Old portrait painting c.1817 - Please date J J Cumming and Wife

[Treetotal]

I think this is a charming and very well executed piece of artwork...the perspective is very good and I think the gent's jacket is giving him a larger than life, upper body look and he was probably quite tall...the artist draws and paints what they see which often doesn't conform to rules. It looks like a pastel drawing most likely using Ingres paper as the support. I have done a version of what I think it may have looked like minus the water damage.
 
If I were the owner of this piece backed up with oral history that has passed down through the generations ...then I would claim this pair as my Ancestors and enjoy it 
Carol

[Ruskie]

I think that surprisingly the faces are well drawn (surprising because faces are often something that amateurs struggle with), but the proportions of the bodies, particularly the man's legs, are not so good.  It's as though the artist was running out of paper and had to foreshorten the bottom half of the figures as s/he drew to squeeze them onto the page. 

It seems an unusual pose with the couple facing each other.

(Nice clean up and colour Carol