James Thornhill

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  James Thornhill was knighted on the 2nd of May 1720, becoming the first native-born English artist ever to receive that honor. That single fact invites a question: how did a painter from the small town of Melcombe Regis in Dorset rise to decorate the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, the Painted Hall at Greenwich, and the ceilings of Blenheim Palace? The answer runs through politics, patronage, and an art world that had long assumed only foreign painters could handle the grandest commissions. Thornhill spent his career proving otherwise, and in doing so he left his mark on some of the most significant buildings in England.

• 2. Apprentice to Master

  ›

  Thornhill was born on the 25th of July 1675 or 1676 in Melcombe Regis, Dorset. His mother, Mary, was the eldest daughter of Colonel William Sydenham, governor of Weymouth, which gave the family a distinguished, if provincial, lineage. In 1689, at roughly fourteen years old, Thornhill was apprenticed to Thomas Highmore, a painter who worked in non-figurative decorative work. Highmore was competent, but the most formative influences came from two other men: Antonio Verrio and Louis Laguerre, both prominent foreign decorative painters then working in England. Watching Verrio and Laguerre operate gave Thornhill a model of the scale and ambition that the great English interiors demanded. He completed his apprenticeship in 1696, and by the 1st of March 1704 he had become a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers of London. The path from apprentice to nationally recognized master would take less than two more decades.

• 3. Politics Painted on Walls

  ›

  Thornhill's decorative schemes were rarely just decoration. In 1707, he received the commission to paint what is now called the Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College, a project he would not complete until 1727. The allegorical program he designed traces the Protestant succession of English monarchs from William III and Mary II through to George I, a sequence that spelled out Whig political ideology in pigment and plaster. At Chatsworth, during 1707-8, Thornhill painted walls and ceilings including an entire continuous panorama in the Sabine room depicting the Rape of the Sabine Women. The choice of Hersilia, who remained loyal to her Roman husband Romulus rather than her Sabine family, was a deliberate reference to Mary II, praised by the Whigs for standing by her Protestant husband William against her Catholic father, James. At Hanbury Hall, Thornhill went further still, inserting a small portrait of Henry Sacheverell, a Tory propagandist tried for sedition by the Whig government in 1710, being cast into the Furies to be burnt. The ceiling at Blenheim Palace, painted in 1716 for John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, continued the pattern: it celebrated the Duke's victory at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession, a commission that arrived just as Marlborough returned from exile after being prosecuted by the Tory ministry under Queen Anne. For Thornhill, paint and politics moved together.

• 4. The St Paul's Argument

  ›

  On the 28th of June 1715, a committee dominated by Whig, low-church members awarded Thornhill the commission to decorate the interior of the dome of St Paul's Cathedral. The wording around that decision reveals how charged the moment was. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Tenison, reportedly said he could not judge painting, but insisted on two conditions: that the painter be a Protestant and that he be an Englishman. A publication called The Weekly Packet declared that the choice would silence the loud praise that had always gone to foreign artists. The eight scenes Thornhill painted inside the dome between 1716 and 1719 depict episodes from the Life of St. Paul, executed entirely in grisaille, a technique that uses shades of grey to simulate the look of stone relief sculpture. The choice was both aesthetically bold and practically shrewd, giving the dome a gravity and unity that full color might have complicated. Thornhill had beaten the foreign competition on its own ground.

• 5. Honors and the Academy

  ›

  George I made Thornhill court painter in June 1718, and in March 1720 appointed him Serjeant Painter, the same post that his former master Thomas Highmore had held. Two months later came the knighthood. That same year Thornhill served as master of the Painters' Company, and in 1723 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. His institutional ambitions extended to teaching. In 1711, Thornhill was one of twelve original directors of the drawing academy Sir Godfrey Kneller established at Great Queen Street, London. He succeeded Kneller as governor in 1716 and held that post until 1720, then opened his own private drawing school at Covent Garden. That first school closed quickly, but in November 1724 Thornhill made a second attempt, establishing a free academy in his private house at Covent Garden. One student those academies almost certainly touched was Thomas Carwitham, a draughtsman and mathematical instrument designer whom Thornhill is credited with influencing. The free academy's most consequential member, however, would prove to be someone much closer to home.

• 6. Hogarth and the Family Bond

  ›

  William Hogarth appears to have joined Thornhill's second academy from its opening. On the 23rd of March 1729, he married Thornhill's daughter Jane, making the teacher-pupil relationship a family one. The connection ran beyond the domestic: Thornhill accompanied Hogarth to Newgate Prison to visit Sarah Malcolm, a woman awaiting execution, so that Hogarth could paint her portrait. The exact date of that visit is recorded as just days before her execution. It is one of the few glimpses the sources offer of Thornhill in company, away from scaffolding and plaster, and it shows a man who moved easily through the criminal courts and prison cells of London alongside one of the era's most ambitious artists. Jane Hogarth would outlive both her father and her husband, and the bond forged in that Covent Garden academy lasted well beyond Thornhill's death in 1734.

• 7. Late Work and the Raphael Copies

  ›

  Towards the end of his life, with no major commissions arriving, Thornhill turned his attention to the Raphael Cartoons, which were then held at Hampton Court. He produced full-size copies, completed in 1731, alongside a set at half-scale, and 162 smaller studies of heads, hands, and feet. The intention was to publish these in printed form as teaching aids for art students, but Thornhill died on the 4th of May 1734 before the project was finished. The original small wash designs of the cartoon details eventually entered the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. After his death, his copies of the cartoons were sold at auction by Christopher Cock on the 24th and the 25th of February 1735, at his room in the Great Piazza, Covent Garden. John Russell, 4th Duke of Bedford paid just £200 for the full-size copies, a sum the auction record itself noted was less than the cost of the canvas and materials Thornhill had used to make them. In 1800, Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford presented them to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where they remain today.