Page 35 from a sketchbook of 78 leaves containing Studies and Designs done in Rome in the Year 1752. The figure of Niobe is taken from the famous Antique sculptural group originally in the Villa Medici, Rome but from the 1770s in the Uffizi, Florence. It shows Niobe trying to protect the last of her seven daughters from the arrows of Apollo and Diana. The figures appear in a similar pose in P90 The Destruction of the Children of Niobe, Yale Center for British Art, which Wilson exhibited in 1760. A few years before his journey to Italy the Revd Joseph Spence discussed the marble group at length and illustrated the central figures in his book, Polymetis (London, 1747, pp. 96-100 and 111). In Wilson's first version of the subject P90A, Private Collection at Ashridge, painted in Rome perhaps as early as 1754, the group was composed differently. As noted by Robin Simon, Wilson's associates in Rome, J.J. Winckelmann and Johannes Wiedewelt, made a particular study of the Niobe group, together with the other sculptures in the Villa Medici, in 1756-58.
