, p. 136, define Mercier as a painter of French school.
  2. ^ Waterhouse 1952, p. 127: "Never a first-rate artist, he had a flair for novelty in the French manner, and he seems not only to have been responsible for the introduction of the French genre style into English painting, but to have played a considerable part in popularising the 'conversation piece'"; Eidelberg 2013: "Philippe Mercier (c. 1689-1760) looms large in the history of English eighteenth-century art. One of the first practitioners of the new rococo style, Mercier’s genre subjects and portraits provided the foundation for William Hogarth and the next generation of English artists."
  3. ^ Vertue 1934, p. 37: "Mr. P. Merciere. painter Born at Berlin, of French extraction." Walpole 1879, p. 703, give the painter's age at his death as seventy-one. From Walpole's account, Ingamells & Raines 1976–1978, pp. 1, 8 n. 1, and Ingamells 1996, p. 147, suggest that Mercier was the Pierre-Phillipe Mercier born in 1689 to Pierre Mercier in Berlin; however, it is noted that a Phillipe Mercier, also the son of a Huguenot tapestry-worker in Berlin, was born in 1691.
  4. ^ Academy Webpage Archived 29 April 2009 at the Wayback Machine
  5. ^ "Playing Soldier". Detroit Institute of Arts. 2015. Archived from the original on 22 December 2015. Retrieved 10 September 2015.
  6. ^ "Fake or Fortune?, Series 5: 4. Portraits". Retrieved 22 August 2016.
  7. ^ Profile of Claude Mercier in the Dictionary of Pastellists Before 1800.

Further reading

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Primary sources
General studies
Exhibition catalogues
Additional notes
Reference books
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