James Rivington Sr. (c. 1724-1802)

The sitter James Rivington was a publisher and bookseller who took over the London publishing house founded by his father, Charles Rivington. In 1760 Rivington immigrated to Philadelphia, opening bookstores there as well as in New York and Boston. He first supported the Tory cause and published newspapers attacking the Revolutionary movement, but his sympathies shifted to the side of independence in 1781. Susan, Rivington’s daughter, exhibited Cotes’s handsome portrait of her father at the American Academy of the Fine Arts in New York in 1824 and 1825, suggesting that Rivington may have brought it with him when he immigrated.

Francis Cotes’s assured, bravura handling of pastels and his hallmark appreciation for the luscious surface textures and colors of the sitter’s costume place this work among his finest in the medium. Known primarily as a portrait painter and pastelist, Cotes was the elder brother of the miniaturist Samuel Cotes. Beginning his career about 1748, when pastel was all the rage, Cotes worked in that medium almost exclusively until the early 1760s, when he turned increasingly to oil painting. Cotes maintained a fashionable London studio and attracted many major portrait commissions. Although his portraits do not achieve the psychological insight of, for example, Sir Joshua Reynolds, they have an intimate warmth lacking in Reynolds’s works. Cotes became an important figure in the London art world and was instrumental in setting up the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 after presenting its case to King George II.