(1709 - 79), physician and poet; b. Castleton, Rox.; MD Edinburgh 1732; phys. to London Soldiers' Hosp. 1746; phys. to British forces in Germany 1760 - 3.
1770 [dep. London Nov. 1769] Genoa (Apr. 1770), Leghorn (May), Florence (by 19 May), Rome (by Jul. - Aug.) [Paris, Sep.]
Armstrong visited Italy for his health and he sailed out with Henry Fuseli, whom he had first met in Berlin in 1764 and whose studies in Italy he was to support.1 They landed at Genoa and Armstrong alone spent two weeks with the ailing Tobias Smollett at Leghorn early in May.2 According to Knowles, Armstrong had quarrelled with Fuseli,3 but they were together in Florence on 19 May4 and in Rome in July 1770.5 In September Armstrong was in Paris with Andrew Lumisden (to whom he was related), who found him 'tolerably well',6 and by 10 December 1770 he had 'returned in better health.'7 In 1771, under the pseudonym Launcelot Temple, Armstrong published A Short Ramble through some parts of France and Italy, in which he described Michelangelo's paintings in the Sistine Chapel as 'a prodigious display of sublime, melancholy, and dreadful imagination' - quite in the Fuseli manner.
1. D. H. Weinglass ed., Collected English Letters of Henry Fuseli, 9 - 10. 2. L. Melville, Life and Letters of Smollett, 248, 274. Smollett, Letters, ed. L. M. Knapp, no. 104. 3. Knowles, Fuseli, 1:46 - 7. 4. Gazz.Tosc.. 5. Weinglass (at n1), 10. 6. Dennistoun, 2:137 (22 Sep. 1770). 7. Weinglass (at n1), 12.