Thomas WORLIDGE

Signed with the artist’s initials, the present sheet was in all likelihood produced as an independent work of art, and such finished drawings by Worldige were popular among the fashionable circles of London and Bath.

This drawing was once part of the large collection formed by Charles Rogers (1711-1784), a member of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, who was an art historian as well as a collector of prints and drawings. After his death his collection passed to his brother-in-law, William Cotton, and thence to his son, also William Cotton, on the death of the elder Cotton in 1791. The bulk of the collection was dispersed at auction in two sales held over thirty days in 1799, while the remainder, inherited by the third William Cotton, was eventually presented by him in 1850 to the Public Library at Plymouth and is now in the Museum there. 

The collection of paintings, drawings and prints assembled by the banker William Esdaile (1758-1837), beginning in the late 18th century, was housed at his estate on Clapham Common on the outskirts of London. Esdaile’s large collection included numerous drawings by such artists as Michelangelo, Raphael, Rubens, Titian, Claude and Gainsborough, and was dispersed after his death in a series of auctions between March 1838 and June 1840.