Portrait enamel of Catherine Tracy (1694-1722) in open blue silk day-gown with lace underdress, her long fair hair plaited and upswept and falling over her left shoulder

CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH ZINCKE

(c.1683-1767)

Portrait enamel of Catherine Tracy (1694-1722) in open blue silk day-gown with lace underdress, her long fair hair plaited and upswept and falling over her left shoulder

Enamel on copper
Gold frame with reeded border, the reverse with sitter's cipher on blue enamel ground and sitter's dates on white ground within green enamelled foliate border and blue and turquoise enamelled surmount
Oval, 46 mm (1 ³/₄ inches) high

SOLD

“It has been suggested that the reverse of the frame of the present lot was also designed by Christian Friedrich Zincke as he was apprenticed to his father, a goldsmith…”

Although the sitter in this enamel portrait was named as Catherine Tracy by the family descendants, it has been difficult to trace the name in the ancestral records. The reverse of the frame, enamelled with a complex design to record the sitter’s early death at the age of twenty-eight, gives a date of 13th June 1722. The closest link in the burial books is recorded at Stanway, Gloucestershire, where the seat of the Tracy family was Stanway House.

The sitter here was likely presumed to be Catherine (the linked ‘C’ in the cipher suggesting this as a first name), eldest of nine daughters of Sir Anthony Keck (1639-95). Catherine married, first, Ferdinando Tracy of Stanway House in Gloucestershire, and secondly, Edward Chute of the Vine, Hampshire. Catherine’s dates are, however, recorded as – and this portrait may be of her daughter, another Catherine, her dates unrecorded.

By her first marriage she had two sons, John and Anthony. The Jacobean manor of Stanway was likely the home of the present sitter, as the family seem to have had some wealth in the 1720s, with John Tracey employing Charles Bridgeman to create the most extraordinary water garden, fed by a cascade.

John Tracy's eldest son Robert, the owner of Stanway from 1735-1767 embellished it by employing Thomas Wright of Durham to layout serpentine paths up the hillside and build the pyramid over the head of the cascade, with a banqueting house. It is now the home of James Donald Charteris, 13th Earl of Wemyss and 9th Earl of March.

It has been suggested that the reverse of the frame of the present lot was also designed by Christian Friedrich Zincke as he was apprenticed to his father, a goldsmith.

By direct family descent;
The property of a Gentleman, Christie’s, London, Important Gold Boxes and Portrait Miniatures, 6 December 2005, lot 74 (price realised £6,600);
Private Collection, UK.

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