Thomas Stothard, RI (1755-1834)
Thomas Stothard was the most successful illustrator, and one of the most foremost history painters, of his time.
Thomas Stothard was born at the Black Horse Inn, Long Acre, London on 17 August 1755, the only child of a prosperous publican from Yorkshire. At the age of five, he was sent away, first to an uncle at Acomb, near York, and then to a boarding school in Ilford, Essex.
On the death of his father in 1770, Stothard returned to London and took up an apprenticeship with the silk weaver, John Vansommer of Spital Square. When his master died in 1774, he completed the final three years of his apprenticeship with his wife, Ann Vansommer. It seems that he then embarked on a trip to North Wales, as he exhibited two views of Caernarfon, as well as a scene from Homer, at the Society of Arts in 1777. Though beginning a career as a silk pattern designer, he entered the Royal Academy Schools at the end of that year.
In 1779, while still a student, Stothard began to work as an illustrator, by contributing to the Town and Country Magazine, Harrison’s Novelists
Magazines (1780-86) and Bell’s British Poets (1782-83).
A friend of fellow students William Blake and John Flaxman, he shared their economical approach to draughtsmanship, though he was neither as visionary as the former or as austere as the latter. Instead, he developed an elegant style through which he was able to tease out the subtleties of human sentiment, in keeping with the contemporary concept of ‘sensibility’. As a result, he became an ideal illustrator of such novels as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe (1784) and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1792). His other important sets of illustrations include Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1790), and Samuel Rogers’ Italy (1830), produced in collaboration with J M W Turner.
Stothard developed a parallel career as a painter and designer, spurred on by his election to the membership of the Royal Academy of Arts
(ARA 1791, RA 1794, Librarian to the Royal Academy 1812-34). He undertook important decorative commissions, painting the staircase at
Burghley House, Cambridgeshire (1799-1803) and the cupola of the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh (1822), and winning the competition for the design of the Wellington Shield (1814). He also produced landscapes and scenes of historical genre, as exemplified by his most celebrated canvas, the Chaucerian subject Pilgrimage to Canterbury (1806, Tate), which was commissioned by Robert Cromek, the engraver.
About 1805, he was employed by Colonel Thomas Johnes of Hafod House, Cardigan, to teach drawing to his daughter Mariamne.
In 1783, Stothard had married Rebecca Watkins, an Anabaptist, and moved into Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. Together, they had six
children that survived infancy. In 1793, he bought 28 Newman Street, and lived there until his death on 27 April 1834, as a result of a carriage accident. He outlived not only his wife but also two of his sons.
His work is represented in the collections of the British Museum, The Courtauld Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and Tate; and Manchester Art Gallery.
