Joseph Highmore

Joseph Highmore (13 June 16923 March 1780) was an English painter of portraits, conversation pieces and history subjects, illustrator and author. After retiring from his career as a painter at the age of 70, he published art historical and critical articles.West, S. ''Highmore, Joseph''
Grove Art Online. Retrieved 18 March 2022

Life

Highmore was born on 13 June 1692, in London, the third son of Edward Highmore, a coal merchant, and nephew of Thomas Highmore, Serjeant Painter to William III. He displayed early his ability in art but was discouraged by his family from taking up art professionally, and began a legal training instead. At the ending of a clerkship at the age of 17 (during which he continued to attend a drawing academy run by Godfrey Kneller and lectures on anatomy by William Cheselden), he abandoned his law career and started to work as a portrait painter in London. From 1720, he attended the St Martin's Lane Academy, where he was exposed to contemporary French art.

On the revival of the Order of the Bath in 1725, he was selected to paint the knights in full costume. In 1732, he visited the Low Countries to study Rubens and van Dyck's works. Two years later he visited Paris where he studied works in public and private collections. In the next few years he received patronage from the royal family, but during the 1740s he began to cater more to middle-class clients who appreciated his ability to capture a likeness in a single sitting and to create an informal composition. In 1762, Highmore sold the contents of his studio and retired to Canterbury, where he lived with his daughter and son-in-law. He subsequently published art historical and critical articles, including on Rubens' ceiling decorations in the Banqueting House, Whitehall, London, colour theory and Brook Taylor's theory of perspective.

Highmore died on 3 March 1780, aged 87, in Canterbury. He was buried in sheep's wool (to comply with a 17th-century statute to encourage the wool trade) in the fifth bay of the south aisle of Canterbury Cathedral.

His wife Susanna Highmore (née Hiller) was a poet, though little of her work was published. His son Anthony Highmore (1719–99) was an artist, one of whose 15 children, Anthony Highmore Jnr. (1758–1829), became a writer on legal affairs and a social activist.

Joseph Highmore: 1692:1780 volumes I and II a PhD dissertation, 1975, by Alison Shepherd Lewis is at Harvard University, Fogg Museum, stack number HU 90 10796B

Work

He painted portraits, conversation pieces and history subjects. He worked for artistocratic clients as well as middle-class patrons. His ability to give a group portrait the informal outlook of a conversation piece is demonstrated in his ''Mr Oldham and his Guests'' (National Gallery, London). It shows Mr Oldham, who appears to have just arrived, standing at the extreme left of the painting, with his arms folded over the top of a chair. He is looking with an expression of barely concealed amusement at his guests who are already seated at a table. Highmore also made portraits of his children. His portrait of his daughter Susanna (c.1740, National Gallery of Victoria) is remarkable in the richness of the visual details and the confident glance which the sitter casts towards the viewer. For his portraits, he employed the specialist drapery painter Joseph Van Aken to paint the dresses and costumes of his sitters.Drapery painter
in Oxford Reference

Highmore painted works illustrating biblical subjects, historical painting being a genre which Highmore had studied during his visit to Paris. One such biblical painting is ''Hagar and Ishmael'', which Highmore donated to the Foundling Hospital for the purpose of decorating its Court Room. The painting is now part of the Foundling Hospital art collection at The Foundling Museum in London. During the 1740s, Highmore had become connected with the new Foundling Hospital which aimed to support desperate and abused women. His involvement caused him to engage with issues relating to women's vulnerability to sexual assault and society's unwillingness to support them. He expressed this engagement in his work ''The Angel of Mercy'' (c. 1746, Yale Center for British Art). It depicts a desperate mother about to kill her baby, when her hand is stayed by an angel who points to the Foundling Hospital shown in the background as the alternative to the murder of her child.

In 1744, Highmore painted a series of 12 paintings after scenes from Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel ''Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded''. The novel was first published in 1740–1 and recounts the virtuous lady's maid Pamela Andrews' relationship with an aristocratic seducer whom she repeatedly rebuffs, then reforms and finally marries. Highmore's paintings were based on the novel Pamela but were not conceived as book illustrations, although they were later engraved by Antoine Benoist and Louis Truchy. They were rather an attempt to recount the whole story in successive and connected images. Highmore's pictures were conversation pieces which focused on the characters.Karen Lipsedge, Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels, Springer, 2012

As an author, he was best known for the works ''Critical Examination of Reubens' two Paintings in the Banqueting House'' and ''Observations on Bodwell's Pamphlet against Christianity''.

Gallery

File:Joseph Highmore - The Angel of Mercy - Google Art Project.jpg, The Angel of Mercy, 1746
File:Joseph Highmore - The Harlowe Family, from Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa" - Google Art Project.jpg, The Harlowe Family, from Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa", 1745/1747
File:Joseph Highmore - The artist's wife Susanna, son Anthony and daughter Susanna - Google Art Project.jpg, The artist's wife Susanna, son Anthony and daughter Susanna, 1728
File:Portrait of Rachel Busk, later Mrs Richard Milnes (d. 1835) (circle of Joseph Highmore).jpg, Rachel Busk, later Mrs Richard Milnes (d. 1835), half-length, wearing a pink dress and holding flowers
File:Frederica, Countess FitzWalter, by circle of Joseph Highmore.jpg, Frederica, Countess FitzWalter, 1727
File:Highmore - Caroline of Ansbach - RCIN 406035.jpg, Queen Caroline of Great Britain and Ireland, 1735
File:William Wilberforce (1721–1777), and Hannah Wilberforce, née Thornton (d.1788).jpg, William Wilberforce (1721–1777), and Hannah Wilberforce, née Thornton, 1750
File:Anne Wells, aka Duchess of Chandos (died 1759) by Joseph Highmore, in the Walker Art Gallery.jpg, The Duchess of Chandos, 1746
File:Joseph Highmore (1692-1780) - Equestrian Portrait of King George II - T04944 - Tate.jpg, Equestrian Portrait of King George II, 1743/1745

References

;Attribution
*

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Highmore, Joseph
1692 births
1780 deaths
Painters from London
18th-century English painters
English male painters
English portrait painters
English illustrators
English art critics
English history painters
18th-century English male artists