Joseph Highmore

Joseph Highmore (13 June 16923 March 1780) was an English painter of portraits, conversation pieces and history subjects, illustrator and writer. After retiring from his career as a painter at the age of 70, he published art historical and critical articles.

Life Highmore was born on 13 June 1692, in London, the third son of Edward Highmore, a coal merchant, and nephew of Thomas Highmore, Serjeant Painter to William III. He displayed early his ability in art but was discouraged by his family from taking up art professionally, and began a legal training instead. At the ending of a clerkship at the age of 17 (during which he continued to attend a drawing academy run by Godfrey Kneller and lectures on anatomy by William Cheselden ), he abandoned his law career and started to work as a portrait painter in London. From 1720, he attended the St Martin's Lane Academy, where he was exposed to contemporary French art. Highmore also made portraits of his children. His portrait of his daughter Susanna (c.1740, National Gallery of Victoria) is remarkable in the richness of the visual details and the confident glance which the sitter casts towards the viewer. For his portraits, he employed the specialist drapery painter Joseph Van Aken to paint the dresses and costumes of his sitters.

Highmore painted works illustrating biblical subjects, historical painting being a genre which Highmore had studied during his visit to Paris. One such biblical painting is Hagar and Ishmael, which Highmore donated to the Foundling Hospital for the purpose of decorating its Court Room. The painting is now part of the Foundling Hospital art collection at The Foundling Museum in London. During the 1740s, Highmore had become connected with the new Foundling Hospital which aimed to support desperate and abused women. His involvement caused him to engage with issues relating to women's vulnerability to sexual assault and society's unwillingness to support them. He expressed this engagement in his work The Angel of Mercy (c. 1746, Yale Center for British Art). It depicts a desperate mother about to kill her baby, when her hand is stayed by an angel who points to the Foundling Hospital shown in the background as the alternative to the murder of her child.

In 1744, Highmore painted a series of 12 paintings after scenes from Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. The novel was first published in 1740–1 and recounts the virtuous lady's maid Pamela Andrews' relationship with an aristocratic seducer whom she repeatedly rebuffs, then reforms and finally marries. Highmore's paintings were based on the novel Pamela but were not conceived as book illustrations, although they were later engraved by Antoine Benoist and Louis Truchy. They were rather an attempt to recount the whole story in successive and connected images. Highmore's pictures were conversation pieces which focused on the characters.

As an author, he was best known for the works Critical Examination of Reubens' two Paintings in the Banqueting House and Observations on Bodwell's Pamphlet against Christianity.

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