From the Master of the Giants Album

The present work once formed part of an album that was rediscovered in the 1940s and was the subject of an exhibition held in 1949 at the London galleries of Rowland, Browse and Delbanco. The group contained some forty works and while half were drawn on a similar scale to the present works, the remainder were smaller. Some of the drawings were dated June or July 1779 but none were signed. 

Given the clear influence of Michelangelo, classical sculpture and Italian prints, scholars agreed that the works had been made in Rome and were by an artist operating within the circle of the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli. Rowland, Browse and Delbanco named the unknown figure ‘The Master of the Giants’ and debate as to the true identity of the artist has simmered away ever since.

In the 1950s the collector Leonard Duke and the leading expert on Fuseli, Frederick Antal, suggested that Prince Hoare (1755-1834), could have been responsible for the drawings. Hoare was the second son of the pastellist William Hoare of Bath and he lived in Rome between 1776 and 1799. While in Italy he immersed himself in the artistic community and is recorded as striking up friendships with Henry Fuseli, William Pars, Alexander Day, James Nevay and James Northcote.

An alternative attribution was presented by Nancy Pressly in her 1977 Burlington Magazine article.¹ Citing a signed drawing in the collection of Maidstone Library and a group of unsigned sheets at the Royal Academy, London, she confidently assigned the group to the history painter James Jefferys (1751-1784), who was also in Rome over the same period (in his case 1775 to circa 1781) thanks to a scholarship from the Dilettanti Society.

In more recent times Lowell Libson and Jonny Yarker Ltd. have handled several works from the album. They have sided with Duke and Antal and have suggested that Prince Hoare is the more likely author.

In January 2020 Sotheby’s sold a sheet from this enigmatic group, entitled The Punishment of Lust.² The emergence of that work prompted Malcolm Rogers, former Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to express his view that the ‘Master of the Giants’ is likely to have been John Cartwright (fl. 1767-1808), an artist with whom Fuseli shared a house in St Martin’s Lane, London in 1779 and the like subject of an intimate portrait by Fuseli now in the National Portrait Gallery, in London.³

^1. N. Pressly, 'James Jefferys and the 'Master of the Giants', The Burlington Magazine, 1977, pp. 280-284 

^2. Sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 26 January 2020, lot 86 ($47,880)

^3. London, National Portrait Gallery, inv. no. NPG 4538