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James Thornhill

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Sir James Thornhill

  • b. 1675 or 1676
  • d. May 4, 1734

As an English artist in the baroque tradition, Thornhill decorated palace interiors with large-scale compositions. The figures of these wall-paintings are commonly shown in idealized and rhetorical postures. Examples are the allegorical ceiling decorations of the Painted Hall at Greenwich Hospital (1707-14) depicting the Protestant succession of English monarchs from William and Mary to George I; the eight scenes executed in grisaille from the Life of St. Paul in the cupola of St Paul's Cathedral (1716-19); and the ceiling of the Great Hall in Blenheim Palace, painted in 1716 and showing the Duke of Marlborough's victory at the Battle of Blenheim during the War of the Spanish Succession. In Dorset, his birthplace, Thornhill decorated the reredos at St. Mary's Church, Weymouth, with a picture of the Last Supper. He also painted some portraits.

George I made him court painter and in 1720 knighted him.

In 1718 Sir James took a large house on Covent Garden Piazza, and in 1725 he built Thornhill House in the south of Stalbridge, which he probably designed himself in the Palladian manner.

In 1711, he was one of the 12 original directors of Sir Godfrey Kneller’s academy at Great Queen Street, London. In 1716, he succeeded Kneller as Governor there and held the post until 1720. He also established his own private drawing school at Covent Garden where one of his students was William Hogarth, who on 23rd March 1729 married Sir James' daughter Jane.

As at the end of his life he received no further major commissions, Thornhill copied the Raphael Cartoons at Hampton Court. 162 of these studies of heads, hands and feet are now kept in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.


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