John Opie (British 1761-1807) A young boy playing with a cat, oil on canvas, unframed, 76 x 64cmProvenanceColognaghi, Faulkner, 1930BiographyOpie, John (1761-1807), portrait and history painter, was born in May 1761 at Blowing House, Mithian, St Agnes, near Truro, Cornwall. When he was fourteen or fifteen, Opie was 'discovered' by Dr John Wolcot, an amateur artist and critic who was both a pupil and a friend of Richard Wilson, and who had valuable acquaintances in the artistic world (a portrait of him by Opie is in the National Portrait Gallery, London). Wolcot proved to possess something of genius as a publicist and he and Opie went into partnership in the promotion of Opie's career. Wolcot introduced Opie to Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was very much impressed and rather crushed his former pupil James Northcote, who was then trying once again to establish himself in London: 'You have no chance here', Northcote recorded Reynolds as saying to him, 'There is such a young man come out of Cornwall … Like Caravaggio, but finer' (Leslie and Taylor, 2.341-2). Northcote nevertheless became a lifelong friend of Opie, for whom he retained the highest regard, remarking to Hazlitt, 'He was a true genius' (Earland, 31), and Opie's portrait of Northcote dates from about 1799.On 4 December 1782, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Opie married, unhappily as it turned out, Mary, daughter of Benjamin Bunn. Her father was described as 'a Jew broker to whom Opie used to sell his pictures' (Earland, 46). Alfred Bunn, the tyrannical theatre manager, was apparently a relation of his wife's with whom Opie stayed in touch.The marriage led to Opie's parting from Wolcot. Opie was earning more than Wolcot, but now had a wife to support. Wolcot, on his side, was later wont to point out that he had given up his medical practice and £300 or £400 a year in order to promote Opie. While they were in partnership Wolcot earned some money with his Peter Pindar satires, which also provided a useful vehicle for favourable publicity on Opie's behalf as, for example, with one of two portraits of the organist and composer William Jackson, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1783. The break with Wolcot was not final at this stage: Opie and his wife together with Wolcot visited Wales in 1783 or 1784, and Wolcot and he toured the south-west in 1783-4. Opie's particular gift for child portraiture was demonstrated at this time (c.1784), with paintings of the children of the fifth duke of Argyll and his famously beautiful duchess, the former Elizabeth Gunning (priv. coll.). One of Opie's finest fancy pictures, A Peasant's Family (Tate collection) is also of children and was painted c.1783-5, while Opie further demonstrated his range in a groundbreaking genre group showing a schoolmistress and her varied pupils (priv. coll.). It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1784 under the title A School and drew Walpole's approving note, 'Great nature, the best of his works yet' (Earland, 54). At the same time in his more original portraits, for example, Thomas Daniell and Captain Morcom, with Polperro Mine, St. Agnes, in the Background (1786; Truro, County Museum and Art Gallery; another version ex Sothebys, London, 13 July 1994, no. 66), Opie developed this same rare seam of realistic genre, of a kind which seems to reach back to John Riley's portraits in the preceding century.Opie was also attracted, however, by that chimera of the British school, history painting on a large scale. By the winter of 1786 he was signed up to create a substantial number of canvases for Alderman John Boydell's Shakspeare Gallery. This commission followed close upon Opie's dramatic success with his first large history picture, The Assassination of James I of Scotland, when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy that year. Caravaggio, not only in the lighting but also in the gestures, although contemporary reference was more often made to the influence of Lo Spagnoletto (Jusepe Ribera).One can only speculate about how these influences came to bear upon Opie, since the tracks of his artistic education were so carefully covered by Wolcot, but prints after Caravaggio were certainly in circulation in eighteenth-century Britain. At the time, however, Opie was even more widely talked of as an 'English Rembrandt' and Caravaggio's influence would have been mediated through the many works of Rembrandt which Opie could have come across in English collections. The success of Opie's history pictures assisted his election as associate of the Royal Academy in 1786 and as Royal Academician in 1787.Like many another English artist, Opie was frustrated by having to paint portraits for a living rather than grander history paintings, and his income was also augmented by a few pupils: Henry Thomson RA; Theophilus Clarke ARA; Thomas William Stewardson; Jane Beetham; William Chamberlain; John Cawse; and the amateurs Elizabeth Mary Booth and the Revd John Owen (both referred to above) and Katherine St Aubyn. However, despite his yearning for fancy pictures and histories, and his skill at them, Opie exhibited his last historical painting at the academy in 1804, a scene from Gil Blas, and thereafter painted only portraits. The focus and freshness of his vision in portraiture gave way in his last years to imitative eclecticism, picking up a hint of Gainsborough here or a touch of Hoppner there.Opie's further ambition to become professor of painting at the Royal Academy began unpromisingly with a course of lectures at the British Institution in 1804-5 which he failed to finish. Nevertheless, when, on his becoming keeper, Henry Fuseli resigned the professorship at the academy in 1805, Opie was elected to the post, and the four lectures he managed to deliver in February and March 1807 were both better written and better presented than his earlier series. They were published as Lectures on Painting (1809). The last lecture was given on 9 March and, after a visit to Henry Tresham a few days later, Opie caught cold and subsequently a fever. He died in London on Thursday 9 April 1807. Opie enjoyed a remarkable reputation in his lifetime, although his own high estimation of his achievement has not lasted. He had genuine, if often sarcastic, wit and real talent and produced a handful of striking and original images. He struck a distinctive note among his contemporaries which can still be recognized. Technical shortcomings in drawing and in creating coherent figures, of a kind not unknown among his peers, made him inconsistent as a portraitist, but his fancy pictures and portraits of children can be better than those of almost any British artist of his time. He was not congenial and was liked and disliked in almost equal measure, not always for the right reasons in either case. It was noticeable at the time, for instance, that he was reluctant to stay long with his second wife's relations on visits to Norwich, and it may be that they did not heartily approve of him. A story told of Amelia's cousin Robert Alderson after the funeral on 20 April (a lavish affair at St Paul's Cathedral, where Opie was interred in the same vault as Reynolds) suggests this family mistrust, and also Opie's idiosyncratic character. The undertaker apologized to Alderson for putting the coffin the wrong way round (with Opie's feet towards the west rather than the east). 'Shall we change it?' he asked. 'Oh, Lord, no!' replied Alderson. 'Leave him alone! If I meet him in the next world walking about on his head, I shall know him' (Earland, 234).
