William (1649) Lodge Sold at Auction Prices

WILLIAM LODGE (BRITISH 1649-1689)

WILLIAM LODGE (BRITISH 1649-1689) York from St Maries Tower -Ao 1678 etching 17 x 24 cm From a family of prosperous cloth merchants in Leeds, Lodge had an annual income of £300 from an early age and although he studied law at Lincoln's Inn, he did not find it necessary to practice. He had learnt to draw, limn and etch (sic) while still at Cambridge in 1667, possibly taking lessons from the amateur artist, John Lambert. That year, when promising to send his mother 'the best efforts of my limning', he took care to reassure her that 'I make painting only a recreation an hour after dinner or so, no hindrance in it but rather a furtherance to things of greater concernment' (Hake, p. 60). In 1669, he accompanied Thomas Belasyse, 2nd Viscount Fauconberg on his embassy to Venice, where he remained until 1671. Giacomo Barri's Viaggio Pittoresco d'Italia was published that year and in 1679, Lodge published the English translation, accompanied by his owned etched map of Italy and portraits of the artists mentioned in the text. He also etched a series of views in Italy and France as well as of monuments and buildings of antiquarian interest around London, York and Leeds. During that decade he had been drawn into the circle of York virtuosi, particularly Dr Martin Lister, whose shells, fossils, snails and spiders, he drew and etched to accompany the doctor's papers for the Royal Society. Lodge's greatest friend among the York circle was Francis Place, who also illustrated Lister's articles and with whom Lodge shared a passion for topographical views, antiquities, and angling, the pair frequently travelling together on sketching tours that lasted three to four months. Sketching tours were not yet as popular as they were to become in the 18th century and in 1678, during the Popish Plot, they were arrested as Jesuit spies. Place produced a mezzotint portrait of Lodge, and when the latter died, Place inherited his portrait in oils by Alexander Cromer Vertue recorded that Lodge 'painted some few pictures from the life in Oil, but was no mighty labourer in Art, having enough to live on without it. being all his life single'. His oils 'from the life' may well have been landscapes, the subject preferred by Lambert, but none survive. His topographical drawings and drawings of monuments are in the collections in Leeds and York, and the British Museum has three views of monuments and ancient buildings in London, intended for engraving, which came from the collection of another of the circle of York Virtuosi, Ralph Thoresby (ECM & PH, 1-3). LITERATURE: Hake, p. 60; Vertue I, pp. 26, 74-5, 83, 119-21; Norah Gillow, 'A Portrait of William Lodge by Comer', Preview: City of York Art Gallery Quarterly, XXV, Apr., 1972, 883-7; A Griffiths, 'Stuart Print', 1998, pp. 245, 253-4.