Thomas Trotter (1756–1803)

Abstract

The 2009 volume of this journal carried an article by Cameron Moffett and Richard Hewlings on the coffins at Farleigh Hungerford, reproducing watercolours by Thomas Trotter, an artist who was understandably not known to them. In fact, Trotter was well known in his day — but as an engraver, primarily of small portraits of Nonconformist or Scottish interest, and was only active as a watercolour painter in the last decade of his life. As he is not included in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, it may be helpful to give an account of his career, together with an explanation of how he came to work in watercolour. This article also carries an account of two sets of watercolours, now in Devizes Museum, commissioned by Sir Richard Colt Hoare; and it offers evidence that shortly before Trotter’s death publication had been planned of a set of plates after his watercolours of the chapel at Farleigh Hungerford which contains the coffins.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Richard Hewlings for agreeing to publish this article and for his patience in waiting for me to piece the material together. I must also thank my wife Helena Moore for her help, Philip Athill for showing me the Trotter watercolours recently in the stock of Abbot & Holder, and, at the Wiltshire Museum, Devizes, Sandy Haynes and her colleagues in the Archives.

Notes

1 Cameron Moffett and Richard Hewlings, ‘The anthropoid coffins at Farleigh Hungerford Castle, Somerset’, English Heritage Historical Review, IV, 2009, 54–71.

2 The Trotters’ son Albert was born in Ceres in October 1769; their daughter Margaret was baptized in the Swallow Street Church on 7 May 1771; Elizabeth Trotter was buried at Ceres on 21 May 1772 (biographical details from ancestrylibrary.com).

3 The Gentleman's Magazine, LXXIII, February 1803, 198–99.

4 Sidney C Hutchison, ‘The Royal Academy Schools, 1768–1830’, Walpole Society, XXXVIII, 1960–62, no. 356.

5 Alexander Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, 1907, 34.

6 Love in a Coffin [London, British Museum (hereafter BM), 1868.0808.5405], published by ‘T. Trotter’, without an address. As Gillray made a habit of signing prints with made-up names, it is possible that the use of his colleague’s name was one of his jokes.

7 Details of his exhibits at the RA in this and subsequent years are taken from Algernon Graves, The Royal Academy: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors . . . 1769 to 1904, 8 vols, 1905–6, vol. 8.

8 Engraved portraits in the BM are currently being digitalized. There are some 90 portraits listed under Trotter in the index to the Catalogue of Engraved British Portraits . . . in the British Museum, VI, 697–98, and further portraits have been added since this was published in 1925, but the collection is by no means comprehensive and Trotter engraved a number of portraits of foreigners which are not included in the catalogue.

9 A volume, described as ‘Drawings of Heads by Thomas Trotter’, with the book-plate of the Library of Carton House, Co. Kildare, was sold at Drewett’s and Bloomsbury, 16 February 2012; most of the 21 outline drawings were for prints made by Trotter for the book trade.

10 Richard B Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland and America, Chicago, 2008, 180, fig. 2.18.

11 This print is based on the fine portrait by William Miller now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, which was presumably in the possession of Trotter’s father in London at the time it was engraved.

12 Morning Post and Morning Herald, both on 14 July 1781. Moffett and Hewlings, op. cit., 70, notes 4 and 8, record Trotter’s membership of ‘the Antiquarian society of Edinburgh’ from the title- page of his volume of Farleigh Hungerford watercolours; although note 4 continued ‘nothing else is known about him’.

13 Letter in the Lewis Collection, Free Library, Philadelphia, S–T.

14 Impression seen in a private collection; no traced example in a public collection.

15 Account of the Institution and Progress of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Part Second, Edinburgh, 1784, 84.

16 The print, with the publisher given as Joseph Freeman, Cambridge, 25 September 1784 [London, National Portrait Gallery (hereafter NPG), D37558] was published by subscription at half a guinea (10s. 6d.) [Cambridge Chronicle, 24 January 1784].

17 BM, 1831.0521.3.

18 BM, 1940.1109.112.

19 BM, 1922.0428.67.

20 William Zachs, The First John Murray, Oxford, 1998, pl. 23.

21 David Weinglass, The Engraved Work of Henry Fuseli, Basingstoke, 1994, no. 86.

22 This drawing is presumably the one of which he made an undated print, inscribed as ‘From the Original Drawing in the possession of Mr John Simco, taken from the life a short time before his decease and Etched by T. Trotter’ [BM, 1850.0810.188]; the same drawing, or a version, was engraved in stipple for Edward and Silvester Harding’s Shakespeare Illustrated, 1792, when it was inscribed as ‘From an Original Drawing by T. Trotter in the possession of the Revd Dr [Richard] Farmer’ [BM, G.8.41]. The wording on these prints is ambiguous and does not actually say that the original drawings were by Trotter; indeed, the portrait looks as if it was worked up from a small print which he had earlier etched of Johnson ‘Drawn from the Life by J. Harding’ and which had been published by George Kearsley on 10 February 1782, when Johnson was still alive.

23 John Simco (d. 1825), who may have been born into a Nonconformist family in Northampton in 1750, established himself as a print- and bookseller in the mid-1780s.

24 Henry Bromley, A Catalogue of Engraved British Portraits, 1793, 436, listing an oblong aquatint, dated 1786, also a second, private, plate. In Trotter’s posthumous sale, 24 March 1803, the first oblong plate was lot 93, and the second, described as ‘upright’, was lot 94; both were described as ‘extra rare’.

25 BM, 1850.0810.161.

26 BM, 1852.0214.291.

27 Bromley, 447, 446 and 414. The portrait of Elizabeth Trotter was re-issued many years later by Robert Wilkinson as Elizabeth Trotter / Afterwards / Mrs Thornbourough / Died 1817 [Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Hope Collection 29990).

28 Wakefield’s Merchant and Tradesman’s General Directory for London, 1790, unpaginated.

29 The Gentleman's Magazine, loc. cit.

30 David Weinglass, op. cit., no. 120. Weinglass assumed that Caldwall completed Trotter’s plate, but it must be pointed out that the cataloguers at the Folger Shakespeare Library, which holds three of Trotter’s proofs, are of the opinion that Caldwall’s print was engraved on a different copper plate [Folger online catalogue]; if this is the case, it is hard to understand why Caldwall received such a small fee.

31 Winifred H Friedman, Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, New York, 1976, 233.

32 The Gentleman's Magazine, loc. cit.

33 Catalogue of the Hoare Library at Stourhead, John Bowyer & Son, 1840, 412. The volume, with pages measuring 21 by 141/2 inches (532 × 362mm), has 107 pages numbered in ink in the top right of each sheet and catalogued by the Museum as 1982.2660–2675.

34 This volume was bought in Morice’s sale by the Revd JE Jackson, and was subsequently acquired by Lord Crewe, whose ex-libris it carries. Jackson compiled eight albums titled Hungerford Family Collections, and in vol. I, ‘Places A–C’, 169, there is a watercolour, apparently by Trotter, with the title ‘Monument to Thomas Hungerford Esq/ in/ Old S.t Luke's Church, Chelsea, Middx' [1982.3718, on a sheet 300 × 190mm].

35 ‘Report to the Trustees', 18 March 1824, in Appendix to the Report from the Select Committee on the British Museum, 1835, 413. The reference to Fowler is to the builder William Fowler of Winterton, Lincs, the self-taught engraver of a series of large plates of stained glass and mosaics [David Alexander, ‘Antiquity at half a Guinea', Country Life, 13 March 2003, 102–6, with five plates in colour].

36 Towcester and District Local History Society: http://www.mkheritage.co.uk/tdlhs/PlacesStLawrence/Tour/ archdeaconsponne.html (accessed 6 December 2014).

37 Topographical Prints and Drawings of the late William Bentham, sold Evans, 10–12 April 1838, contained, lot 202, ‘Drawings of Tiffield Church, Monument at Towcester &c by Buckler, Trotter &c'.

38 Edmund Dorrell (1776–1857), brought up by a doctor uncle in Warwick who wanted him to study medicine [John Lewis Roget, A History of the ‘Old Watercolour’ Society, I, 1891, 248]. He had entered the RA Schools as an engraver aged 21 in August 1797 [Hutchison, no. 723]. It is not known whether he had been apprenticed to an engraver, but his presence at Trotter's funeral suggests some link between them, perhaps as a pupil or assistant. He later became known as a landscape artist [see Roget, cit.].

39 Biographical details from ancestrylibrary.com

40 A Catalogue of a well chosen Collection of Prints, from Sir Joshua Reynolds, Angelica Kauffman, Morland, &c . . . a Volume containing several Thousand Specimens of Engraving in Portraits, Drapery, landscape, &c. Engraving Tools, &c. of Mr. Thomas Trotter, Engraver, deceased, Richardson, 31 . . . Strand, Thursday, March 24, 1803, And Two following Evenings, at Six o'Clock (copy in Print Room, British Museum).

41 There were a number of women engravers at work at the time of Trotter's death; the most notable were Caroline Watson (1760–1814), who worked in stipple, and Elizabeth (1777–1849) and Letitia (1779–1849), daughters of the line engraver William Byrne [see David Alexander, Caroline Watson & Female Printmaking in Late Georgian England, Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum, 2014, esp. 70–72].

42 NPG D35668, lacking date or publication line.

43 K Cave (ed.), The Diary of Joseph Farington, IX, New Haven and London, 1982, 3209, recording her election in January 1808; she held the post until June 1813 [ibid., XII, 4376]. No record of her death has been found.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Alexander

David Alexander, who is Honorary Keeper of British Prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, has organised many exhibitions, and has catalogued the work of several engravers, such as Richard Newton, George Hayter, George Vertue, and Caroline Watson.

English Heritage acknowledges the cooperation of Wiltshire Museum, Devizes, in allowing a selection of the Trotter watercolours to be photographed