NORTHCOTE, JAMES (1746–1831), English painter, was
born at Plymouth on the 22nd of October 1746. He was
apprenticed to his father, a poor watchmaker of the town, and
during his spare hours was diligent with brush and pencil. In
1769 he left his father and started as a portrait-painter. Four
years later he went to London and was admitted as a pupil
into the studio and house of Reynolds. At the same time he
attended the Academy schools. In 1775 he left Reynolds,
and about two years later, having acquired the requisite funds
by portrait-painting in Devonshire, he went to study in Italy.
On his return to England, three years later, he revisited his
native county, and then settled in London, where Opie and
Fuseli were his rivals. He was elected associate of the Academy
in 1786, and full academician in the following spring. The
“Young Princes murdered in the Tower,” his first important
historical work, dates from 1786, and it was followed by the
“Burial of the Princes in the Tower,” both paintings, along with
seven others, being executed for Boydell’s Shakespeare gallery,.
The “Death of Wat Tyler,” now in the Guildhall, was exhibited
in 1787; and shortly afterwards Northcote began a set of ten
subjects, entitled “The Modest Girl and the Wanton,” which were
completed and engraved in 1796. Among the productions of
Northcote’s later years are the “Entombment” and the “Agony
in the Garden,” besides many portraits, and several animal
subjects, like the “Leopards,” the “Dog and Heron,” and the
“Lion”; these latter were more successful than the artist’s efforts
in the higher departments of art, as was indicated by Fuseli’s
caustic remark on examining the “Angel opposing Balaam”—Northcote,
you are an angel at an ass, but an ass at an angel.”
The works of the artist number about two thousand, and he made
a fortune of £40,000. He died on the 13th of July 1831.
Northcote was emulous of fame as an author, and his first essays in literature were contributions to the Artist, edited by Prince Hoare. In 1813 he embodied his recollections of his old master in a Life of Reynolds. His Fables—the first series published in 1828, the second posthumously in 1833—were illustrated with woodcuts by Harvey from Northcote’s own designs. In the production of his Life of Titian, his last work, which appeared in 1830, he was assisted by William Hazlitt, who previously, in 1826, had given to the public in the New Monthly Magazine his recollections of Northcote’s pungent and cynical “conversations,” the bitter personalities of which caused much trouble to the painter and his friends.