20 Facts About John Vanderbank

John Vanderbank was an English painter who enjoyed a high reputation during the last decade of George I's reign and remained in high fashion in the first decade of George II's reign.

George Vertue's opinion was that only intemperance and extravagance prevented Vanderbank from being the greatest portraitist of his generation, his lifestyle bringing him into repeated financial difficulties and leading to an early death at the age of only 45.

John Vanderbank senior was the leading tapestry weaver in England throughout his life and by the introduction of the lighter and less formal style, now referred to as Chinoiserie, he exercised a powerful influence on the style of the Soho weavers.

John Vanderbank first studied composition and painting under his father and then the painter Jonathan Richardson, before becoming one of Sir Godfrey Kneller's earliest pupils in 1711 at his art academy in Great Queen Street, neighbouring his father's tapestry workshop.

John Vanderbank succeeded his father to the post of Yeoman Arras-maker to the Crown in 1727.

The family's relationship to the leading late 17th century painter and engraver Peter Vanderbank is uncertain although the Parisian origins of both, the similarity of profession, the facial similarities of Kneller's chalk portrait of Peter Vanderbank and John Vanderbank's self-portrait drawing, and John Vanderbank senior's ownership of land in Hertfordshire where Peter Vanderbank married and spent his final years are suggestive.

John Vanderbank worked chiefly as a portraitist, painting some allegorical subjects, and as an illustrator.

John Vanderbank used a bold pigmentation in the flesh where pink tones are painted thinly over the cooler greys of the ground layer to suggest glowing skin, the technique of colori cangianti derived from Rubens who was himself inspired by the artists of the seicento.

John Vanderbank's Academy, as it became known, proved popular and its list of subscribers is a roll call of the next generation of leading artists.

In 1724 it was discovered that the academy treasurer had embezzled the subscription funds and this, coupled with John Vanderbank's growing debt problems, and perhaps Cheron's old age and illness, led to the closure of the academy that summer.

John Vanderbank was a frequent concert goer, drawing a caricature of Senesino, Cuzzoni and Berenstadt in a scene from Handel's Flavio in 1723, which was anonymously etched and engraved, and in the same year painting the portrait of the leading soprano, and later contralto, Anastasia Robinson, Countess of Peterborough, of which Faber produced a popular mezzotint in 1727.

From 1729 John Vanderbank occupied a house in Holles Street, Cavendish Square, rent-free thanks to the generous patronage of Lord Carteret who appropriated the contents of his studio after his death.

Ellis Waterhouse considered that John Vanderbank's masterpiece was the large full-length of Queen Caroline.

In 1723 John Vanderbank was commissioned by the publishers J and R Tonson to illustrate Don Quixote, in the original Spanish and this eventually appeared as a lavish four-volume quarto edition in 1738 with sixty-eight engraved plates after John Vanderbank.

John Vanderbank illustrated or designed frontispieces for various volumes of plays.

John Vanderbank then accepted a free residence in Lord Carteret's house in Holles Street, neighbouring the Duke of Chandos's house in Cavendish Square, London.

That John Vanderbank succeeded in remaining in the first rank of portraitists in the 1720s and again in the 1730s in spite of his intemperance, sometimes producing outstanding works of art, testifies to the accuracy of Vertue's opinion.

John Vanderbank was deemed by Vertue to be 'a Vain empty wooman' though, judging by the portrait miniature by Christian Friedrich Zincke and Faber's mezzotint from her portrait by her husband, she was certainly strikingly attractive.

Vertue noted that John Vanderbank 'left no children behind him by this wooman' and indeed none has ever been traced from the marriage.

Anne John Vanderbank died in 1750 and was buried at St George Hanover Square.