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    Niobe

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    Niobe
    Niobe
    Niobe
    Royal Academy of Arts, London
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    Artist
    William Woollett (1735-1785) after Wilson
    Title
    Niobe
    Date
    Published 1761
    Medium
    Etching and engraving
    Dimensions
    Metric: 436 x 584 mm
    Imperial: 17 3/16 x 23 in.
    Collection
    Royal Academy of Arts, London. To license image, click here.
    Accession Number
    05/2838
    Wilson Online Reference
    E11D
    Description
    Niobe 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 already wounded, the others, on the left, attempting to escape; a mass of broken trees on the far right, a fortress, and stormy seas with lightning flashes on the left
    Exhibited
    [An impression] Free Society of Artists 1762 (205); Kenwood 1980 (74); Tercentenary 2014 (90)
    Provenance
    Purchased from Thomas Cadell the younger's executors, 27 March 1844
    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.
    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
    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.
    Bibliography
    Anon, The Critical Review, vol. 12 (1761), p. 312; John Lockman, The Public Advertiser, 5 November 1761; 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; R.T. Godfrey, Printmaking in Britain, Oxford, 1978, pp. 43-45; Clayton 1997, pp.186, 188-89; Layfield 2010, pp. 29-32; A Griffiths, The Print before Photography, 2016, pp. 73, 291-292, repr.

    Work of Art

    Drawings

    • Richard Wilson (1713/14-1782), Recumbent Male Nude, National Museum Wales, Cardiff

    Versions

    • William Woollett (1735-1785)after Wilson, Niobe, Victoria & Albert Museum, London
    • William Woollett (1735-1785)after Wilson, Niobe, The British Museum
    • William Woollett (1735-1785)after Wilson, Niobe, National Museum Wales, Cardiff

    Paintings

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

    Exhibitions

    • London, Kenwood House, Iveagh Bequest, 11 July - 28 September 1980
    • New Haven, Yale Center for British Art & Cardiff, Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, 6 March - 29 October 2014

    Biographies

    • John Boydell (1720-1804)
    • William Woollett (1735-1785)

    Documents

    • Col. Maurice Harold Grant, 'Richard Wilson's Niobe'
    • Thomas Jones, Memoirs of Thomas Jones, Penkerrig, Radnorshire, 1803
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