Ramsay, Allan
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- Ramsay, Allan
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(1713 - 84), painter and antiquary, s. of the poet Allan Ramsay; studied in London with Hysing 1732 - 3; m. 1 1739 Anne Bayne (d. 1743), 2 1752 Margaret Lindsay, dau. of Sir Alexander Lindsay of Evelick; FSA 1743; King's Painter 1767.
1736 - 8 [dep. London Jul. 1736] Genoa (23 Sep. 1736), Leghorn (1 Oct.), Florence (5 - 21 Oct.), Rome (26 Oct. 1736 - summer 1737), Naples (summer), Rome (1 Oct. 1737 - mid-Apr. 1738), Venice, Modena, Parma, Milan, Turin [England c.Jun.]
1754 - 7 [dep. London Jul. 1754] Genoa, Leghorn, Pisa, Florence (by 12 Oct. - 11 Dec.), Rome (14 Dec. 1754 - Apr. 1756) with visits to Tivoli (May - Jun. and Sep. 1755), Naples ( - 10 May 1756), Rome (mid-May 1756 - ), Viterbo, Rome (by Nov. 1756 - May 1757), Florence (May - mid-Jun.), Bologna, Venice [England by Nov.]
1775 - 7 [dep. London Aug. 1775] Pisa, Rome (by 21 Oct. 1775 - ), Turin (1776?), Ischia (Jul. - Aug. 1776), Rome, Licenza ( - 28 Jun. 1777), Rome [London Oct.]
1782 - 4 [dep. London 4 Sep. 1782] Rome (by 11 Dec. 1782 - 9 Apr. 1783), Naples (13 Apr. - 22 Jun.), Terracina (24 Jun.), Rome (27 Jun. - Aug.), Licenza (27 Aug. - 15 Sep.), Rome (15 Sep. - 4 Oct.), Florence (9 Oct. 1783 - 5 May 1784 - ) [d. Dover, 10 Aug.]
Ramsay made four separate visits to Italy, spread over a period of nearly fifty years. He went first as a young painter, but on his last visit, when his eyesight was fading, his interests were those of an antiquarian. He was a man of 'a superior and disciplined mind' whose interests ranged widely.
He first arrived in Italy at the age of twenty-three after completing his studies in London with the painter Hysing. He travelled with Alexander Cunyngham, whose journal provides a detailed record of their tour (see Alexander Cunyngham).1 In Florence Ramsay made drawings from statues in the Uffizi, and in Rome he experienced an initial disappointment with Raphael's Stanze (an experience later shared by Reynolds). Ramsay continued to draw classical sculpture and received more formal training under Francesco Imperiali and at the life class at the French Academy. He became acquainted with Batoni (then twenty-eight) and Camillo Paderni, another pupil of Imperiali (and later keeper of the museum at Portici). Cunyngham left Rome in March 1737, and the 'Monsu Ramse Scozzese Ateista' listed that Easter as living by the Piazza di Spagna ('seguita P. di Spagna verso Propaganda') may have been Ramsay.2
That summer Ramsay went with Samuel Torriano to Naples, to study with Solimena, then past eighty, to whom he had been recommended by Billy Bristow. He acquired 'great fame' he told Cunyngham, with his portrait drawings on blue paper, and Solimena himself sat to him. He was also composing poems and epigrams. James Clark, the Scottish antiquarian in Naples, later remembered Ramsay saying that he had seen Vesuvius erupt in 1737, 'a torrent of liquid fire covering the spot they were [then] passing'.3 On 1 October he returned to Rome with Torriano, whose portrait (dated Rome 1738) remains the only one securely associated with Ramsay's first Italian visit. Ramsay commissioned works from Paderni for the poet James Thomson and for George Turnbull's Treatise on Ancient Painting. In April 1738 he completed the purchase for Dr Richard Mead of a volume of drawings by Pietro Santo Bartoli and he intended to leave Rome in the middle of that month. Again he travelled with Torriano, to Venice (to see Veronese and Titian) and then to Modena, Parma, Milan, Turin and 'over the Alps as hard as we can drive'. Torriano left him at Marseilles, and Ramsay was back home in the early summer. On 10 June 1738 Dr Mead was still anxiously awaiting his Santo Bartoli drawings.4
On his second visit in 1754 Ramsay, now forty-one and an acknowledged master, was accompanied by his sister Catherine (d. 1798, unm.) and his second wife, Margaret Lindsay (with whom he had eloped in 1752).5 They spent two and a half years in Rome where they took rooms on the Viminale. There Ramsay was able to 'preserve the greatest part of [his] time for painting, drawing and reading', free from 'dinners, suppers and jaunts' among British travellers around the Piazza di Spagna. They nevertheless held weekly conversazioni for the English, 'and as Mrs Ramsay is of so good a family and Mumpy [Allan Ramsay] himself so rich they are no discredit', wrote the aspiring young Robert Adam6 who, with Cl?risseau, P?cheux, Piranesi, the traveller Robert Wood and the Abb? Grant, became one of Ramsay's closest associates. Ramsay and Piranesi in turn attended Adam's conversazioni. Ramsay showed none of the Jacobite ambivalence of his previous youthful visit and Andrew Lumisden was received with indifference. In March 1755 his daughter Amelia was born in Rome (later Lady Campbell; d. 1813). In May and June (and again in September) they went on an excursion to Tivoli, where they stayed in the Villa d'Este. It was there that Ramsay began his search for Horace's villa. In May 1756 he was sketching Virgil's tomb at Posillipo (SNG) in the course of a short visit to Naples. On their return journey to Rome they visited Monte Cassino where Ramsay studied Solimena's large paintings in the monastery choir. In the summer of 1756 Ramsay was ill and spent a time convalescing in Viterbo, Adam meanwhile reporting he was consumptive and likely to die. But the Ramsays left Rome together in May 1757 for Florence, where Allan painted for the Master of Trinity a copy of Galileo's portrait by Sutterman in the Uffizi (Trinity, Camb.). They returned home through Germany and Holland, the outbreak of the Seven Years War preventing a return through France. They were home by November.
Throughout this second visit Ramsay drew and painted. On his way to Rome he had stayed in Florence to copy in the Uffizi and in Rome he made many copies from old masters, particularly Domenichino, and he again attended life classes in the French Academy. Late in 1755 Ramsay's pupil, David Martin, joined him in Rome, bringing out with him, it was said, boxes of Ramsay's drawings to be shown at the Accademia di S.Luca (see Martin). Ramsay again met Batoni, whose portraits of British travellers influenced his own work. Ramsay painted Robert Wood, John Burgoyne, the Abb? Grant and Robert Adam, besides himself and his wife (both priv. coll.); in January 1756 Adam mischievously wrote that only Mrs Ramsay and Wood were finished, 'the others half done so that [Ramsay] has properly come to Italy to have the name of it'.7 The Grant portrait is now known only through a drawing and that of Adam is untraced.
Ramsay's third visit began in 1775, when he was sixty-two and increasingly afflicted with rheumatic pains following a fall in 1772 which had put an end to his painting activities.8 He set out with his wife and his daughter Amelia for Rome. Apparently he tried the baths at Pisa and Casiano while on his way, but they were ineffectual; the taste of the latter being 'somewhat like that of Tunbridge Wells, but twenty times stronger'.9 On 21 October Father Thorpe noted an infirm Ramsay with his wife and daughter in Rome.(10) There he sat to Michael Foy for his bust (SNPG), showing him stern-faced ('mumpy' as Adam would have said) and wearing a toga. He spent his time in antiquarian pursuits, Fuseli commenting on Ramsay's fondness for 'tracing on dubious vestiges the haunts of ancient genius and learning'. The two shared a love of scholarship and visited Turin together to see the works of a 'learned but uninspired painter'. In July and August 1776 Ramsay went to the Isle of Ischia, to take the baths. There was a temporary recovery and Ramsay began to draw again; a Self-portrait of 1776 is in the NPG and a study of his wife in the SNG.
But his most sustained activity was the investigation of Horace's Sabine Villa. He identified the site in the Licenza valley (which is still accepted); Mrs Ramsay became his amanuensis and the young Jacob More assisted him by drawing views. In the summer of 1777 Count Orsini lent Ramsay rooms in his palace at Licenza, where More joined him in June. This was a happy break, Ramsay later recalling how the inhabitants were themselves 'antiquities', admirable in their 'contented poverty' and 'innocence'. On 28 June 1777 the Ramsays returned to Rome and by October they were back in London.
Ramsay's second wife died on 4 March 1782 and, unprepared to withstand 'the cold and damp of another of our winters', he returned to Italy for a fourth and last time, an 'old and enfeebled scholar - painter'. He was accompanied by his fourteeen-year-old son John who kept a travel journal.(11) They had reached Rome by 11 December, and John described copying out texts for his father, or reading to him from the classics, as well as taking drawing lessons from Batoni (now in his mid-seventies). Ramsay attracted many visitors in Rome; the artists' names recurring most frequently in his diary are J.R. Cozens, H.D. Hamilton, Gavin Hamilton, Jacob More and Angelica Kauffman. Ramsay would hold small literary parties which were on occasion attended by Lords Breadalbane, Cowper, Clive and Shaftesbury. The Abb? Grant was still in Rome and another Catholic priest, Father Jacquier, a French astronomer and mathematician, was engaged to teach John Ramsay geometry. Ramsay's researches on Horace's Sabine villa continued and Philipp Hackert, then painter to the King of Naples, had made ten views of Licenza which Ramsay discussed with him.
On 9 April 1783 Ramsay and his son left Rome and made a slow progress to Naples, where they lodged on the Chiaja. William Hamilton became a close and solicitous friend until his departure in May; he played Handel sonatas to Ramsay on his violin, while Ramsay gave him a copy of his new pamphlet (printed in Florence in 1783) On the Right of Conquest (a defence of imperial power). To Charles Parker he explained the origins of triglyphs and produced a rather far-fetched idea of the origins of flutings.(12) While he talked with Lord Tylney, his son John climbed Vesuvius and visited Herculaneum with Lord Grandison (1 May). Later that month father and son visited Lake Avernus and then Pompeii, Salerno, Eboli and Paestum. They left Naples late in June, sailing to Terracina, then to Rome. On 17 July they went to Tivoli for a month, Ramsay anxious to complete his treatise on Horace's villa. On 7 August he began to paint a portrait of his son which was completed by 23 September (untraced).
When they returned to Rome on 18 August they found another invitation from Count Orsini to stay in Licenza, and they duly returned, arriving on the 27th and staying to 15 September. Hackert had meanwhile produced his map of Licenza. They finally left Rome on 4 October, spending the winter in Florence. Horace Mann, aged seventy-eight, carefully tended Ramsay, aged seventy-one. Robert Merry rather surprisingly persuaded Ramsay to contribute some verses to the Arno Miscellany (Ramsay was 'Disporting and playing at leap-frog with brats', commented Horace Walpole). John continued visiting collections, while his father stayed indoors. John Ramsay's journal ends on 5 May 1784 in Florence; he had been sitting to H.D. Hamilton on 26, 28, 29 April and 3 and 4 May. That summer his father, hearing that his married daughter Amelia was about to return to London from the West Indies, determined to return home. The journey, however, proved too much for his frail constitution and he died on arriving at Dover on 10 August, without seeing his daughter again.
1. Ramsay 1992, 27 - 40. 2. AVR sa, S.Lorenzo in Lucina. 3. Forbes jnl.MSS (Mar. 1793). 4. Ramsay 1992, 39. 5. Ibid., 115 - 38. 6. Fleming, Adam, 121. 7. Ramsay 1992, 128. 8. Ibid., 244 - 9. 9. Ramsay to Sir Jn.Pringle, 22 Nov. 1775 (letter with W.A. Myers 1965). 10. Thorpe letters MSS (21 Oct. 1775). 11. Ramsay jnl.MSS, and Ramsay 1992, 264 - 76. 12. Parker letters MSS, B 2090 (12 Jul. 1783).