Mr and Mrs Atherton

William Atherton, a wealthy woollen draper, was an Alderman of Preston and a close friend and political associate of the artist’s father. His patronage may have helped establish Devis’s career as a painter of small-scale group portraits in the north-west. The painting is a calculated mixture of solid domestic reality and invention: in actual fact the Atherton’s house overlooked Preston market square, not a landscape garden. The painting was once thought to date from just after the couple’s honeymoon (when Devis would have been still in his teens) but is now believed to have been made not long before William Atherton’s death in 1745.