Ashfield remains a somewhat mysterious figure as few biographical details are known about him. He is said to have trained under the portrait painter John Michael Wright and began his career by painting copies after Lely, Van Dyck and others. David Blayney Brown writes about him: 'Although Lely... and a school of followers drew in coloured chalks, Ashfield and his gifted pupil Luttrell worked chiefly as pastellists and raised the medium to a new distinction. They used richer, denser colours and applied them very thickly so that their work ceases to look like drawing but takes on something of the power and finish of oil painting; thus Bainbridge Buckeridge wrote of Ashfield: "there is no subject which can be express'd by oil, but the crayons can effect it with equal force and beauty". Ashfield could achieve a most sensitive likeness, and considerable realism in describing the texture of hair or clothing, which shows him to have studied painting as well as the more restricted convention of chalk drawing' (Early English Drawings from the Ashmolean Museum, exh. cat., Morton Morris and Co., 1983, no.13).
Nothing is known of the sitter.
We are grateful to Sir Oliver Millar for suggesting an alternative attribution to John Michael Wright (1617-1694).