Thomas Stothard
Born London, 17 Aug 1755; died London, 27 April 1834.
English illustrator, painter and designer. He was one of the most popular, prolific and successful artists of his time and was highly regarded by such contemporaries as Thomas Lawrence and Walter Scott. He was the son of a prosperous publican and completed his apprenticeship as a silk weaver (1770–77), before studying at the Royal Academy, London (1777–c. 1783). From the beginning of his career, book illustration was his main area of activity. His earliest surviving works are in the decorative Rococo mode, but he soon adopted the more idealistic Neo-classicism of John Hamilton Mortimer and James Barry. Together with his friends and near contemporaries, William Blake and John Flaxman, Stothard developed an austere, linear style of draughtsmanship. This is more pronounced in such drawings as Boadicea Inspiring the Britons against the Romans (c. 1780; Boston, MA, Pub. Lib.) than in his published illustrations, where the call for realism was stronger.
Thomas Stothard’s illustrations have been considered less visionary than Blake’s and less primitive than Flaxman’s. They were, however, well attuned to contemporary taste and broke new ground in their realism, elegance and ‘sensibility’. The last was a quality that was prized in the 18th century but that has more recently been equated with sentimentality—to Stothard’s detriment. Such was his reputation up to the early 20th century, however, that A. C. Coxhead could claim that there were many to whom Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa ‘would be but a name, had they not been led to study it by the thirty-four matchless illustrations’ (Coxhead, 1906, p. 70) by Stothard (1784). Similarly, in response to the publication of Samuel Rogers’s Italy (1830), illustrated by Stothard and J. M. W. Turner, William Wordsworth commented: ‘The Plates made it sell, for in the Poetry there’s nothing—absolutely nothing’. Other illustrations by Stothard include those to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1788–9), Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1792), Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1798) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1798).
Stothard contributed history paintings to such large-scale patronage schemes as John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, Thomas Macklin’s Poets’ Gallery and Robert Bowyer’s Historic Gallery. His most important commission was for three wall paintings for the staircase of Burghley House, Cambs: Orpheus and Eurydice, the Banquet of Cleopatra and the Horrors of War (1799–1803). These works reflect the artist’s admiration for the rich colours and swirling figures of Rubens, as does Parnassus (1822), painted inside the dome of the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, where austere Neo-classicism is tempered by sumptuous colour. Stothard also painted prolifically, on a smaller scale, fête champêtre compositions closely modelled on those of Watteau; these include naturalistic watercolour landscapes and historical genre scenes. In the last category belongs his most celebrated painting, the Pilgrimage to Canterbury (1806), a scene from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. With its bright colours, historical authenticity and realism, it anticipates the works of the Pre-Raphaelites. Stothard’s paintings probably contributed more to his academic success than did his book illustrations, which, while greatly admired, were considered to be of a lowly genre. In 1791 he was elected ARA, in 1794 RA and in 1812 he was appointed as the Royal Academy’s librarian.
Besides illustrations, Stothard designed vignettes, roundels and tailpieces for books; invitation cards, banknotes and theatre tickets; Wedgwood jasperware reliefs; silverwork, including the Wellington Shield (1814; London, Apsley House), the relief figures of which he himself modelled; and monumental sculpture. The design of Francis Chantrey’s best-known funerary monument, the ‘Sleeping Children’ (1817; Lichfield Cathedral), has been attributed to Stothard. His career reveals the wide possibilities open to artists at the beginning of the industrial and consumer revolutions and is ripe for re-evaluation.
Mark Stocker and Paul Binski. "Stothard." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T081674pg1 (accessed May 2, 2012).
