THOMAS MANBY (c.1633-1695)

THE PONTE LUCANO, NEAR TIVOLI
Bears inscription & numbering [possibly by Francis Place (a)] u.l. Manby 2-6
Pen & black ink with grey wash on laid paper
28 x 47 cm
 
PROVENANCE:
Francis Place (1647-1728);
Thence by descent to Elizabeth Fraser (1805-1873) and thence, on her death, to her second husband Patrick Allan Fraser (1813-1890), Hospitalfield, Abroath;
By whom donated to Arbroath Art College;
Sold by the trustees of Arbroath Art College, Sotheby's, London, 10.06.1931, lot 149 ('Various views in Italy, including two views of the Ponte Lucano, near Tivoli, etc. (11)');
Where acquired by Bernard Squire;
From whom acquired by Iolo Williams (1890-1962), London;
Thence by descent to the previous owner
 
 
 
 
Iolo Williams, the former owner of this fascinating sheet, was the first modern-day scholar to examine the career of Thomas Manby, one of the very first British artists to visit and record the landscapes of Italy. Williams summarised Manby's extant works thusly:
 
 
'Another English artist who worked in Italy was Thomas Manby...eleven topographical drawings apparently by him are known. They are in grey wash, generally with some pen work, and they were sold at Sotheby's in 1931 in the remarkable collection of English drawings, chiefly of the seventeenth century, which had belonged to Patrick Allan Fraser, of Hospitalfield, Arbroath. They were catalogued without attribution as 'Various views in Italy, including two views of the Ponte Lucano, near Tivoli'. Several of them have the name Manby written on them in a very old hand, and there seems little reasonable doubt that they are the work of this English landscape painter, of whom it is recorded that he 'had been several times in Italy, and consequently painted much after the Italian manner'. He is known to have executed landscape backgrounds in oils for Mrs Beale, including one to a portrait now at Welbeck. He died in 1695 and there were probably two sales of pictures by or belonging to him. The best of the extant group of drawings is one representing a bridge over a river, with part of a castle to the right and figures in the foreground [now in the Yale Centre for British Art, acc. no. B1977.14.5699]...These wash drawings, though they are chiefly concerned with ruins, sometimes go beyond topography, and search out, not very effectively perhaps, towards imaginative landscape, as, for example, in one (an upright...)... which shows a tree rather to the left of the foreground, below and beyond which an expanse of mountainous country is seen. It is to be noted that Manby's drawings are a good deal like certain grey wash drawings by his younger contemporary Francis Place... and they also resemble an anonymous and apparently English seventeenth century drawing, in the same medium, inscribed 'Ye Remains of ye Temple of Concord behind ye Campidoglio' [now attributed to John Talman though this is doubted by Kim Sloan, British Museum, acc. no. 1956,0414.4], which was once in the collection of Jonathan Richardson, and which I now have. These similarities suggest that there may have been something more like a school of English landscape draughtsmen of this sort than we know at present...' (1)
 
 
Williams owned a further view by Manby of the Ponte Lucano, the Roman bridge near Tivoli on the Via Tiburtina which crosses the Aniene, with that work illustrated in his seminal text Early English Watercolours (2). Shortly after publishing this indispensable book, he donated the drawing to the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (acc. no. E.1168-1935). 
 
 
Baynbrigg Buckeridge, one of the first English art historians, noted in his 1704 Essay towards an English School of Painters that Manby was ‘a good English Landskip-Painter, who had been several times in Italy, and consequently painted much after the Italian manner…he was famous for bringing over a good Collection of Pictures, which were sold at the banqueting-house about the latter end of King Charles IId’s Reign [1685]. John Cocks advertised the sale on 4 February 1695/6 of ‘Mr Pearce, carver [Edward Pierce, sculptor, d.1695], and Mr Manby, painter, their curious Collection of Books, Drawings, Prints, Models & Plaster Figures.’ Wadham Wyndham, the son-in-law of the artist Francis Place (1647-1728) who had known Manby, noted that there were 14 drawings by Manby himself in that sale (3)
 
Following on from Iolo Williams own research, Kim Sloan pointed out the references to Manby in Charles Beale’s notebooks, wherein the painter recorded in 1672 that Manby informed his (Beale’s) family of the death of the artist Isaac Fuller (c.1606-1672). Four years after this, Manby is again recorded as having provided the landscape background in a copy that Mary Beale had made after a portrait by Lely, for which Charles Beale provided him ‘some lake and pink pigments.’ (4) Aside from these professional interactions, Manby appears to have been close with the Beale family, as Charles also noted that he had lent him treatises on painting by Antonio Doni and Leonardo da Vinci. 
 
 
Manby’s visit to Italy introduced him to the Dutch-Italianate artists active in Rome during this period, and he likely encountered works by Bartholomeus Breenbergh and Jan Asselijn, among others, who were as-yet little-known in Britain. Manby’s own style owes much to these artists, and his extant drawings all show a departure from the strict topographical approach that his predecessors in England had practised, and even seem to have been drawn in-situ. 
 
Only a small number of Netherlandish artists who had been in Rome had also worked in England, and it seems therefore that Manby introduced their style of landscape draughtsmanship and painting to antiquarians and amateurs such as John Talman and Francis Place; indeed, Place owned all eleven of Manby’s surviving drawings. Kim Sloan has noted that ‘This early evidence of ‘sketching’ from nature rather than ‘delineating’ it topographically is of great significance to the later tradition of English landscape drawings.’ (5) Manby's work represents therefore a crucial moment in the history of landscape drawing in Britain, and the present work is an outstanding example of this coalescence of traditions.