STOTHARD, THOMAS English subject painter, was born in London on Aug. 17, 1755, the son of a well-to-do innkeeper in Long Acre. After a delicate childhood, he was apprenticed in Spitalfields to a draughtsman of patterns for brocaded silks. In 1778 he became a student of the Royal Academy, of which he was elected associate in 1792 and full academician in 1794. In 1812 he was appointed librarian. He died in London on April 27, Among his earliest book illustrations are plates engraved for Ossian and for Bell's Poets; and in 1780 he became a regular contributor to the Novelist's Magazine, for which he executed 148 designs, including his II admirable illustrations to Peregrine Pickle and his graceful subjects from Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison. He contentedly designed plates for pocket-books, tickets for concerts, illustrations to almanacs, portraits of popular players—and into even the slightest and most trivial sketches he infused a grace and distinction which render them of value to the collectors of the present time. He is at his best in domestic or ideal subjects; the heroic and the tragic were beyond his powers.
His oil pictures are usually small in size, and rather sketchy in handling; but their colouring is often rich and glowing, Stothard having been a great admirer of Ripens. The "Vintage," perhaps his most important oil painting, is in the National Gallery. He was a contributor to Boydell's Shakespeare gallery, but his best known painting is the "Procession of the Canterbury Pilgrims," also in the National Gallery, the engraving from which, begun by Luigi, continued by Niccolo Schiavonetti and finished by James Heath, attained an immense popularity. It was followed by a companion work, the "Flitch of Bacon," which was drawn in sepia for the engraver but was never carried out in colour.
Among his illustrations are the two sets to Robinson Crusoe, one for the New Magazine and one for Stockdale's edition, and the plates to The Pilgrim's Progress (1788), to Harding's edition of Gold smith's Vicar of Wakefield (1792), to The Rape of the Lock (1798), to the works of Gessner (1802), to Cowper's Poems (1825), to The Decameron, the superb editions of Roger's Italy (183o) and Poems Stothard also decorated the grand staircase of Burghley House, near Stamford (1799-1803) ; the mansion of Hafod, North Wales, (i8io) and the cupola of the upper hall of the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh (now occupied by the Signet Library), with Apollo and the Muses, and figures of poets, orators, etc. (1822). His designs for a frieze and other decorations for Buckingham Palace were not executed, owing to the death of George IV. He also designed the magnificent shield presented to the duke of Wellington by the mer chants of London, and executed with his own hand a series of eight etchings from the various subjects which adorned it. In the British Museum is a collection, in four volumes, of engravings of Stothard's works, made by Robert Balmanno.
An interesting but most indiscriminately eulogistic biography of Stothard, by his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Bray, was published in 1851. A. C. Coxhead's Thomas Stothard, R. A., an Illustrated Mono graph (1906), contains a short biographical chapter, and an accu rately dated summary of the various books and periodicals illustrated by Stothard ; see also Austin Dobson, Eighteenth Century Vignettes, 1st series (1892).