(fl. 1747 - 71), painter, etcher and dealer, b. Dublin; pupil of Francis Bindon and later studied in Paris and Amsterdam; exh. SA 1764 (from London).
c.1747 - c.1755 [Paris, Amsterdam] Rome, Capua (27 Sep. 1753), Naples [Dublin 1755]
1759 [Dublin, Paris 1757] Rome (1759) [Amsterdam 1760, Dublin 1762]
Exshaw trained in Dublin under Francis Bindon who, from his own experience, may have encouraged his student to go to Italy. After his first tour to the Continent, Exshaw returned to Dublin in 1755, when he held a sale at Geminiani's rooms: 'a curious and valuable collection of paintings, statuary and drawings, most of them originals of the best masters ... and others copied from capital pictures during a course of eight years' travel through France, Flanders and Italy, to the latter of which places he proposes to return some time next summer' (Strickland). 'Mr Carlos Exshaw' had passed through Capua on 27 September 1753 with the artist Richard Hayward, either going to or coming from Naples.1
By 1757 Exshaw was back in Paris and by 1759 he was in Rome, where he signed and dated a pencil portrait of a bearded man and etched from the life a model of Carlo Maratti.2 In the following year he was in Amsterdam, where he acquired works from the collection of Count Colloredo. After Exshaw's return to Dublin he held a second sale at Geminiani's rooms on 10 February 1762. Later in 1762 he settled in London and tried unsuccessfully to set up an Academy in Maiden Lane for instruction in drawing 'in the manner of the Caracci'. A further sale took place in Dublin in May 1764 of Italian, Dutch and Flemish pictures.
1. ASN cra 1257. 2. A. Crookshank and Knight of Glin, Painters of Ireland, 52.
N. F.