Object Description
Watercolour on vellum. Signed with monogram ‘ND’.
Gold frame with scroll top.
The discovery that the present miniature was part of the family collection at Leeswood Hall has offered a possibility of its identity. Although Leeswood was not built by the time the portrait was painted circa 1670, that the family collection of miniatures was installed there is chronicled in a Country Life article from August 6th 1943.[1] The article is accompanied by a series of images, including one of a group of miniatures hanging in a Regency-style niche in the Hall’s drawing room. The miniature can be seen in the image, registered by the National Portrait Gallery to have been in the collection of Mrs Violet Fairbairn-Wynne-Eyton in 1949.
One likely candidate is Sir Kenrick Eyton, a Welsh lawyer and politician who had fought in the Royalist army in the English Civil War. The son of Sir Gerard Eyton of Eyton, Denbighshire, husband of Eleanor Mutton, daughter of Sir Peter Mutton of Llanerch., he was one of the commissioners to arrange the surrender of Denbigh Castle to General Thomas Mytton on 14 October 1646.
In 1660, Eyton was elected Member of Parliament for Flintshire in the Convention Parliament. He was appointed King’s Attorney at Chester in August 1660 and Prothonotary and Clerk of the Crown for Denbighshire and Montgomeryshire in July 1661. In 1670 he was appointed Second Justice of the Court of Great Sessions in Wales for Anglesey, Caernarfon and Merioneth. He was knighted on 13 April 1675. Leeswood Hall was built by Sir George Eryton in 1730.
Nicholas Dixon was an English miniaturist working during the time of Charles II, to whom he occupied the role of King’s Limner between 1673 to 78. Little is known about the artist prior to this appointment, but the similarity in his technique to Samuel Cooper has led historians to presume that he may have been trained in Cooper’s studio. Towards the final decades of his life, Dixon diversified his career by additionally dealing in paintings and with other ventures such as the organisation of a lottery of limned copies of Old Master paintings.
1] Country Life, 6th August 1943, pp. 244-247