Object Description
Watercolour on vellum. Gilt metal frame.
Mathew Snelling was an English Miniature painter whose style heavily influenced Thomas Flatman. Working in London during the mid-seventeenth century, Snelling held close circle with some of the most important miniaturists of his day including Samuel Cooper, Richard Gibson and Mary Beale. Many of Snelling’s limning techniques may have been gleaned from Cooper, who was ten years his senior. The connection between the two men goes back to the earlier part of Cooper’s career, when he drew the young man in 1644 (whereabouts unknown). Snelling may have also earned a living as an artist’s supplier, as there is a reference in one of Vertue’s notebooks to him supplying ‘parcels of Pink’ to Mary Beale in 1654 and 1658. Via his family, he certainly knew the Beales well and shared East Anglian connections with them and Nathaniel Thach.
The present miniature appears to relate, particularly in the face, to a portrait of Charles, circa 1658, by an anonymous artist, now at Castlemains, Douglas, Lanarkshire, and originally in the collection of the Earl of Clarendon. This full-length portrait was also the inspiration for the miniature of Charles by Richard Gibson, dated circa 1660 and sold at Bonhams, 21st November 1996, lot 12. Interestingly, one of Snelling’s works was included in Michael Rosse’s sale of 1723 and it suggests that he was acquainted with the Gibson and Rosse families and therefore privy to the central hub of court artists and artisans clustered in London by the middle of the seventeenth century.