Caricatures, Campagna, and Connoisseurs: Thomas Patch and the British Grand Tour in Eighteenth-Century Italy

Caricatures, Campagna, and Connoisseurs: Thomas Patch and the British Grand Tour in Eighteenth-Century Italy

Presented by Hugh Belsey, Guest Curator and Independent Scholar

Known primarily as a caricature artist, Thomas Patch (1725-1782) in fact engaged in a much wider array of activities. He was a landscape painter, experimental printmaker, and a dealer of antiquities and old master paintings. He was also among the first scholars of early Renaissance art.  This exhibition will explore the many aspects of Patch’s art, life, and associations with the British community of diplomats, tourists, artists, and collectors in Italy. 

Hugh Belsey, a graduate of the Universities of Manchester and Birmingham, has lectured to groups in Europe, America, Australia, and Britain. For twenty-three years he was the curator of Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury (UK) where he formed one of the largest collections of the artist’s paintings and drawings. In 2004 he was awarded an MBE in recognition of his museum work. His long-awaited catalogue of portraits by Thomas Gainsborough was published by Yale University Press in February 2019 and was awarded the William W.B. Berger Prize for British Art History in 2020.