Andrew, Patricia R.

2013-06-26T12:49:44Z

2013-06-26T12:49:44Z

1981

Jacob More (1740-1793), known as 'More of Rome's worked in Edinburgh until 1771 and then (after a brief stay in London) in Italy. First apprenticed to a goldsmith, and then to a firm of housepainters, he gained public recognition with his series of Scottish landscapes exhibited in London in 1771. In Rome, he became the leading landscape painter of the large colony of British artists, producing striking compositions of brilliant tones and subtle light effects. The huge commercial success and high status he enjoyed led him, however, to waste much of his potential , and from the mid-1780s he-produced increasingly large, repetitive and hastily-executed canvasses to satisfy an insatiable public demand for his paintings. He developed other professional interests in Rome, including the planning and laying out of a Picturesque English garden, and he acted as an agent and dealer to the British Grand Tourists. His career well illustrates the artistic tastes of the British public in the late eighteenth century, and offers an insight into the small but competitive world of British artists and their patrons abroad. As the first major painter of his native landscape, More played an important part in the development of the Scottish school of painting; the more widely known paintings of his Italian period have obscured this achievement, a fact acknowledged by his contemporaries as well as by art historians of recent years. The transient excesses of his later paintings led to a neglect of his work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during which time much of his oeuvre, and most of the records of his life, were lost. This thesis aims to provide a full account of More's life and work; to show his importance in the development of certain aspects of British landscape painting and in the development of a Scottish national school; to present new research on the artistic life of Edinburgh in the 1760s and Rome from the 17708 to the 1790s, indicating More's central place in the artistic circles of both cities; and to demonstrate, through More's career, some of the changing tastes and attitudes held towards landscape by both the British and Italians in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

345735

http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6970

eng

University of Edinburgh

History

Literature

Mass

media

Performing

arts

Jacob More: 1740-1793

PhD Doctor of Philosophy