Mattia Jona, Master Drawings and Prints, Japanese Prints - Piazzetta Guastalla 5, 20122 Milan, Italy, tel (+39) 02 8053315

JOHN HAMILTON MORTIMER (Eastbourne, Sussex 1740 - London 1779) FEMALE HEAD IN PROFILE (Beatrice in Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing')
Pen and black ink. The drawing, oval shaped, 355 x 280 mm. The old mount 430 x 372 mm. On the back of the mount inscribed in pencil ' "Portia" / John Hamilton / Mortimer'.
Despite the old inscription the drawing is in fact preparatory, in reverse, for the character of Beatrice in Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing', etched by Mortimer in 1776. See here an impression of the print at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Other preparatory drawings, in reverse, for Mortimer's series of twelve etchings depicting shakespearian characters, exist. Two of them are, again, at the Victoria and Albert Museum; for Poor Tom in 'King Lear', and for Shylock in 'The Merchant of Venice'

By 1757, while he was still young, Mortimer was studying in London at the Duke of Richmond's Academy. During this time he became a friend of Joseph Wright, a fellow student at the Academy. Mortimer submitted works for exhibition to the Society of Artists—of which he was elected a Fellow in 1765—each year from 1761 until 1778, when he transferred to the Royal Academy. Despite his prizes, Mortimer received few commissions for history paintings and increasingly turned to portraiture to make a living. From 1770, in addition to his output of portraits and conversation pieces, history paintings and theatrical subjects, a new interest in the monstrous and barbarous (described by Mortimer’s contemporaries as his ‘horrible imaginings’) appears in his work. His fascination with psychological and physical sensationalism places him in the vanguard of the Romantic Movement in Britain. In the late 1760s and ’70s a circle of British painters in Rome had already begun to find academic precepts inadequate. James Barry, the brothers John and Alexander Runciman, John Brown, George Romney, and the Swiss-born Henry Fuseli favoured themes—whether literary, historical, or purely imaginary—determined by a taste for the pathetic, bizarre, and extravagantly heroic. Mutually influential and highly eclectic, they combined, especially in their drawings, the linear tensions of Italian Mannerism with bold contrasts of light and shade. Though never in Rome, John Hamilton Mortimer had much in common with this group, for all were participants in a move to found a national school of narrative painting. Mortimer was also much inspired by the etchings of Salvator Rosa and he was the first English artist to promote untamed figures of bandits as the heroes of his work, the tragedy associated with these characters according perfectly with the Romantic nature of his art. And the theme influenced the Italian artists associated to the British painters in Rome, an example being this drawing by Felice Giani here on my web site. Despite his short life, the influence of John Hamilton Mortimer’s art, especially through the etchings of his work, has been considerable. He was revered by many of the younger artists of his time, especially William Blake, who regarded him as a radical opponent to Sir Joshua Reynolds and the mainstream of conventional academic art.