Gavin Hamilton (1723-1798)

Gavin Hamilton (1723 – 1798), the Scottish-born painter who spent most of his life in Italy, was one of the most prominent figures among the artists and collectors of 18th-century Europe. Although he first went to Rome to further his career as a painter and pursue his interests in the Antique, he soon found himself in the circle of distinguished artists, critics and antiquarians, many of whom were British visitors to Italy on the Grand Tour seeking to build or augment their collections of paintings and ancient culture. It was thus an easy move for Hamilton to begin dealing in Old Master paintings and antiquities, and his activities as a dealer almost overshadowed his reputation as an innovative painter of classical themes. The present publication, with its introductory essay on Hamilton’s life and career, and the corpus of more than 300 edited and annotated letters, provides a significant contribution to the literature on the history of collecting. It brings evidence of Hamilton’s wide-ranging personal contacts with the most eminent collectors of the time and of the many great works of art that passed through his hands, among them Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks (now in London, National Gallery), Tintoretto’s large Adoration of the Shepherds (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum), Salvator Rosa’s Pythagoras (Fort Worth, Kimbell Museum). The correspondence documents Hamilton’s dealings with agents and purchasers and provides new source material on the dispersal of Italian art collections, on the fate of individual pictures and more generally on British artistic taste in the second half of the eighteenth century. There is also a body of illustrations that includes both Hamilton’s own works – history paintings and portraits – as well reproductions of some of the works mentioned in the letters. The author, Brendan Cassidy, took his Ph.D at Cambridge, and was Research Associate at the Warburg Institute before becoming Director of the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University. He is currently Professor and Head of the School of Art History at the University of St. Andrews.