This characteristic drawing by James Thornhill is previously unpublished, made before March 1720 it gives fascinating insights into his creative process. The drawing for a ceiling painting of roughly 20 x 10 feet in size shows Zephyr scattering flowers over the seated goddess Cybele, who is in turn, surrounded by Cyrene, her son Aristaeus and the river god Peneus. The sheet is extensively inscribed by Thornhill describing the iconography, including a later note stating that the composition had been ‘resolved on march 1720’, suggesting that a final scheme had been agreed by the patron. The scheme for which this is preparatory seems not to have survived but can be related to a contemporary sheet in the British Museum which shows a design for a ceiling Thornhill painted at Eastbury Park, Dorset. From at least 1718 Thornhill had been spending considerable portions of each year in his native Dorset, eventually repurchasing his family estate at Thornhill and being selected as Member of Parliament for the constituency of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis in 1721. In Dorset Thornhill worked on the decoration of three houses, completing the staircase of Charborough Park for General Thomas Erle in 1718 and decorating a house in Sherborne for Henry Seymour Portman the following year, finally working for George Bubb Dodington, first Lord Melcombe at Eastbury Park from 1719. Designed by John Vanbrugh for George Bubb Dodington’s uncle, the interiors were completed in the 1720s and included a suite of rooms decorated by Thornhill.[1]
James Thornhill was a hugely successful decorative painter who worked on some of the most significant interior projects of the first decades of the eighteenth century. Thornhill’s interior schemes include rooms at Chatsworth House, Hampton Court Palace and Stoke Edith, Herefordshire. In 1707, at a relatively young age, Thornhill won his greatest secular commission for decorating the painted hall at the Royal Naval Hospital, Greenwich. Thornhill’s complex, swirling iconography, celebrating the Protestant succession, was filled with a cast of classical deities, personifications and allegorical figures. In 1715 Thornhill was awarded the commission to decorate the interior of Christopher Wren’s dome at St Paul’s Cathedral. This complex project, working within the confines of the pre-existing architectural space, resulted in Thornhill receiving over £6,500 in payment. Thornhill continued to be in demand for the grandest interior schemes of the period, completing commissions for Queen’s College, Oxford, decorating Hawksmoor’s Clarendon Building and painted the hall, saloon and gallery of Vanbrugh’s Blenheim Palace.
Thornhill was the natural choice to work on the interiors at Eastbury. A drawing, similar in style, construction and arrangement to the present drawing, preserved in the British Museum, shows ‘Bacchus, Venus & Ceres’ in an octagon, the drawing is further inscribed: ‘Historys proper for a dining Room, or to ye Pavilion of a Seat in a Hunting County’ with a list of alternative subjects.[2] The present design shows the iconographically more complex arrangement of Zephyr scattering flowers on the seated figure of Cybele, crowned and holding a sheaf of corn. Cybele, the personification of Mother Earth, is in turn surrounded by the seated figures of ‘pan offering his fleece’, accompanied by boys with sheep, Aristaeus, who is associated with the discovery of beekeeping and is shown with a beehive along with the figure of the river god Peneus, shown bearded and holding an oar. The horizontal composition designed for a space, according to the scale on the drawing, 20 feet 6 inches by 10 feet 6 inches, is conceived in sotto in su. Thornhill’s drawing was presumably designed to be shown to his patron and Thornhill includes not only a helpful description of the figures included, but a key to other possible classical figures with a list of their attributes. This suggests the active role the patron took in formulating the final scheme. As Thornhill’s note makes clear the final agreement was for more simplified iconography, omitting Peneus and pan. The iconography suggests that the study was made for a county house, at the heart of an agricultural estate and perhaps in a hall or vestibule with access to the outside. Eastbury Park was demolished in 1775 and there is no record of Thornhill’s involvement with the interiors except for the British Museum drawing and a further drawing of the Ascension for the Chapel.[3] This beautifully fluid wash drawing therefore offers fascinating insight into Thornhill’s working practice and a tantalising glimpse into the interior of Vanbrugh’s great lost house.
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