Thomas Forster
Sir Thomas Pope Blount, 1st Baronet (1649-97), 1700
Plumbago on vellum. Set into a wood frame with inner gilded mount
Oval, 4 ¼ in. (110 mm) high
Signed and dated ‘T. Forster/ delin./ 1700’
Philip Mould & Co.
To view all current artworks for sale visit philipmould.com Sir Thomas Blount, son of the traveller Henry Blount and his wife Hester, is best known as both writer and...
To view all current artworks for sale visit philipmould.com
Sir Thomas Blount, son of the traveller Henry Blount and his wife Hester, is best known as both writer and politician. He eventually inherited the manor of Tittenhanger, which had been rebuilt by his father, but which had been the residence of Sir Thomas Pope (1507?-1559), founder of Trinity College, Oxford.
Although Sir Thomas was educated at home and did not attend university, he was considered clever and articulate. In 1668 he entered Lincoln’s Inn and married the following year Jane Ceasar. The couple had fourteen children. In 1680, he was created a baronet by letters. A loyal Whig, he was a member of the Green Ribbon Club and sat in the House of Commons as member for St Albans.
It is possible that the current portrait, dated posthumously, is a copy from an slightly earlier plumbago by Forster intended to be engraved into a frontispiece for Blount’s literary works. He began his literary career in 1690, his first publication was Censura celebriorum authorum (1690), a volume, he explains in the preface, he had originally compiled for his own use and which he published only 'at the request of persons of distinguished learning', and with the hope that it 'might promote letters' (Biographia Britannica, 2.833, where a translation is provided).[1]
Blount went on to publish Essays on Several Subjects (1691; 2nd edn, 1692), 'writ in my idle hours, for my own Entertainment' (1691, sig. A2v); A Natural History (1693), De re poetica (1694). As his entry in the ODNB concludes, ‘Blount was well regarded in his lifetime as a cultivated and retiring man’.[2] He died of apoplexy at the age of forty-seven at Tittenhanger in June, 1697.
Blount is typical of the type of patron attracted to plumbago portraits. With rising interest in the rapidly evolving art of print-making, the aesthetic associations between engravings and plumbagos appealed to connoisseurs and collectors. Often commissioned by academics and writers, these highly-detailed, monochromatic works could also be used as a basis for engravings. The lack of colour and modest size was also perhaps of appeal to those patrons who considered other types of portraiture rather more vanity projects than truthful studies of the human face.
Thieme Becker’s encyclopedic Allgemeines Kunstler-lexicon suggests that perhaps this lack of apparent ‘quality’ of sitter can be explained by Forster’s pitch to a level of society more dignified and generally private in character.
Little is known about the artist Thomas Forster, who was working between 1690 and 1713, but he was considered to be one of the most accomplished artists working in the plumbago medium.
[1] The folio is a biographical and bibliographical dictionary of the most eminent literary and scientific writers, with over 500 entries. Subsequent editions were published in Geneva in 1694 and 1696.
[2] Online edition accessed 8 April 2020.
Sir Thomas Blount, son of the traveller Henry Blount and his wife Hester, is best known as both writer and politician. He eventually inherited the manor of Tittenhanger, which had been rebuilt by his father, but which had been the residence of Sir Thomas Pope (1507?-1559), founder of Trinity College, Oxford.
Although Sir Thomas was educated at home and did not attend university, he was considered clever and articulate. In 1668 he entered Lincoln’s Inn and married the following year Jane Ceasar. The couple had fourteen children. In 1680, he was created a baronet by letters. A loyal Whig, he was a member of the Green Ribbon Club and sat in the House of Commons as member for St Albans.
It is possible that the current portrait, dated posthumously, is a copy from an slightly earlier plumbago by Forster intended to be engraved into a frontispiece for Blount’s literary works. He began his literary career in 1690, his first publication was Censura celebriorum authorum (1690), a volume, he explains in the preface, he had originally compiled for his own use and which he published only 'at the request of persons of distinguished learning', and with the hope that it 'might promote letters' (Biographia Britannica, 2.833, where a translation is provided).[1]
Blount went on to publish Essays on Several Subjects (1691; 2nd edn, 1692), 'writ in my idle hours, for my own Entertainment' (1691, sig. A2v); A Natural History (1693), De re poetica (1694). As his entry in the ODNB concludes, ‘Blount was well regarded in his lifetime as a cultivated and retiring man’.[2] He died of apoplexy at the age of forty-seven at Tittenhanger in June, 1697.
Blount is typical of the type of patron attracted to plumbago portraits. With rising interest in the rapidly evolving art of print-making, the aesthetic associations between engravings and plumbagos appealed to connoisseurs and collectors. Often commissioned by academics and writers, these highly-detailed, monochromatic works could also be used as a basis for engravings. The lack of colour and modest size was also perhaps of appeal to those patrons who considered other types of portraiture rather more vanity projects than truthful studies of the human face.
Thieme Becker’s encyclopedic Allgemeines Kunstler-lexicon suggests that perhaps this lack of apparent ‘quality’ of sitter can be explained by Forster’s pitch to a level of society more dignified and generally private in character.
Little is known about the artist Thomas Forster, who was working between 1690 and 1713, but he was considered to be one of the most accomplished artists working in the plumbago medium.
[1] The folio is a biographical and bibliographical dictionary of the most eminent literary and scientific writers, with over 500 entries. Subsequent editions were published in Geneva in 1694 and 1696.
[2] Online edition accessed 8 April 2020.
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