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(b c. 1723; d Guzel Hisar, Turkey, Sept 19, 1750)

English collector and antiquarian. He was educated at New College, Oxford. After inheriting a large fortune, he went on the Grand Tour to Italy (1740–42). He travelled extensively throughout his short life and went to Italy several times, acquiring antiquities, paintings, engravings, medals, cameos and, above all, drawings. His collection of Old Master drawings was one of the most important assembled in England in the first half of the 18th century. It included examples by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Rembrandt and particularly Guercino. Many of these are still identifiable by their beautiful mounts, which have a distinctive ruled and patterned border (see Display of art §IV).

The provenance of the Bouverie drawings was lost sight of until the early 1990s, and until then these mounts were rather misleadingly known as ‘Casa Gennari’ mounts (from the family name of Guercino’s descendants). The greater part of the Bouverie collection was inherited in the first half of the 19th century by the 1st ...

(b Elson, Hants, 1738; d Tilehurst, nr Reading, Feb 9, 1810).

English antiquarian. He was educated at Winchester School and Queen’s College, Oxford. He became famous through the publication in 1763 of Marmora oxoniensia, an account of the statuary and inscriptions in the University collection, mostly from the Arundel Marbles (now Oxford, Ashmolean). Through Robert Wood, the author of The Ruins of Palmyra, he was introduced to the Society of Dilettanti and invited to undertake an expedition to Asia Minor, together with Nicholas Revett and William Pars. They spent about two years in western Turkey and in Greece (1764–6). Chandler had charge of the historical part of the work, together with the inscriptions, while the architect Revett measured the buildings and the painter Pars recorded the various views. The account of their expedition, Ionian Antiquities, was published in 1769 at the expense of the Society of Dilettanti; it was an important book, used by Edward Gibbon, among others. In ...

(b Paris, Sept 27, 1752; d Aachen, June 20, 1817).

French antiquary and writer. He was the son of the Comte de Choiseul-Beaupré and married the heiress Adelaide-Marie-Louise de Gouffier, whose surname he assumed. He first followed a military career; then, inspired by the Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, he developed a taste for antiquities; in March 1776 he embarked on a three-year tour of the monuments of Greece and Asia Minor, recording his observations in drawings. He corresponded with various members of the Académie Royale des Inscriptions, of which he was elected a member on his return in 1779. Three years later he succeeded Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83) as member of the Académie Française, on presenting the first volume of his illustrated Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce. He also became an honorary member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and was a founder of the Société des Amis des Arts.

In 1784 Choiseul-Gouffier was appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire by Louis XVI; he set out for Constantinople accompanied by various intellectuals and literary figures, including the poet Abbé Jacques Delille (...

(b 1722; d Jamaica, Dec 1757).

English traveller and antiquarian. He was educated at Oxford University, spent several years as a young man travelling in Italy and was elected as a member of the Society of Dilettanti in 1755. He was referred to in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson as ‘Jamaica Dawkins’, as his family had extensive sugar plantations in Jamaica. He travelled with Robert Wood and John Bouverie to Baalbek and Palmyra in 1750. For this journey they chartered a boat from London and joined it in Naples; it was well equipped with a library of Greek histories and poems, volumes of antiquities and travel books. They visited many of the Greek islands and part of the Greek mainland, the Bosporus and the coast of Turkey, before travelling overland to Baalbek and Palmyra, where Bouverie died. Together with Wood, Dawkins later published The Ruins of Palmyra and The Ruins of Balbec, to which he contributed the measured drawings (and all of the costs). He and Wood gained a great reputation by these splendid publications of antiquities, though most of the credit for them has gone to Wood....

(b Givry, nr Chalon-sur-Saône, Jan 4, 1747; d Paris, April 28, 1825).

French museum director, writer, graphic artist, collector, archaeologist and diplomat. He was the son of a provincial aristocrat. He went to Paris to further his law studies c. 1765 but entered the studio of Noël Hallé. He became Gentleman-in-Ordinary to Louis XV and was appointed keeper of the collection of engraved gems and medals that Mme de Pompadour had left to the King. In 1772 he entered the diplomatic service as attaché to the French embassy at St Petersburg, he was subsequently posted to Stockholm, Geneva (where his disrespectful engraving Repast at Ferney, of 4 July 1775, angered Voltaire) and, from spring 1776, Naples. There he became acquainted with Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador, and made many drawings of his future wife Emma. Denon began to acquire a diverse collection of paintings and engravings as well as antiquities from excavations at Nola, Catania, Agrigento, Pompeii and Herculaneum. He purchased the painting of the ...

(b La Roque d’Anthéron, Bouches-du-Rhône, Aug 19, 1777; d Paris, Feb 23, 1841).

French museum director, painter, printmaker, writer and military officer. He studied painting in Aix-en-Provence under Jean-Antoine Constantin, alongside his lifelong friend François-Marius Granet; further teachers included Jean-Jacques de Boissieu, Jean-Louis Demarne and, from 1796, Jacques-Louis David. He first exhibited at the Salon in that year. However, during the Empire he was chiefly celebrated as a soldier, writer and lover. He became Chamberlain and consort to Napoleon’s sister, Pauline Bonaparte, Princess Borghese, and was decorated for his conduct in the Portuguese and Austrian campaigns. In 1810 Charles Barimore, the most successful of his four Orientalist novels, was a great sensation in Empire boudoirs. Forbin’s most significant contributions to the history of art came when he returned to Paris after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814.

Following his appointment in 1816 as Director of the Royal Museums, to succeed Vivant Denon, Forbin’s first concern was to minimize the repatriation of works of art acquired by force during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. In ...

(b Southampton, 1704; d Charleville, nr Tullamore, Ireland, Sept 1765).

English traveller, churchman and antiquarian. He was educated at Highclere Rectory and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he matriculated on 13 July 1720. His major journey, which resulted in his Description of the East, began in Alexandria in 1737 and took in Egypt (where he was the first modern visitor to describe the Valley of the Kings and copy the Greek and Latin inscriptions on the Colossi of Memnon), Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Cyprus, Crete, Greece and Italy, returning to England in 1742. From 1750 he also toured England, Scotland and Ireland. While the text of his Description of the East is largely of antiquarian interest, in the sense that its aim was to confirm the veracity of the Scriptures and of the geographers of antiquity and that it was not otherwise concerned with the chronology of the monuments, the plates are a valuable document not merely for Egyptology and Classical archaeology but also for the architecture of Islam and the crusaders. His drawings of Pharaonic columns, capitals, cornices and entablatures also brought a novel corpus of ornament to contemporary architectural decoration. After his death his collection of Greek, Roman and English coins and medals, ancient jewellery, statues, urns and mummies was dispersed....

(b Durham, April 26, 1777; d St Petersburg, May 4, 1842).

British painter, writer and diplomat. His family moved to Edinburgh in 1780, and there he knew the young Walter Scott and the Jacobite heroine Flora Macdonald. A battle painting owned by Macdonald inspired him to become a painter of battle scenes himself. In 1790 his mother took him to London to see Benjamin West, President of the Royal Academy, who was impressed by Porter’s sketches and arranged for him to be admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. There he made rapid progress and in 1792 was awarded a silver palette by the Royal Society of Arts for his drawing the Witches of Endor (untraced). The following year he was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for Shoreditch Church in London, and he received a number of further commissions over the succeeding years. On a visit to his grandparents in Durham he painted his only known landscape, View of Durham (untraced), which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in ...

(b Plympton, Devon, July 16, 1723; d London, Feb 23, 1792).

English painter, collector and writer. The foremost portrait painter in England in the 18th century, he transformed early Georgian portraiture by greatly enlarging its range. His poses, frequently based on the Old Masters or antique sculpture, were intended to invoke classical values and to enhance the dignity of his sitters. His rich colour, strong lighting and free handling of paint greatly influenced the generation of Thomas Lawrence and Henry Raeburn. His history and fancy pictures explored dramatic and emotional themes that became increasingly popular with both artists and collectors in the Romantic period. As first president of the Royal Academy in London, he did more than anyone to raise the status of art and artists in Britain. His Discourses on Art, delivered to the students and members of the Academy between 1769 and 1790, are the most eloquent and widely respected body of art criticism by any English writer.

Although Reynolds’s father, a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and master of Plympton Grammar School, had intended that his son train as an apothecary, Joshua chose instead to seek fame as a painter. In ...

(b ?Riverstown Castle, Co. Meath, c. 1717; d London, Sept 9, 1771)

British traveller and antiquarian . Wood’s antecedents and education are unclear, although he reputedly graduated at Oxford. However, Lord Ronald Gower despised his ‘mean birth’ and Robert Adam carped about his having been ‘a surgeon lad in Glasgow’, while Joseph Foster’s Alumni Oxonienses does not mention his name. Even so, Horace Walpole considered him ‘an excellent classic scholar’ with ‘taste and integrity’. According also to Walpole, Wood was ‘originally a travelling tutor’, a cicerone for those on the Grand Tour .

In Rome in 1749 he joined company with James Dawkins , a rich Jamaican plantation owner, and John Bouverie . Together they planned to journey to Syria and there to ‘rescue from oblivion the magnificence of Palmyra’. They had in mind to take views and architectural drawings of the ancient buildings such as had been done in Rome by Antoine-Baruty Desgotetz (1653–1728) and Charles-Louis Clérisseau. To make these drawings of ruined Palmyra, they retained the Piedmontese architectural draughtsman ...