James Northcote
Born Plymouth, Devon, 22 Oct 1746; died London, 13 July 1831.
English painter and writer. He was largely self-taught before his arrival in London in 1771, when he entered the Royal Academy Schools and joined Joshua Reynolds as a pupil and assistant, remaining with Reynolds until 1776. From 1773 to 1776 he exhibited portraits at the Royal Academy, for example Miss Chatfield as St Catherine (1774; priv. col., photograph London, Mellon Cent.). For much of Northcote’s career his paintings depended heavily on Reynolds’s style, and while his intellect was first-rate, his artistic talent did not match that of his master. He considered himself something of an authority on his fellow Devonian, publishing his valuable Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1813, the year of the Reynolds exhibition at the British Institution.
After an interval painting portraits in Plymouth, in 1777 Northcote travelled to Italy, where he was elected to the Accademia Imperiale in Florence, the Accademia dei Forli in Rome and the Accademia Etrusca in Cortona. He was also invited to donate a Self-portrait (1778) to the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (in situ). He returned to England in 1780, determined to produce history paintings. He began, however, by establishing himself as a portrait painter, exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy from 1781. Distinguished by careful drawing and restrained handling and use of colour, his best portraits of this period are not elaborate.
Northcote, who was elected ARA in 1786 and RA in 1787, expanded his oeuvre during the 1780s to include subject pictures and history paintings. From 1786 he produced nine paintings for John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery; these include the Meeting of Edward V and his Brother (1786; Petworth House, W. Sussex, NT), the Entry of Richard II and Bolingbroke into London (1793; Exeter, Royal Albert Mem. Mus.) and the Burying of the Two Young Princes in the Tower (priv. col., photograph London, Mellon Cent.), the last of which is blatantly derived from Caravaggio’s Deposition (Rome, Pin. Vaticana). Northcote also executed paintings for Robert Bowyer’s edition of David Hume’s History of England (e.g. Lady Jane Grey at Prayer, 1792; sold London, Christie’s, 16 Nov 1962, lot 88) and for Woodmason’s edition of Shakespeare (e.g. Timon of Athens, 1792; untraced). All were meticulously researched, with visual quotations from antiquity and the Old Masters, but they are largely lacking in life. The failure of Boydell’s scheme in 1803 seriously affected Northcote’s market for such pictures, but he continued to paint ambitious historical scenes, and late works, such as the Marriage of the Duke of York to Lady Anne Mowbray (1820; ex-Mrs John Bastard priv. col., Kitley House, Devon), were painted in a very similar manner to his first Boydell pictures.
In 1796 Northcote exhibited a series of pictures entitled Diligence and Dissipation, ten morally instructive scenes illustrating the careers of a ‘modest’ and a ‘wanton’ servant girl; the series emulates similar groups by William Hogarth or Joseph Highmore’s scenes illustrating Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (e.g. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam). Each picture is augmented by a verse taken from the Book of Proverbs (inscribed on the back of the canvas); the engravings of each of these pictures also carry the appropriate verse. Stylistically these paintings, with their meagre and graceless figures, do not resemble Northcote’s earlier fashionable genre scenes, and they were probably painted as his interpretation of Hogarth’s expressive style, which he was unable to master. Northcote was also active in the genre of animal painting, examples of which include the Vulture and Snake (version, 1798; Dunrobin Castle, Highland) and the large Lion Hunt (exh. RA 1813; Petworth House, W. Sussex, NT), modelled on similar works by Frans Snyders, and the portrait of the water-spaniel Jupiter (c. 1806; sold London, Sotheby’s, 19 Nov 1986, lot 122). The last two were painted for his patron Sir John Fleming Leicester, on the formation of whose gallery of contemporary British art Northcote advised. His portraits painted after Reynolds’s death, such as William Wilberforce (1803; sold London, Sotheby’s, 17 Nov 1971, lot 70) and John Ruskin as a Boy (1822; London, N.P.G.), show slightly more independent character.
Northcote’s career as a published writer began in 1807 when he contributed some essays on current artistic topics to The Artist, a weekly periodical edited by Prince Hoare (ii). His life of Reynolds began as a short memoir for John Britton’s The Fine Arts of the English School (1812). His Life of Titian (1830) represents the culmination of a life-long study of that artist. However, the most useful of Northcote’s thoughts on art are those collected by William Hazlitt (1830) and James Ward (see Fletcher, 1901), which are indispensable sources for historians of English art from the age of Reynolds to the death of Thomas Lawrence. In these Northcote’s musings on his own theories and practice of art are intermingled with recollections of his contemporaries. Both collections are candid, anecdotal and full of the character that earned Northcote a reputation among his colleagues for his good companionship.
John Wilson. "Northcote, James." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T062779 (accessed May 1, 2012).
