VOLUME 86 (2024)
Thomas Carwitham (1701/2–45), History Painter and Mathematician
by Richard Stephens
AND
Lectures on Sculpture to Students of the Royal Academy Schools, c .1877, by Thomas Woolner RA (1825–92)
by Dr Claire Jones
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Volume 86 contains two papers, on topics from the early-18th and later-19th centuries. The volume also opens with a tribute to our late member Mary Lightbown (1922-2023), a distinguished historian of Wheatley and Zoffany.
Richard Stephens describes the life and career of the history painter and mathematician, Thomas Carwitham (1701/2-45) for the first time. He has established a corpus of 70 drawings, which are catalogued in the accompanying checklist. Carwitham appears to have studied under Sir James Thornhill, and helped make a full-sized set of copies of the Raphael Cartoons, now on loan from the Ashmolean Museum to Hampton Court Palace. Carwitham was also an enterprising mathematician who invented a drawing tool to help architectural draughtsmen.
Sculpture historian Dr Claire Jones, from the University of Birmingham, has published the undelivered lecture notes of Thomas Woolner RA (1825-92), an important new source for the study of Victorian sculpture. Woolner was the only sculptor member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who became a successful specialist portrait sculpture. He was briefly the Royal Academy's Professor of Sculpture in 1877-8, resigning apparently because of the time commitment. His lectures are appealingly direct and provide many insights, both practical and conceptual, about the making and goals of portrait sculpture in an age of Victorian heroes.