Joseph Farington

• 1. Introduction

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  Joseph Farington died on the last day of 1821 by falling down a church steps in Didsbury, Manchester. He had gone there for a New Year's Eve service. He was 74 years old, a respected Royal Academician, a landscape painter whose topographical drawings had found their way into folios sold to tourists across Britain. But the thing that would truly outlast him was not a single painting. It was a diary he had been keeping, almost without interruption, since the 13th of July 1793. By the time he died, that diary ran to sixteen handwritten volumes. It recorded the London art world from the inside, captured the workings of the Royal Academy, tracked political trials and abolitionist campaigns, and gathered gossip and biography from some of the most prominent people of the era. Who was the man writing it? And what made his access so extraordinary?

• 2. Lancashire Roots

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  Farington was born in Leigh, Lancashire, on the 21st of November 1747, the second of seven sons of William Farington and Esther Gilbody. His father served as both rector of Warrington and vicar of Leigh, a dual ecclesiastical posting that placed the family at the respectable center of provincial life. The brothers spread out across empire and profession. Three of them, William, Henry, and Richard, found employment in the naval service of the East India Company. Edward died of yellow fever at the age of 32. Robert went to Brasenose College and eventually became vicar of St George in the East in London. George, like Joseph, became a painter. That single family produced a portrait of British imperial society in miniature: the church, the Company, the sea, and the arts all represented across one generation of the same household. Farington's early education, unusual for a Lancashire boy, was conducted in Maryland, a detail the sources note without further explanation, and it was from that starting point that he made his way to London.

• 3. Learning and the Academy

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  Richard Wilson, the Welsh landscape painter, took Farington on as a student in London in 1763. Within a year the young man was winning premiums from the Society of Artists for his landscape drawing, prizes that came in 1764, 1765, and 1766. He became a member of that society in 1765. When the Royal Academy was founded in 1769, Farington joined from its earliest days. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1783 and a full Royal Academician in 1785. For the next sixteen years he contributed work to the Academy's annual exhibitions without a single gap, a run that only tapered off after 1801. His role extended well beyond submitting pictures. He sat on the committee that determined where works would be hung during the exhibitions, one of the more politically charged decisions in the Academy's internal life. He also served as executor for the estate of his fellow Academician John Webber. In 1793 he became a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and later helped establish the British Institution. When exhibitions honoring Thomas Gainsborough, William Hogarth, and Richard Wilson were organized in 1806, Farington lent his assistance.

• 4. Landscapes and Travels

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  Between 1776 and 1780 Farington lived for a period in the Lake District, producing numerous drawings of the region's scenery and keeping a list of the order in which he thought the drawings should be arranged. That careful, taxonomic impulse was characteristic. In 1793 he traveled to the Netherlands specifically to prepare illustrations for an official record of the siege of Valenciennes. Then, during the Peace of Amiens in 1802, he joined a group that included Benjamin West, John Hoppner, and Johann Fuseli on a trip to Paris. There he examined antique sculpture and Italian art and visited the studios of two of France's most prominent painters, Jacques-Louis David and François Gérard. The Paris trip appears to have marked a turning point in his practice as a painter. After returning, he produced less and less original work. Evelyn Newby, writing in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, noted that appraising his paintings is difficult because they are scattered across many private and public collections and rarely surface in art sales. But she identified his strongest contribution as the topographical drawings he made for folio engravings of British views, work that found a ready market among tourists who were confined to Britain by the unrest of the Napoleonic period.

• 5. Published Works

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  In 1785 Farington published Views of the Lakes of Cumberland and Westmorland, the first of several illustrated works that would mark his career. Nine years later, in 1794, he followed it with a two-volume History of the River Thames, illustrated with 76 aquatints. In the early nineteenth century he contributed to Cadell and Davies's modernization of the illustrated atlas Britannia depicta, which reached six volumes of a planned whole. His contributions included topographical Views in Cornwall, published in 1814. Drawings he completed for the unpublished seventh volume, intended to cover Devon, were engraved but never saw print. He also worked on William Byrne's Magna Britannia, a project that grew so expensive it was never completed. In 1819, two years before his death, he edited the Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds across six volumes. That editorial project placed him in direct scholarly conversation with the Academy's founding president, a fitting late-career undertaking for someone who had been part of the institution almost from its beginning.

• 6. Marriage and Loss

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  On the 19th of March 1776 Farington married Susan Mary Hamond, a relative of the Walpole family. The couple had no children, though Farington remained closely interested in the lives of his brothers' children throughout his life. When Susan died in 1800, the effect on him was severe. He collapsed and found himself unable to draw or paint. Recovery came slowly, aided by his family and by friends including the painter Robert Smirke and his household. The grief revealed how much his personal life and his professional practice were intertwined. Smirke's involvement is a small but telling detail: the friendship between painters of a certain standing in the Royal Academy ran deep enough that one could carry another through a crisis. After recovering, Farington continued his diary without significant interruption until his final weeks.

• 7. The Diary's Long Life

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  Farington began his diary on the 13th of July 1793 and kept it daily until he died, missing only a handful of days across nearly three decades. Newby described its value precisely: with its emphasis on biography and anecdote, it stands as an invaluable source for understanding both the artists of the period and the internal workings of the Royal Academy. But the diary ranged much further than the art world. Farington knew the new industrialists in the Midlands. He understood the internal operations of the East India Company. His wife's family gave him access to information on government policy. He attended prominent political trials, including Warren Hastings's failed impeachment. He followed William Wilberforce's anti-slavery campaign closely enough to record it. The sixteen volumes were kept as a family heirloom after his death and were sold at auction in 1921 to the Morning Post. James Greig edited and published them in book form between 1922 and 1928, first in serial form and then as a bound edition. A second sixteen-volume edition appeared between 1978 and 1984, nearly a century and a half after the diary's first entry was written.