Footnotes

Provenance
Sir William Young, 1st Baronet (1725-1788)
Sir William Young, 2nd Baronet (1750-1815)
Sir William Lawrence Young, 3rd Baronet (1778-1824)
Sir William Lawrence Young, 4th Baronet (1806-1842)
Sir William Norris Young, 5th Baronet (1833-1854)
Sir George John Young, 6th Baronet (1835-1854)
Sir Charles Lawrence Young, 7th Baronet (1839-1887)
Sir William Lawrence Young, 8th Baronet (1864-1921)
Sir Charles Alban Young, 9th Baronet (1865-1944), and by descent to the present owners

Exhibited
London, National Portrait Gallery, Johan Zoffany 1733-1810, 14 January-27 March 1977, cat. no. 40
London, National Portrait Gallery, long term loan 1977-1985

Literature
M. Webster, Johan Zoffany 1733-1810, London, 1976, exh. cat., cat. no. 40, p. 42
P. Treadwell, Johan Zoffany Artist and adventurer, London, 2006, p. 203
P. Treadwell, Johan Zoffany Artist and adventurer, London, 2009, p.155
M. Webster, Johan Zoffany, New Haven and London, 2011, p.163
M. Postle (ed.), Johan Zoffany RA, Society Observed, New Haven and London, 2011, exh. cat., pp.114, 123,
A. Kidson, Earlier British Paintings in the Walker Art Gallery and at Sudley House, Liverpool, 2012, pp.300-1, fig. 125

In this intimate double portrait William Young, who was around 17 or 18 at the time, is shown sitting on a parapet with his favourite sister Mary who was about ten years his junior. Zoffany gives a sense of the affection between them in the pose, with William leaning in towards his sister as she rests her elbow on his shoulder. The application of paint is fluent and liquid, although as a preliminary sketch this piece is highly finished; nevertheless there are numerous pentiments where Zoffany has reconsidered and corrected certain details.

Mary (c.1759-1821) married the Rev. George Sewell of Byfleet, Surrey and became a published poet of some note. After her husband's death she brought out a collection of her writing simply titled Poems, the subscribers to which included royalty and a number of well-known figures of the day. Unsurprisingly for the time there are more extensive records of William's life (1749-1815). He left Eton in 1767, probably the same year that Zoffany painted the present sketch, and Benjamin West was commissioned to paint his leaving portrait. After completing his education at Oxford he went on the Grand Tour from 1771-3. Whilst in Rome he met Charles Townley (who Zoffany was to portray some ten years later in his impressive painting of Townley in his library in Park Street); William Young and Townley travelled together to Apulia and Calabria after which William continued on to Sicily and Malta with the Scottish artist John Brown. William himself was a talented artist and the journal of his travels that he printed whilst in Palermo was illustrated with his own watercolours. On his return to England he became a Member of Parliament, first for St Mawes (1784-1806) and then for Buckingham (1806-7). He was appointed Governor of Tobago in 1807 and spent the last years of his life there, having inherited his father's title and lands in the West Indies in 1788. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and in 1793 was elected into the Society of Dilettanti. He was married twice, first to Sarah Lawrence (in 1777) and then to Barbara Talbot (in 1793).

Note on lots 60 and 61
The two studies offered in the present sale are related to Zoffany's most ambitious conversation piece of the 1760s, his painting of The Family of Sir William Young now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. The finished portrait contains eleven family members together with John Brook, their servant, and a horse and dog, arranged into three distinct groups.  Given the complexity of the composition and the number of sitters involved one can understand why Zoffany chose to take the unusual step of making preliminary studies  of the lateral groups so that he could work out their configuration before embarking on the considerable challenge of painting the full composition.  

With the benefit of seeing them without the thick plate glass that has covered them since 1977 when they were loaned to the National Portrait Gallery, certain elements are now visible that indicate they are preliminary studies rather than replicas taken from the finished painting, as was once suggested. The lively, liquid brushwork so characteristic of sketches and the numerous pentiments visible in both works suggest Zoffany was developing his ideas as he worked; and there is further confirmation of this in the slim, vertical strip of canvas which is an original addition to the right edge of the painting of William and Mary. The toe of William's shoe extends onto this strip showing that Zoffany required more space than he had initially estimated in order to accommodate his idea for William's outstretched leg. 

Overall there are a number of differences between these two studies and the finished painting which in general show as improvements, as Alex Kidson points out in his entry in the Walker Art Gallery catalogue, and which he believes confirm the studies are part of Zoffany's working process and predate the Walker portrait (A. Kidson, Earlier British Paintings in the Walker Art Gallery and at Sudley House,, 2012, pp.300-1).  For instance John, the smallest brother sitting on the horse, has a more successful pose in the Walker portrait as well as acquiring a green costume which creates a better chromatic contrast to the clothes of those around him, and Mary on the far right is given a yellow dress which echoes the gold satin worn by Harry standing on the opposite side of the composition.  Zoffany has added a drawing instrument into Mary's proper left hand in the Walker painting which makes more sense of the sheet of paper in her lap, and William's foot rests on a staircase as opposed to the slightly ambiguous ledge shown here in the study.  The sky has been altered in the Walker painting to better dramatic effect, with dark clouds offsetting Brook's head on the far left. Another significant point is that the two studies are on a slightly different scale from each other making it unlikely they can have been extracted from the same finished painting. The logical conclusion is therefore that these are preliminary studies, albeit highly finished ones, used by Zoffany to formulate his compositional ideas before he embarked on the large and complex conversation piece commissioned by William Young.

Young was from a wealthy family who owned land in Antigua where he grew up, and he divided his time between his Wiltshire estate and his property in the West Indies.  He was widowed shortly after his first marriage and married his second wife, Elizabeth Taylor (1729-1801), in 1747; the couple had nine children all of whom are portrayed in  Zoffany's Walker Art Gallery painting.  The Youngs were passionate about music and were themselves talented musicians, they also loved the theatre and putting on plays and were friendly with the actor David Garrick.  It is likely that it was Garrick who introduced them to Zoffany as he was one of the artist's most important patrons in the latter's early years in London. Zoffany had arrived in London in 1760 from Germany and in the ensuing years he was to become one of the most significant society portraitists in England.  He has shown the Youngs in Vandyke costume (loosely based on the style of the 17th century), which reflects a fashionable trend in portraiture at the time but it is also a nod to the Youngs' enthusiasm for masquerade. They are depicted enjoying their favourite activities, and they show no awareness of us as spectators, interacting with each other quite unselfconsciously as though they were not being observed.  This novel device of showing his sitters absorbed in each other rather than in us is something we also see in Zoffany's theatrical paintings, but applied to portraiture it was a highly successful departure from the normal practice of the day; it gives his conversation pieces a naturalism that belies their carefully-staged format.

We know that William Young was in England in 1767-8, when he bought the Elizabethan manor house of Delaford near Iver in Buckinghamshire, providing a likely opportunity for the painting of the Walker Art Gallery portrait and therefore the present studies; the Youngs' smallest  son, John (on the horse), who appears to be no more than six or seven in the portrait, was christened in 1761 which would support this dating. It is likely that Young commissioned the portrait to celebrate the acquisition of his new estate, and possibly to mark his appointment as Lieutenant-Governor of Dominica (1768). His baronetcy was conferred in 1769 which is probably a little too late in date to provide a reason for the commission.