The Reverend John Rhudde (1704-1778), was vicar of Portesham and Weymouth and was great grandfather to Maria Bicknell who married the great landscape artist John Constable. The present portrait is quite similar to a known mezzotint in the National Portrait Gallery, London, engraved by William Dickson after a painting by Williams. Given the style and date it would appear that the artist William Williams (d.1797) is the painter in question and therefore highly likely to be the author of these portraits.

William Williams, (not to be confused with an American painter of the same name), was an itinerant painter whose best work seems to be small scale portraits which he undertook whilst travelling extensively across England. He is recorded a number of times in the North of England and then down at Bath in the 1780’s and then London.

Little is know of the Reverend’s wife Mary. As was common with country folk she is not necessarily dressed in the height of fashion and given the period her clothing is quite demure and lacking decoration as perhaps befitted the spouse of a serious clergyman.