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Samuel Pepys's First Portrait Painter: Daniel Savile and Portraiture for the Middling Sort in Restoration London

In 1661, Samuel pepys arranged for his portrait to be painted for the first time. In his diary pepys refers to the painter only as ‘Mr Savill’. Using a range of archival sources, this Note conclusively identifies him as Daniel Savile, a successful City of London artist whose career has not previously been recognised. Savile catered to those men and women who (like pepys in the early 1660s) could not afford the services of a ‘great’ painter such as peter Lely or Samuel Cooper. Savile’s interactions with pepys offer insights into the pleasures and challenges of portrait commissioning in the Restoration. The records of Savile’s business also reveal that that he was responsible for training a significant proportion of the young women apprenticed to the painter-Stainers’ Company—an area of female employment about which little is known. The evidence about Savile’s studio allows us to deduce the potential benefits of such apprenticeship arrangements for the young women, for their employers, and for sitters. Together pepys’s diary and the records of Savile’s life illuminate the ways that painters and sitters from the middling sort negotiated the artistic culture of seventeenth-century London.