Prints and Drawings Room
View by appointment- Artist
- Joseph Highmore 1692–1780
- Medium
- Graphite on paper
- Dimensions
- Support: 153 × 190 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by Mrs Joan Highmore Blackhall and Dr R.B. McConnell 1986
- Reference
- T04222
Catalogue entry
[from] Works on Paper and Vellum [T04173-T04237 and T04318-T04319]
Various media and sizes
Presented by Mrs Joan Highmore Blackhall and Dr Rosemary B. McConnell 1986
Prov: By descent from the artist to the donors
Lit: C.R. Beard, ‘Highmore's Scrap-Book’, Connoisseur, vol.93, 1934, pp.290–7, ‘Highmore's Drawings for Pine's Processions and Ceremonies’, Connoisseur, vol.94, 1934, pp.9–15; Alison S. Lewis, Joseph Highmore 1692–1780, PhD thesis, Harvard 1975 (University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor 1980), I, pp.230–1, II, pp.650–6, 659, III, figs.263–77, 279; E. Einberg and J. Egerton, The Age of Hogarth: British Painters Born 1675–1709, Tate Gallery Collections, 11, 1988, pp.64–71, all but last six repr.; Warren Mild, Joseph Highmore of Holborn Row, Ardmore 1990
All sheets have been irregularly cut; maximum dimensions only are given. All inscriptions, unless otherwise stated, are in pen and ink, and are thought to have been written by the artist's grandson Anthony Highmore (1758–1829).
The Highmore Gift, of which this is a part, is a collection of sketches, drawings, watercolours, engravings and some family papers which descended from the artist through the late Sir Anthony Highmore King, CBE, to the donors. The papers concern mostly nineteenth-century members of the family, but include Joseph Highmore's Paris Journal of 1734, published by Elizabeth Johnston, Walpole Society, vol.42, 1970, pp.61–104. The following items have been removed for conservation reasons from a scrap-book into which they had been pasted, in no particular order, by Sir Anthony Highmore King's grandmother Anna King, together with works by Susanna Duncombe (née Highmore) and later members of the family, as well as photographs, tracings and other fragments now in the Tate Gallery Archive. Nineteen drawings by Joseph Highmore for John Pine's twenty-plate set of engravings depicting the revival of the Order of the Bath, published in 1730, were sold from the King collection to Lord Fairhaven sometime after 1934 and are on loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
T04222 A Conversation of Four Persons on a Terrace
c.1747
Pencil on paper 152 × 190 (6 × 7 1/2)
Lit: Lewis 1975, 11, pp.374–5, no.9; E.K. Waterhouse, Dictionary of British 18th Century Painters, 1981, p.170, repr.
This appears to be a sketch for the lost conversation piece of ‘The Children of William Eyre Archer Esq.’ (22 × 30 in, signed and dated 1747, repr. in Waterhouse 1981). In the finished oil the setting has been made more open, showing more landscape beyond the terrace, and the pose of the boy on the right has been slightly altered. Archer was a lawyer connected with Gray's Inn, who had estates in Berkshire and Derbyshire.
Published in:
Tate Gallery: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions 1986-88, London 1996
Explore
- architecture(30,960)
-
- features(8,872)
-
- arcade(212)
- balustrade(96)
- column(444)
- stair / step(514)
- terrace(149)
- periods and styles(5,198)
-
- classical(1,040)
- actions: postures and motions(9,111)
-
- standing(3,106)
- group(4,227)
- groups(310)