Niobe

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Niobe

National Museum Wales, Cardiff

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Artist

William Woollett (1735-1785) after Wilson

Title

Niobe

Date

Published 1761

Medium

Engraving and etching on laid paper

Dimensions

Metric: 497 x 628 mm (sheet size)
Imperial: 19 9/16 x 24 11/16 in. (sheet size)

Collection

National Museum Wales, Cardiff. To license image, click here.

Accession Number

NMW A 11412

Wilson Online Reference

E11

Description

Niobe is at the centre, clutching a small child to her and looking upwards to the clouds on the right, where Apollo and Artemis fire arrows at her children. Several are already dead or wounded; the others, on the left, are attempting to escape. There is a mass of broken trees on the far right, a fortress and stormy seas with lightning flashes on the left.

Exhibited

Free Society of Artists 1762 (205 - an impression); London 1973-74 (31 - an impression); Tercentenary 2014 (90)

Provenance

Unrecorded but acquired by the museum before 1969

Signature/inscription

Lettered below image:
[1] Upper left: Richard Wilson Pinxit
[2] Upper centre: I.Boydell excudt.
[3] Upper right: William Woollett sculpsit.
[4] Lower centre: NIOBE. | Published according to Act of Parliament by J. Boydell Engraver in Cheapside; London 1761.
[5] Lower left: See Ovids Metamorphos. Page. 17.
[6] Lower right: Size of the Picture 6 Feet 3 In. Long | 4 Feet 10 In. Deep.

Verso inscriptions

[1] Upper right, pencil: 48213

Subject

The subject is taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book 6, lines 144-312. Niobe, daughter of Tantalus and Queen of Thebes, is punished for having dared to suggest, because she had seven sons and seven daughters, that she was superior to the goddess Leto (or Latona). Apollo and Artemis, children of Leto, killed all of Niobe's offspring in revenge and she herself wept until she was turned into stone.

Related Drawings

D355 Recumbent Male Nude, National Museum Wales, Cardiff

Versions

See 'Links' tab
Further impressions are at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery (Ma1565) and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

Related Paintings

P90 The Destruction of the Children of Niobe, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven

Critical commentary

After the first Society of Artists exhibition in 1760, John Boydell commissioned Woollett to engrave Wilson's acclaimed submission, P90 The Destruction of the Children of Niobe, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven, together with three of the other most celebrated landscapes of the exhibition, including a Phaeton. For engraving Niobe Woollett was offered the unprecedented fee of 100 guineas, supplemented by two payments of £25 as the complexity of the project was revealed. The print was finally offered to subscribers in October 1761 and exhibited at the Free Society in 1762. A laudatory poem by John Lockman in The Public Advertiser emphasised the significance of the print, of Woollett and of Boydell in raising the reputation of the British school of engraving. Niobe brought Boydell profits of about £2,000, unprecedented for an engraving after a landscape by a British artist. It sold well in France, enabling Boydell to import French prints in exchange.

Previous Cat/Ref Nos

387 A pts

Bibliography

John Lockman, The Public Advertiser, 5 November 1761; Booth Notes Doc. 4; Booth Notes Doc. 7; Jones 1803, p. 19; Edwards 1808, p. 88; Fagan 1885, p. 19, cat. XLII, 5th State; Grant 1945; WGC, p. 161, notes with pl. 19a; Parris 1973, pp. 29-30 - an impression; R.T. Godfrey, Printmaking in Britain, Oxford, 1978, pp. 43-45; Clayton 1997, pp.186, 188-89; Layfield 2010, pp. 29-32; Wilson and Europe 2014, p. 276; A Griffiths, The Print before Photography, 2016, pp. 73, 291-292, repr.

Condition/Conservation

Image size 436 x 583 mm (17 1/4 x 23 in.); plate size: 485 x 612 mm (19 x 24 in.) Mounted on tissue strips all round. Trimmed close to the platemark.

Niobe

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