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Drawings by Philippe Mercier are rare; only around sixteen can be securely identified and all of them are compositional studies that relate to surviving paintings. This drawing relates to Mercier’s ambitious and emblematic conversation piece The Shutz Family and their Friends on a Terrace (1725; oil on canvas; Tate Britain). Mercier was born in Berlin to parents of French extraction and trained there under the French painter Antoine Pesne. In 1716 he left the service of Frederick I of Prussia and moved to London where Frederick’s brother, the former Elector of Hanover, now reigned as George I. The Shutz family was typical of Mercier's early patrons in London: German émigrés from Hanover with positions of prominence at the new English court. In this drawing, a preparatory study for the seated woman on the far left of the painting, Mercier focuses on the woman’s dress, exploring especially the play of light across its satin surfaces with the result that the model’s head required only cursory treatment. Like all Mercier’s drawings it is executed principally in red chalk in the manner of Jean Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) an artist close to Pesne and whom Mercier is said to have met in Paris and would have certainly met in London when the ailing Watteau spent a year there from the autumn of 1719 seeking treatment from Dr. Richard Mead. Mercier was influential in disseminating the latest French rococo taste in England, not only publishing a set of etchings after Watteau in 1725 but successfully introducing the fête galante genre to English patrons and adapting its conventions to suit their demand for conversation pieces.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2014