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For the British artist studying in Italy, the sketchbook was a crucial tool. Three on "classic ground" the act of drawing focused the attention and aided the understanding. Back in Britain the sketchbook provided not only a record of the art and landscape encountered but also a repertoire of poses, figural groupings, and compositional ideas from the ancients and the masters of the Renaissance and Baroque or of richly evocative landscape elements that could be incorporated into their own art. The sketchbook attributed to Thomas Patch is of a different nature. It records not the beauties of Italian art and the Italian countryside but a gallery of British Grand Tourists. Although the attribution of the sketchbook as well as the accuracy of the inscribed identifications have been questioned, the lively studies are plausibly the work of Patch, and the displayed portrait could well be that of the twenty-seven-year-old Edward Gibbon, future author of History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. After being banished from the Papal States for an unnamed indiscretion, Patch took up residence in Florence. There he became a close friend of Sir Thomas Mann, the British Minister to Florence, through whom he was introduce to all the visiting British worthies, including, in 1764, the young Gibbon.

Scott Wilcox


Wilcox, Forrester, O'Neil, Sloan. The Line of Beauty: British Drawings and Watercolors of the Eighteenth Century. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2001. pg. 126, cat. no. 107, N5220 M552 P38 2007 OVERSIZE (YCBA)