With the great majority of Richard Dalton’s highly finished red chalk drawings after the antique held in the Royal Collection at Windsor, the appearance of the present sheet is a rare occurrence.1

Dalton’s subject is the Laocoön, an ancient sculpture that was excavated in Rome in 1506 and soon installed in the Vatican’s Belvedere Court by Pope Julius II (1443-1513) (fig. 1). A masterpiece of the ancient world - Pliny wrote that ‘of all paintings and sculptures [it was] the most worthy of admiration’.2 Depicting the Trojan priest, Laocoön, with his sons, Antiphantes and Thybraseus, the three are locked in a deadly struggle with two sea snakes that had been sent to kill them by the gods. By the eighteenth-century the marble had lost none of its reputation, with many grand tourists holding it in the highest regard.

Fig. 1 Louis Ducros and Giovanni Volpato, The Cortile del Belvedere with the Laocoön, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, watercolour over etched outline

Richard Dalton had a fascinating and diverse life; his portrait, in later years, was etched by his friend Thomas Patch (fig.2). The son of the Rev. John Dalton of Darlington, County Durham, he worked successfully as a painter, an engraver, a draughtsman, an antiquarian dealer and from 1755, as librarian to George, Prince of Wales, later King George III. As well as accompanying James, 1st Earl of Charlemont on a tour of Egypt, Turkey and Greece in 1749, he made no fewer than six tours to Italy, the first in 1739, where he entered the studio of the painter Agostino Masucci (1691-1758).3 Other pupils there included Pompeo Batoni, Johann Zoffany and Gavin Hamilton and by 1741, Henrietta, Countess of Pomfret wrote to a friend that he was making red chalk drawings after statues for Francis Greville, 8th Baron Brooke (1719-1773).4 Dalton made etchings after some of his drawings that were published in 1745-6 and then reissued by John Boydell in 1770 under the title of ‘A collection of twenty antique statues: drawn after the originals etc. in Italy by Richard Dalton Esq.’ The present drawing relates to his engraving of the Laocoön that appeared as the first plate in that publication (fig. 3).5

Left: Fig. 2 Thomas Patch, Portrait of Rcihard Dalton, Private Collection, etching

Right: Fig. 3 Richard Dalton, The Laocoön, etching

This drawing once belonged to Forest H. Sweet of Battle Creek, Michigan. His father, Forest G. Sweet (1869-1956), established a manuscripts and rare books dealing firm, a business that F.H. Sweet, and then his daughter, Julia (see Provenance), continued.

1Royal Collection Trust: RCIN 917338, 917339, 917342, 917744, 917345 & 917348
2See F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique, The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900, New Haven and London, p. 243-247  
3See J. Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701-1800, New Haven and London 1997, pp. 267-270
4Correspondence between Frances, Countess of Hartford (afterwards Duchess of Somerset) and Henrietta Louisa, Countess of Pomfret between the years 1738-1741, London 1805, vol. III, pp. 102 and 110-111
5The Wellcome Collection, London, acc. no. 663861i