Pastel Portrait By Nathaniel Bermingham.

A typically fine pastel portrait by Nathaniel Bermingham, executed in pastel and within a fine wooden frame, carved and gilded, likely original to the work.

Bermingham’s work is most often attributed to other hands; he rarely if ever, signs his pastels. He was born in Ireland, Dublin, probably in 1712, and was drowned at Chelsea, aged 70, towards the end of 1779. He began his working life apprenticed to a Dublin herald painter, John Seymour, and was to become a paper cutter, the skill used to create coats of arms, examples sold at both Christies and Sothebys early in the present century.

An “owl in cut paper” was in the Strawberry Hill sale of 1842 and Walpole also owned one of Nathaniel’s fables from Aesop.

On coming to London in around 1744, his works were sold from the print shop of Mrs Laetitia Pilkington, who considered the artist “a most ugly, squinting, mean-looking fellow”. Prosperity initially eluded our man; his marriage in 1749 to Catherine Roberts, widow, under the “Rules of the Fleet” suggesting he was in prison, very likely for debt. However, by 1758 he is recorded as a painter of St. Martin-in-the Fields, taking on one Will Sharpe as apprentice and in 1763 Bermingham advertised in Mortimer’s London Directory as working from Great Queen Street as “an improver of a curious art of cutting out portraits and Coats of Arms in Vellum, with the point of a pen-knife’ and in 1769 was “so well known to several of the Royal Family, nobility, gentry and artists of these kingdoms”. Initially working in monochrome, at some stage he joined two of his skills to produce portraits in pastel colours, their profile sharply delineated by cutting around and drop mounting onto a background shaded in dark pastel. (As in this case).

Done circa 1775. The sitter unidentified.

Incorrectly attributed in pen to the reverse “R. Downman’.

12 1/4 in x 10 3/8 in