Joseph Highmore

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.

T04214 Two Studies for a Female Full-length c.1740

Pencil on paper 141 × 172 (5 9/16 × 6 3/4)
Inscribed ‘E Studiis Avi pro Effigie Matri mei. AH. 1724. J.H.’ b.r.
Lit: Beard 1934, vol.93, p.290, fig.I; Lewis 1975, II, p.435, no.89; Mild 1990, p.231

The inscription by Highmore's grandson Anthony confirms that this is a study for a portrait of Anthony's mother Anna Maria Ellis, who married the painter's son, also called Anthony, in 1740. The date 1724 therefore does not relate to the date of the painting, but is more likely to be an approximation of her date of birth (she was baptised 25 April 1723). The right-hand study was used for a three-quarter-length portrait of Mrs Anthony Highmore now in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, which was for a long time wrongly identified as a portrait of the painter's daughter Susanna.

Published in:
Tate Gallery: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions 1986-88, London 1996

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