Hendrik Frans de Cort

With Dr. Martin Moeller, Kunsthandel, Hamburg, by 2008,

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

Hendrik de Cort was born in Antwerp where he studied under Hendrik Josef Antonissen (1737-1794). He lived in Paris between 1776 and 1781 where he was appointed ‘Painter to the Prince de Condé’. At some point after this, but certainly by the end of the 1780s, he moved to London, where he established a strong reputation as a painter of the country seats of the landed gentry and aristocracy.

The present drawing is dated 1791 but despite de Cort’s inscription of 'Witham Park', he is more likely to be at Witham Place, an estate that lies between Colchester and London in the county of Essex, whose principal house was built by the Southcote family in the reign of Elizabeth I and whose park was redesigned by Capability Brown in the mid-eighteenth century. The tall tower seen on the horizon is probably that of St Nicholas’s Church, a predominately fourteenth-century structure.

At the time of de Cort’s visit, Witham Place was owned by the Stourton family but - in 1800 - they sold it to John Bullock, MP (1731-1801), whose family had lived at nearby Faulkbourne Hall since the early seventeenth century.