Balthazar Nebot
English, 1700-1786
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Balthazar or Balthasar Nebot, was a painter active in England between 1729 and 1765.
Nebot is first recorded in London in 1729-30. He is generally assumed to have been be of Spanish birth or descent, but the details of his life are obscure. He married in London in 1729 or 1730, and there are various records of members of his family in the registers of St Paul's, Covent Garden. They include the burials of five of his children between 1731 and 1739, and of his wife Mary in 1742.
He was a painter of urban scenes and topographical landscapes, whose paintings of markets are considered to be close in style to those of the Dutch painter Peter Angelis who had also worked in Covent Garden. He painted several versions of a picture of the Piazza at Covent Garden, seen from the south-east: a version in the collection of the Tate Gallery is dated 1737. In them he included genre scenes featuring familiar local characters of the time. Ellis Waterhouse wrote that Nebot's figures "owe something to Hogarth, but are wholly lacking in satirical overtones". Nebot also made an etching of "Foolish Sam", a mentally handicapped man well known in Leicester Fields.