Tilly Kettle 1735-1786

three-quarter length, standing, wearing a grey suit, leaning on a pediment in an Indian landscape

Tilly Kettle was the first serious portrait painter to go to India.  He remained in India from 1769-76 where he made a highly successful living painting Nabobs and princes.  On stylistic grounds the work would seem to date to the mid 1770s, and the picture is close, in terms of composition, to the double portrait of Charles and John Sealey, signed and dated 1773.