J. Thornhill, Painter and Decorator

Join us in the Painted Hall for our final Autumn lecture on Baroque murals in Britain.

James Thornhill’s artistic success brought fame and fortune in his lifetime, but his professional career began in the relatively humble surroundings of the Painter-Stainers’ hall in the City of London, in the company of other English tradesmen who typically specialised in heraldry, leather gilding, or everyday “house painting”. Fortuitously, as a young apprentice to the house painter Thomas Highmore, Thornhill was taken to work first at Chatsworth, then at Hampton Court (where he probably helped to paint the railings of the King’s staircase). It was here that he first encountered the Continental tradition of grand-scale decorative painting, exemplified by Antonio Verrio and Louis Laguerre. In making the move from house painter to history painter, Thornhill proved his ability to reconcile two very different ideas of what it meant to be a painter at the turn of the eighteenth century.

Please see the Old Royal Naval College website for a biography of the speaker and further information about the event.