John Downman
Born Ruabon, N. Wales, 1750; died Wrexham, 24 Dec 1824.
English painter and draughtsman. He became a pupil of Benjamin West in 1768 and entered the Royal Academy Schools, London, the following year. In 1770 and 1772 he exhibited portraits at the Royal Academy and showed his first subject picture in 1773. He left for a period of study in Italy and was in Rome with Joseph Wright of Derby from 1773 to 1774. When he next exhibited at the Royal Academy (1777) he was living in Cambridge, but from 1778 to 1804 his considerable annual contribution to the Academy exhibitions was sent from various London addresses. His very popular small portraits were often shown in groups of six or nine. His occasional subject pictures were based on themes from mythology, Classical history, poetry and the theatre. They included a scene from As You Like It (untraced) painted for John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. Downman became ARA in 1795 and travelled widely in later life, marrying in Exeter in 1806 and sending works to the Royal Academy (1805–12 and 1816–19) from all over the country.
Downman’s oil portraits are attractive, crisp and neat in the manner of similar work by Francis Wheatley, but his portrait drawings are much more distinctive. The technique of black chalk and stumping on very fine paper with flesh tints added in red chalk and watercolour is complemented by a light touch and a fine sense of style, as in George John Spencer, Viscount Althorp (1777; Cambridge, Fitzwilliam). Downman retained the studies for many of his finished drawings from the mid-1770s until his death and had them bound in over 20 albums of varying sizes (several in London, BM, and Cambridge, Fitzwilliam). The pretty elegance of the portrait drawings becomes cloyingly effeminate in many of Downman’s subject pictures, although some, such as The Sybarite (pencil, black chalk, watercolour and gouache, 1805; London, V&A), are almost startlingly glossy.
Geoffrey Ashton. "Downman, John." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T023524 (accessed May 1, 2012).
