William Hamilton

1751 – 1801

English painter and illustrator. The son of one of the assistants of Robert Adam (1728-1792), he was sent to Rome to be trained as an architectural draughtsman. He studied under Antonio Zucchi (who was later Adam's chief decorative painter), possibly in Rome from 1766 and in London from 1768. At the Royal Academy Schools from 1769, Hamilton developed into a figure painter and exhibited portraits and subject pictures at the Royal Academy from 1774 to 1801. He became ARA in 1784 and RA in 1789. Hamilton's most interesting work pertains to the theatre, particularly Shakespearean. His most distinguished large pictures are the 23 he painted for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery. Also in the 1790s he contributed illustrations to Bowyer's History of England and Thomas Macklin's Bible and British Poets. Nevertheless, his pleasantly plump and youthful figures were better suited to the less pretentious format of book illustration than that of history painting. His attractive romantic scenes appear in many editions of 18th-century poets as well as in John Bell's second editions of Shakespeare (1786-88) and The British Theatre (1791-97). Hamilton was capable of being an accomplished draughtsman in a variety of styles; his album of drawings (London, Victoria and Albert Museum) includes work reminiscent of Henry Fuseli and Angelica Kauffmann as well as more distinctive compositions nervously constructed with repeated, scratchy strokes of the pen. His portraits are mostly theatrical and include many of Sarah Siddons; they are curiously stilted, although the John Philip Kemble as Richard III (exhibited at the Royal Academy 1788; private collection) is a fine dramatic pastiche of Hogarth's portrait of David Garrick in the same role (1745; Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery).

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