William Sharp
English, 1749 - 1824
English engraver. He trained under the heraldic engraver B. Longmate (1738–93) and from 1771 at the Royal Academy Schools. He began as a writing engraver but came to notice with an engraving of a lion, Hector in the Tower, which he published in 1775. He worked on many book illustrations, although he made his name in 1782 with a large print of Alfred the Great Dividing his Loaf after Benjamin West, published by John Boydell. Sharp engraved many portraits, the best being Dr John Hunter (1788) after Joshua Reynolds. He completed Charles II Landing at Dover (1789) after West, which had been begun by William Woollett. Sharp’s major commissions were from two painters, to engrave two large plates of the siege of Gibraltar: the Sortie, after John Trumbull, was finished in 1799, but the other engraving, after John Singleton Copley, who had to pay Sharp £2000 on completion, took him 20 years, finally appearing in 1810. Sharp worked regularly for the leading publishers. He engraved three plates for Thomas Macklin’s Bible, including an admired plate of the Holy Family (1792) after Reynolds; three for Robert Bowyer’s History of England; and three for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery project (1792), including, at the painter’s insistence, King Lear after West. Sharp, who had firm ideas of the status and worth of line engraving and did not work in other media, was widely recognized in England and abroad as the finest English line engraver. He had radical political views, reflected in such prints as the Declaration of Rights (1782), designed by Thomas Stothard and dedicated to the Society for Constitutional Information, of which Sharp was a prominent member; he narrowly escaped indictment for high treason. He was also a follower of the millenarian Joanna Southcott.
David Alexander. "Sharp, William." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T078044 (accessed May 2, 2012).
Person TypeIndividual
