Thomas Patch

Florence was second only to Rome as the most important destination for Grand Tourists. In contrast to the Imperial City it lacked the necessity for a forensic study of classical antiquity. Instead it offered the largest gallery of paintings in what is now the Uffizi and Sir Horace Mann, the British resident, ensured that visitors were welcomed at a weekly conversazione. Mann was an intimate friend of Thomas Patch. They lived close to each other and as Mann noted Patch ‘is never out of it [his house] a whole day’. Patch’s caricature engravings give a unique insight into Anglo-Florentine life. The engravings fall into two sections.

The volume includes six sheets of heads, four etchings to a sheet, some printed in black and others in red ink, some simply etched though most using soft-ground. Several of them are dated 1769 and 1770 and one dates from 1765. The first in the series shows Charles Hadfield, a Mancunian who provided accommodation for visitors in his hotel on the Oltrarno. Other likenesses include well-known Grand Tourists such as the ‘Welsh Maecenas’ Sir Watkin Williams Wynn who was in Florence in October 1768 and Henry Lyte who acted as bear-leader to William, 5^th Duke of Devonshire and William Fitzherbert in the same year. A number of the heads show characters, recorded in Florence in 1764/5, who appear in Patch’s painted caricature groups, which indicates that the prints were related to a long-term project. These small heads may have been made to illustrate a study about physiognomy that was burnt and these pages may have been a hurried attempt to salvage some of his work.

In addition the book contains twenty-five etched full-length studies of Florentine characters. They include the author Laurence Sterne who had travelled to Italy in 1766 in an unsuccessful attempt to improve his health. Patch painted him as his fictive character Tristram Shandy with Death handing him an empty hourglass. Sterne died in London in March 1768 and the print is dated 1769. Other figures include Francis Harwood, a busy sculptor who was described by the Fleming Joseph Nollekens in broken English as ‘knocking the marbil about like feway’, Ferdinand Gregori, a skilled Florentine printmaker who provided Patch with etchings for his study of Ghiberti’s second set of Baptistry Doors, an infamous quack oculist, Cavalier John Taylor, whose agonized patient is held down by the masked figure of Pulchinella while Taylor removes his eye with a fork and Richard Dalton, later the Royal Librarian, who had walked to Rome with Patch in 1747. This group of prints also includes native Florentines, but they are more difficult to identify.

These larger engravings are highly finished and they include two remarkable portraits of Patch himself, one showing him seated at a table ‘canonising’ the mask of a satyr and the other shows his likeness as a contented reclining bull with a view of Florence in the background. The print includes an inscription from St Luke’s Gospel in Italian, Latin and Greek which reads, ‘he that humbleth himself shall be exalted’.

Although this rare and extraordinary volume is in libraries in Britain, Italy and America, this is the first copy to come to market in living memory.

We are very grateful to Hugh Belsey for writing this catalogue entry.