NORTHCOTE, James (1746-1831), historical and portrait painter, was born at Plymouth on the 22d October 1746. Though he early showed an inclination for art, his father, a poor watchmaker of the town, insisted that he should be bound with himself for an apprenticeship of seven years. During his spare hours the boy was diligent with brush and pencil, and on the expiry of the term, in 1769, he 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, who had been the object of his warmest admiration from early boyhood. At the same time he studied from the round and the life in the Academy schools, making, it would seem, rather slow progress in the technical processes of art. In 1775 he left Reynolds, and about two years later, having acquired the requisite funds by portrait-painting in Devonshire, he set out for Italy. There he remained for three years, studying the portraits of Titian, looking, as he tells us, twice at Michelangelo for every time he looked at Raphael, and forming the resolution that in the future he would paint portraits for bread and historical subjects for fame. On his return to England 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 the Shakespeare gallery of Aiderman Boydell. 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. They were suggested by the Pamela of Richardson and the Idle and Industrious Apprentices of Hogarth,—a painter for whom Northcote professed little admiration. The series was popular at the time, but neither in truth of dramatic conception nor in technical qualities does it approach the parallel works of the older master. 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, which 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. By unwearied diligence, combined with extreme frugality, he was enabled to accumulate, before his death on 13th July 1831, a fortune of £40,000.
His works possess a certain dignity, and they tell their story clearly; but they are marred by defective drawing and dull colouring, and by the gross anachronisms and inconsistencies in costume common to the historical painters of the period. Northcote was emulous of fame as an author, and his first essays in literature were contributions to The Artist, edited by Mr 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.
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