Footnotes

Provenance
Jacob Wilkinson (c.1722-1799) presumably acquired the paintings from the artist
Thomas Wilkinson (1762 - 1837), son of the above
Jane Anne Brymer (1804-1870), daughter of the above
William Ernest Brymer (1840-1909) of Ilsington House
Wilfred John Brymer (1883-1957), son of the above
Constance Mary Brymer (1885-1963), sister of the above
John Hanway Parr Brymer (1913-2005), nephew of the above, and by descent to the present owners

Exhibited
London, Royal Academy, 1780 (Girl with Water-cresses)

Literature
M. Webster, Johan Zoffany, London, 1976, exh. cat., pp.70-1, under cat. nos. 89 and 90 (as present whereabouts unknown)
M. Postle, Angels & Urchins, The Fancy Picture in 18th-Century British Art, London, 1998, p.17, The Watercress Girl; p.18, The Flower Girl, ill., fig. 36; pp.79-80 under cat.no. 57, The Watercress Girl (the mezzotint)
P. Treadwell, Johan Zoffany, Artist and adventurer, London, 2006, pp.391-2, ill, pl.1 and 2
P. Treadwell, Johan Zoffany, Artist and adventurer, London, 2009, pp.313-16, ill. pp.312, 314
M. Webster, John Zoffany, New Haven and London, 2011, pp.399-401
M. Postle (ed.), Johan Zoffany RA Society Observed, New Haven and London, 2011, p.34, ill., fig. 28, p.228, under cat.no.52

Engraved
John Raphael Smith, 1780, mezzotint (The Watercress Girl)
John Young, 1785, mezzotint (The Flower Girl and The Watercress Girl)


John Raphael Smith's mezzotint of 1780 identifies the model for The Watercress Girl as a girl by the name of Jane Wallis. She may have been a relative of Albany Wallis (circa 1713-1800), lawyer and good friend to the actor David Garrick, and as Zoffany was a close friend of Garrick it supports this possibility. Martin Postle suggests alternatively that she may in fact be the actress Tryphosa Jane Wallis, who trod the boards at Covent Garden from 1789, but who was known to have been working in Dublin and London as a child actress. Zoffany's model is indeed very young, as well as being very pretty, and when Girl with Water-cresses was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780 a critic wrote in A Candid Review of the Exhibition that 'The artist has been very fortunate in a choice of a most beautiful Girl for his subject and he has copied nature so exactly, that it is not easy to determine whether it is real life or a painting'.

This pair of paintings must have been painted soon after Zoffany's return from Italy where he had spent six years from 1773-79, the last of which was in Parma; back in London he took a townhouse in Albermarle Street and rented a rural retreat at Strand on the Green. Taste in London had changed in the years since he left, public taste embracing 'fancy' pictures, a type of genre painting that came from France and the Low Countries which depicted low-life figures in a somewhat sanitised and romanticised way. Zoffany will also have seen works by North Italian genre painters such as Giacomo Ceruti and Giacomo Francesco Cipper while he was in Parma and his Florentine fruit stall in Tate Britain and La Scartocchia now in the Pinacoteca di Parma (both painted in the late 1770s) reflect their somewhat prettified realism. As an acclaimed painter of portraits and conversation pieces he was responding to this shift in taste when he exhibited Girl with Water Cresses at the Royal Academy in 1780. He was also no doubt demonstrating his versatility as an artist, as one of the other two paintings he exhibited at the Academy that year was The Tribuna of the Uffizi now in the Royal Collection Trust. Why he exhibited only one of the present pair is not known, but they were presumably painted more or less contemporaneously.

The atmosphere in Britain was ripe for the burgeoning market in fancy pictures in the late 18th Century; the slow decline of the court coincided with the rise of private enterprise, and pleasure became a focus of society at the cost of morality. Trades people, maids and street vendors selling consumable goods became typical subjects for artists. The majority of these subjects were women and there was often an intentional insinuation by the artist that these alluring girls were proffering more than just the goods in their baskets. In truth this notion had more to do with fantasy than reality, since as Martin Postle observed in his book Angels and Urchins, 'the back-breaking labour of selling perishable goods on the streets of London left little time for the average street-trader to indulge in sex with her customers'. The appeal of fancy pictures was as strong with the middle classes as it was with the aristocracy, and the diffusion of these images by way of prints – such as the mezzotints of the present works published by Smith in 1780 and Young in 1785 - made them accessible to a very wide public.

We know from the inscription on Young's 1785 mezzotints of the paintings that their owner at that date was Jacob Wilkinson, one of Zoffany's most significant supporters. Wilkinson was a successful businessman, originally from Berwick-upon-Tweed, who made his fortune as a merchant in London and subsequently became MP for Berwick in 1774. From 1782-3 he was a Director of the East India Company and it was he who sponsored Zoffany's application to travel to India; he sailed there in 1783 and remained there for a number of years. Wilkinson commissioned Zoffany to paint his portrait which now hangs at Chequers: it shows a man of both economic and physical substance whose confident gaze is directed out of the picture to the left rather than at the viewer.

Given the close relationship between Zoffany and Wilkinson we can surmise that The Flower Girl and The Watercress Girl were sold to him direct from the studio. On Wilkinson's death they passed to his son and executor Thomas and descended in the family to the present owners. They have not been shown in public during that period although Manners and Williamson erroneously recorded them as having been exhibited in Paris in 1908 and 1909, lent by Thomas Baring (see V. Manners and G.C. Williamson, John Zoffany, R.A., his Life and Works, London, 1920, pp.229, 283. These were presumably copies, one having appeared on the market in 1988 at Sotheby's (17 February, lot 252) with the Baring provenance and sold as 'Studio of Zoffany'.