Philip Mercier (1691 - 1760)

Philip Mercier

Philip Mercier (French: Philippe Mercier) was a French painter, draughtsman and printmaker, a leading representative of the early Rococo period, a student of Antoine Paine and follower of Antoine Watteau. Mercier grew up and studied in Berlin, but spent most of his artistic life in England; he also worked in France, Italy and Portugal.

His artistic legacy consists of about three hundred paintings, drawings and etchings: portraits and genre scenes. He was strongly influenced by his French and English contemporaries - Antoine Watteau, Jean-Simeon Chardin and William Hogarth — and exercised a marked influence on English Georgian painting as one of the creators of a variant of the informal group portrait - the so-called "conversation scene.