Gavin Hamilton – an ‘astonishingly various’ career

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The Life and Letters of Gavin Hamilton: Artist and Art Dealer in Eighteenth-Century Rome

By Brendan Cassidy

This book deals with an extraordinary episode in Britain’s cultural history, for Gavin Hamilton’s correspondence provides information about far more than art and antiquity. There are many details about specific individuals, and descriptions that tell us much about the social mores of the time.

We see several decades through the pen of this one, really well-informed individual, whose career encompassed the international art and antiques trade, collections and collecting, and the phenomenon of the Grand Tour, that great journey across Europe undertaken by large numbers of young British aristocrats and gentry as a finishing stage of their education, a journey which very often included the acquisition of quantities of both antique and contemporary art.

Gavin Hamilton (1723–98) was born in Lanarkshire and educated at Glasgow University. After travelling to Rome to study painting under Agostino Masucci he spent most of the rest of his life in Italy. He became a leading figure – he could even have claimed to be the central figure, a real mainstay – of the large British cultural community in Rome. His career was astonishingly various. He was a painter who produced vast, theatrical works on classical subjects, and fashionable portraits both grand and intimate; he was an early archaeologist and antiquarian; and a dealer and fixer in the world of commercial art and antiques, influencing taste and the fashion for all things neo-classical throughout Europe.

As an artist, Hamilton is rather neglected today. His vast classical canvases illustrating Homer’s Iliad, very well-known and influential in their day, are now unfashionable, their subject-matter now unfamiliar to most of the visitors who pass them by in galleries and museums. But when Hamilton painted them they had great novelty, being dramatic and heroic in their subjects as well as their size, conveying the emotion of Homer’s epic (the works were based on Pope’s translation). There were six canvases in the series, each commissioned by a different patron – a telling arrangement, for Hamilton was astute in his financial dealings. 

A number of works of art which are, by contrast with Hamilton’s own work, very well-known today passed through his hands. They include Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks, now in the National Gallery, London. Hamilton brought it with him to London, and wrote a real dealer’s letter to its potential purchaser, William Petty, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne. He told Lansdowne that he ‘had yesternight a vizet [sic] from Mr. Desenfans the picture dealer’ who also wanted to buy it, and that he had to see Desenfans again the very next day ‘to settle this affair’; so would Lansdowne care to offer more than already offered by Mr Desenfans?  He did just that.

Yet although Hamilton had a shrewd and canny business brain, he was also a notably kind and helpful adviser to many young artists arriving in Rome. His rather quixotic personality is well depicted in the lively, unflattering pastel portrait by Archibald Skirving, c.1788, which serves as the frontispiece of the first volume. His gravitas is shown in the marble bust by Christopher Hewetson of 1784, where he appears in the style of a classical antique sculpture. An image of this serves as the frontispiece of the second volume.

Hamilton’s correspondence was vast, and much of it written in haste. His many letters to the great collector Charles Townley include many rather throwaway lines on politics and personalities, and at times become positively chatty. On 16 December 1779 he wrote of a potential purchase that ‘With Visconti a cambio must be made some how or other. My plan is layd & shall soon acquaint you of the result’. He then wrote another letter the same day, enclosing it with the first – and then yet another one, beginning ‘I find that I must add another bit of paper & this is to beg a favour …’ [for a loan] …‘for three months being at this present time very much pinched for ready cash…it woud [sic] do me a signal service & at the same time may turn out to your own advantage’.

Despite its undeniable interest, this thoroughly researched book is very much aimed at the specialist academic. The two volumes, weighty in both the literal and figurative senses, will form an invaluable reference for scholars of 18th-century art and culture. In particular, they will be useful to those studying the Grand Tour and the excavations and trade in classical art and antiquity undertaken in Italy in the latter half of the 18th century.

The publication contains transcriptions of 333 fully annotated letters, prefaced by a sizable biographical introduction. The illustrations are judiciously chosen, including images both familiar and less well known (notably drawings by Hamilton after classical sculptures). With nearly 40 pages of bibliography, and an index of 24 pages, this is a meticulous study that will fascinate those who dip into it and yield generous nuggets of information for the inquisitive scholar, while also expanding understanding of the period, the man, and his circle in Britain and Italy.

The Life and Letters of Gavin Hamilton: Artist and Art Dealer in Eighteenth-Century Rome  by Brendan Cassidy is published by Harvey Miller, 2011. Two volumes total 855pp.,  151 mono illus, £254.00  ISBN: 978-1-905375-59-2 (set) /  978-1-905375-89-9 (vol.1) /  978-1-905375-90-5 (vol.2)