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"[A] beautiful tome . . . overflowing with new information, insightful interpretations, and interesting arguments. . . . [a] definitive book on the artist."--C.A./i>--C.A. Hanson "Choice "
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Universally recognised as a brilliant and gifted eighteenth-century artist, Zoffany was regarded by Horace Walpole as one of the three greatest painters in England, along with his friends Reynolds and Gainsborough. He has remained without a detailed study of his life and works owing to the fascinating and complex vicissitudes of his career, now established from widely scattered sources. Starting out as a late-baroque painter at a German princely court, he moved to London in 1760 and soon became a leading portraitist. A loyal patron was the great actor David Garrick through whom Zoffany became admired as the unrivalled interpreter of the Georgian stage. The delightful inventions of his conversation pieces proved, then as now, fashionably succesful images of private lives and led to his swift rise into the royal patronage of George III and Queen Charlotte. Sent by the queen to paint the celebrated Tribuna of the Uffizi in Florence, Zoffany while there received commissions from the Empress Maria Theresa for family portraits which took him to the courts of Vienna and Parma. Back in London but out of favour with the fashionable world, he left for the Bengal of Warren Hastings. Portraying the Anglo-Indian society of Calcutta, and working up-country at the glittering court of the Nawab of Lucknow, he developed a serious interest in Indian life and landscape. His fortune made, he returned with impaired health, but continued painting pictures of India, theatrical scenes and portraits, turning in old age to attack the bloody progress of the French revolution. Zoffany set foot in so many worlds that their contrast alone gives a constantly changing interest to the history of his life and work: his pictures document with incomparable liveliness the worlds and people among whom he moved.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This magnificently produced and superbly illustrated volume represents a lifetime of study by Mary Webster of the life and works of the much-travelled Zoffany, a truly fascinating Anglo-German artist (for such we should consider him, as the first thirty-odd years of his life in Germany, where he was born, and Italy where he studied, was negligible compared with the 50 years he spent in the service of the British royal family, aristocracy and wealthy, whether in London, Italy or India). Mary Webster was author of the still valuable 1976 NPG exhibition catalogue, but as she remarked in that catalogue, the large book published in 1920 by Lady Victoria Manners and G.C. Williamson, the previous 'standard' text, is a 'dangerous' book, being full of inaccuracies and stories which she entirely disregarded in the 1976 catalogue, but which which she carefully but silently reassesses here in the light of a great deal of very valuable evidence that she has painstakingly gathered and after many years of thought; this is praiseworthy indeed. The problem with this book, wonderful though it is, is that, after fifty years of study, despite having produced a highly readable book, it does not contain, as one would expect, a catalogue raisonné of Zoffany's works. The appendices are valuable, the list of sale catalogues and list of prints here are of course useful, but they are no substitute for the catalogue raisonné of all Zoffany's works which scholars and collectors must have hoped would be included. Maybe Webster will yet produce this as a supplement to the present volume, as it is badly needed? And maybe she is waiting to see what the scholarly fallout will be from the Zoffany exhibition due to open at the Royal Academy shortly, before issuing this? But if this does not happen, dealers and scholars and interested members of the public will have no recourse but to the catalogue of works published in 1920 by Manners and Williamson (and now available in the online open library in pdf form) which Webster's scholarship was expected to supersede entirely and which she otherwise rightly condemned in 1976 as 'dangerous.' If there is one other regret this reader has in her Zoffany scholarship, it is that Webster has now dismissed, alas justifiably, one 'dangerous' story which he loved: that Zoffany was shipwrecked off the Andaman Islands on his journey home from India and lots were drawn by the starving survivors as to which sailor they should eat - the idea that Zoffany was ever the first and last member of the RA to have been a cannibal was, always, to put it mildly, quite delicious!
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I would agree with everything Multrus has said about Mary Webster's book, with the exception of his gripe about it not being a catalogue raisonne: to lower his rating for this reason seems most unfair.
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