Francis Cotes

Francis Cotes was born in London on 20 May 1726, the eldest son of Robert Cotes, an apothecary. Working from his father's premises on Cork Street gave the young Cotes an informal grounding in chemistry that he later put to use mixing pigments for pastel. Around 1741 to 1742, at about age fifteen, he entered the studio of the portrait painter and pastellist George Knapton, where he trained in oil painting and crayon drawing. No formal school or degree is documented for him; his education was the studio apprenticeship typical of the period.

By the 1760s Cotes had built one of the busiest portrait practices in London, working in both oil and pastel for a fashionable clientele among the aristocracy and gentry. Contemporary and later commentators placed him just below Reynolds and Gainsborough in reputation. In 1760 he showed at the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Artists of Great Britain, and in 1768 he was a founder member of the Royal Academy of Arts, later serving on its council. He exhibited eighteen portraits across the Academy's first two exhibitions, in 1769 and 1770, including portraits of the Dukes of Gloucester and Cumberland.

Cotes fell ill, reportedly with kidney or gallstones, and died after drinking a soap-based potion he had taken in hopes of a cure, a poisoning that major institutional sources including Art UK, the Royal Academy, and the UK Government Art Collection attribute directly as his cause of death. He died at Richmond, Surrey, and was buried at St Mary Magdalene, Richmond. Most institutional and specialist sources, along with a contemporary notice in the Middlesex Journal, date his death to Thursday, 19 July 1770; some general reference works instead give 16 July 1770. He was 44 years old.

Cotes was recognized in his own time as a major rival to Reynolds and Gainsborough; Art UK describes him as, for a few years in the 1760s, their "only serious rival," and other reference sources similarly rank him as the most important fashionable London portrait painter of the decade after those two. Critics have long noted a divide in his output: his pastel portraits, which drew on continental influences including Rosalba Carriera and Jean-Etienne Liotard, are generally regarded as his most original contribution, while his oil paintings are viewed as more conventional.

Cotes's market sits almost entirely in the Old Master and British portraiture category rather than the contemporary market. The best-documented high price for his work is Portrait of William Earle Welby and Penelope, playing chess, which sold for GBP 457,250 (roughly USD 725,000 at the time) at Christie's London on 3 July 2012; this figure comes from an auction-price compilation citing the Christie's catalogue rather than a primary auction-house record, so it is presented here with appropriate caution. A second work, Portrait of Master Smith with a kite, reportedly sold for GBP 422,500 at Christie's London on 8 July 2014, a figure independently corroborated by a separate auction database. Other recorded results are far lower, including a USD 9,375 sale at Heritage Auctions in 2018, illustrating a wide range depending on subject, condition, and attribution. His work is traded through Old Master dealers rather than a modern gallery or estate, with London dealer Sphinx Fine Art among those currently offering pieces attributed to him, and works are also periodically offered under "circle of" or "attributed to" designations at major houses, which affects both pricing and the diligence required of buyers.

Because no catalogue raisonne exists for Cotes, and because his surviving output spans both signed autograph paintings and studio or "circle of" versions, provenance and museum documentation carry outsized weight in establishing attribution. Public auction data for his work is thin and unevenly sourced, so collectors should treat any single reported sale price with caution rather than as an established benchmark. Older records and some dealer listings also use the variant spelling "Coates, Francis" for the same artist, which is worth checking when searching auction archives or provenance chains.