The whole page is taken up with the following notes:
Highmore wrote a treatise upon perspective and | the ceiling by Rubens at Whitehall relative to Archite[...] | and perspective –
Laguerre was employd to repair the Pictures of | Julius Caesar by Andrea Mantegna he contend | himself by repairing while Carle Ma[...]i paintd | over Rapheal [sic] picture that he was employd to | repair
Barry speaks highly of the sapidity | full toned richness and dignified tones of the | St. Peter Martyr as the Grand style of Landsc
These passages are derived from the
Gentleman’s and Connoisseur’s Dictionary of Painters by the Rev. Matthew Pilkington (1701–1774),
1 first published in London in 1770. Although there had been a further edition in 1805, given the reference to Barry (see below) Turner appears to have used the 1798 edition, from which the page references here are taken.
The painter Joseph Highmore (1692–1780) wrote
A Critical Examination of Those Two Paintings on the Cieling [sic]
of the Banqueting-House at Whitehall: In Which Architecture Is Introduced, So Far as Relates to the Perspective (London 1754), as well as
The Practice of Perspective, on the Principles of Dr. Brook Taylor (London 1763). Turner acquired his own copy of the latter at an unknown date.
2 Pilkington mentions these ‘pamphlets’ in his entry on Highmore on page 792.
The two names which follow are those of the father and son Pieter Neefs (I) (?1578–between 1656 and 1661) and (II) (1620–after 1675), known for their architectural interiors, particularly of Antwerp Cathedral.
3 There are entries for them both on page 451 of the 1798 edition of Pilkington, where they are differentiated as being ‘called the Old’ and ‘the Young’. ‘Perspective’ is mentioned as a speciality in the subheading of each entry, but discussed only in the broadest terms under the older artist.
The French painter Louis Laguerre (1663–1721) did some early restoration work for William III on Andrea Mantegna’s important series of paintings, the
Triumphs of Caesar, circa 1486–1505 (Royal Collection, Hampton Court Palace, Surrey).
4 In his entry on Laguerre, Pilkington approves of his ‘judgment to imitate the style of the original, instead of new clothing them in vermillion and ultramarine; a fate that befel [sic] Raphael even from the pencil of Carlo Maratti’ (page 802). In later life, Maratti (1625–1713) had been keeper of Raphael’s Vatican Stanze frescoes.
5The last paragraph is taken from ‘Reflections on the Present State of the Art of Painting in England ... In a Letter to the Dilettanti Society’ by the Irish history painter and Royal Academy professor James Barry (1741–1806), printed at the end of the 1798 edition of Pilkington’s dictionary. The text was also published separately in London that year as
A Letter to the Dilettanti Society Respecting the Obtention of Certain Matters Essentially Necessary for the Improvement of Public Taste, and for Accomplishing the Original Views of the Royal Academy of Great Britain; its controversial content was one reason for Barry’s expulsion from the Academy in the following year.
6On page 829, Barry writes:
No intelligent artist who has studied Titian’s most Giorgionesque picture of St. Mark, in the sacristy of the church of the Salute in Venice, his Christ crowned with Thorns, in the sacristy at Milan (but now at Paris), and many others of his genuine, untouched, unadulterated works, can for a moment doubt or hesitate to subscribe to all that has been said regarding his suogo [sic], sapidity, his flow of well-nourished, harmonious colour: the landscape background also of his St. Peter Martyr, and many other pictures, are fully adequate to our highest expectations from his reputation as the greatest of all landscape painters...
Turner clearly responded to this passage, having copied and commented on Titian’s
Crowning with Thorns and written about the
Death of St Peter Martyr in the
Studies in the Louvre sketchbook on his 1802 visit to Paris (respectively Tate
D04338–D04340;
D04306–D04308; Turner Bequest LXXII 51, 51a, 52; 27a, 28, 28a).
There are further passages from Pilkington earlier in the sketchbook (folios 5 verso, 6 recto, 27 verso;
D07364,
D07365,
D07397).
7
Matthew Imms
October 2011
