(1753 - 1820), merchant, of Catton, Norf., e. s. of Robert Harvey; m. Ann Ives (d. 1801); mayor of Norwich 1787.
1773 Genoa (Jul.), Florence (Aug.), Rome (by 28 Sep.), Capua (4 Sep.), Naples (Sep.), Rome (Oct.), Venice [England Feb. 1774]
A merchant, one of the main reasons for Harvey's tour through France, Italy and Germany, was commercial, and his journal (Harvey jnl.MSS) frequently reflects his practical good sense.1 It determined, for example, his choice of a portrait painter in Rome. He first visited Batoni (on 28 September), 'the best modern painter very fat', whose prices he found 'uncommonly dear. Sixty sequins [about £;30] ye least, then 75 and for a whole length 200'; he then visited other studios: one Mason [Maron?] produced portraits 'like good sign posts', and Labruzzi, before choosing Carlo Marsigli at 8 sequins and Venceslao Verlin for a whole length at 30 sequins. At Castel Gandolfo on 4 October he had an audience with the Pope who, he said, 'rides on horseback & plays billiards every day'. He found the Young Pretender 'almost always drunk', and he did not like the 'common people' in Rome whom he found 'a compound of Pride, roguery, laziness & poverty', while the nobility were 'all for vanity, much ceremonial, but no cordiality'; an Englishman, he concluded, should cry out 'Thanks to ye Gods, I was not born a Roman'.
In Genoa in July he had found visiting picture galleries had its irksome side: he had been given 'lists of ye pictures at ye door which you return on departing, the servants seldom content with 6l. what wretches. I cannot help thinking that Holkham & Houghton rival these places in beauties'. In Florence in August he had met Zoffany in the Tribuna in Florence working on his celebrated painting, and he had perceptively suggested that young Maria Hadfield would 'acquire great reputation in painting'. He passed through Capua on 4 September,2 and at Naples he decided that Sir William Hamilton was 'much more sensible but not so amiable' as Horace Mann. His Italian tour ended in Venice; by then his brain was 'a compound of pictures & antiquities' and he was hoping that 'the good family & Norwich Society will soon make a Modern of me again'.
1. See Moore 1985, 16 - 18, 67, 152 - 3. 2. ASN cra 1259.