THOMAS HEARNE'S COLONIAL COMMISSION FROM SIR RALPH PAYNE: THE THE LEEWARD ISLANDS IN THE WEST INDIES

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THOMAS HEARNE'S COLONIAL COMMISSION FROM SIR RALPH PAYNE: THE THE LEEWARD ISLANDS IN THE WEST INDIES

Thomas Hearne was born near Bath in 1744, and by the late 1750s he had moved to London where he was apprenticed to his uncle, a pastry cook. He was attracted to drawing, however, and in 1763 he won a Premium at the Society of Arts. Two years later he was apprenticed to William Woollett (1735-85), the leading landscape engraver. At the end of his apprencticeship in 1771 Hearne resolved to take up an offer to travel to the West Indies, employed as a draughtsman in the service of Sir Ralph Payne, who earlier that year had been appointed Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief of the Leeward Islands, a group of sugar colonies comprising Antigua, St. Christopher's (now called St. Kitts), Nevis and Montserrat.

The Payne family had been large landowners on St. Christopher's for several generations and were extremely active in the governance of the Leeward Islands. With his return to the West Indies, Sir Ralph Payne inherited a large estate from his parents on St. Christopher's, although he took up his main residence on Antigua, the largest island in the group and the established centre of colonial government.

In the Leewards Payne was a highly-privileged member of an influential oligarchy of rich, white families. They headed a social hierachy that was built upon the all-pervasive institution of black slavery. The white West Indians, a diminishing percentage of each island's population, were gripped by two ever-present fears - the first was the threat of French seaborne attack, the second was that of an insurrection among the expanding slave population. Considerable naval and military support was sought from the English government and much given.

Payne commissioned Hearne to celebrate and commemorate his stewardship of the Leewards, and during his three and a half years there Hearne recorded the towns, harbours, scenery, agricultural life and people. He retained almost one hundred and forty of the drawings which he made in the course of preparing a series of twenty large watercolours for Payne between 1775 and 1776. In the finished series there were ten views of Antigua, four of St. Christopher's, and one each of Montserrat, Nevis, Tortola, Crab Island, Puerto Rico and Madeira. Before the recent emergence of the present group of four watercolours, only four of the series of twenty had been traced - A View on the Island of Antigua: The English Barracks and St. John's Church from the Hospital (Private Collection); A View on the Island of Antigua: Court House and Guard House in the Town of St. John's, Antigua (Victoria & Albert Museum, London); A View on the Island of Antigua: The Front of the English Barracks, St. John's, from the Parsonage (Private Collection, Antigua); A View on the Island of Antigua: James Fort, St. John's Harbour, Antigua (Private Collection, Antigua).

Three other watercolours by Thomas Hearne of West Indian subjects are known, but do not form part of the twenty works made for Payne. Parham Hill House and Sugar Plantation, Antigua, 1779 (British Museum, London); A Scene on board HMS Deal Castle on a voyage from the West Indies, 1775 (National Maritime Museum, London); Negroes on mules, Antigua, c. 1771-5 (Henry C. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California).

The present four views, made for Sir Ralph Payne, are remarkable examples of Hearne's distinguished draughtsmanship, here deployed on a truly ambitious, panoramic scale - each view is made from two joined sheets of laid paper and measures five feet in width. Equally, these works are of great historical importance, depicting one of the leading centres of Britain's colonial empire in the period of relative peace and prosperity between the Seven Years War and the American Revolutionary War.

Behind the compositional arrangements and tehniques of these works commissioned by Payne lie the traditions of architectural and military draughtsmanship exemplified by the work of Paul and Thomas Sandby. Like the Sandbys in Scotland and Flanders, Hearne was essentially surveying a British military presence, albeit in the West Indies, and the ships of the Royal Navy and the forts of the islands are important pictorial elements in each view. In two of the images Hearne includes groups of figures, both black and white, which on close inspection reveal much of West Indian social life from the perspective of his employer, the Governor-General.

In 1810, after the death of the Sir Ralph Payne (later Lord Lavington), his widow disposed of his collection of works by Thomas Hearne. The sale catalogue remarked that: "These Drawings are particularly interesting to Gentlemen having Estates in these Parts, as they exhibit Accurate Views of some of the principal Towns and Harbours with the Costume of the Country: they likewise afford the Speculative Publisher an opportunity of enriching the Libraries of the Cognoscenti and others, by making a Volume of Engravings in imitation of the Originals"¹

No engravings were produced and these watercolours remain a unique record of the Leeward Islands in the mid-1770s.

In the twenty years after his return from the West Indies Thomas Hearne became one of the most admired and influential topographical artists working in late eighteenth-century Britain. His finest later works were picturesque landscapes of the Lake District and the Wye Valley, elegant townscapes of Bath, Edinburgh and Durham, and meticulous studies of ruined castles and abbeys. His work had an important influence on the next generation of British artists, including Turner, and he worked for three important connoisseurs of the period - Sir George Beaumont, Dr. Thomas Monro and Richard Payne Knight, the last of whom commissioned Hearne to paint a superb set of landscapes of Downnton, his estate in Herefordshire.

These exceptionally ambitious watercolours of the West Indies add a new dimension to ur knowledge of Hearne's early career, and help to explain why his work was held in such high regard in the 1780s and 1790s

¹Lavington Sale, Jaubert, London, 5 July 1810

Thomas Hearne (1744-1817)

View of Antigua: English Harbour, Freeman's Bay, and Falmouth Harbour, Monk's Hill etc. from the Hill near the Park (1775-6)

numbered '18' in the margin upper left, watercolour and bodycolour over pen and ink on two joined sheets of laid paper
20¾ x 60in. (52.7 x 152.4cm.)

Provenance

Sir Ralph Payne, Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief of the Leeward Islands (later the Right Hon. Lord Lavington); (f) his sale, Jaubert, London, 5 July 1810, lot 18

Lot Essay

English Harbour is a small inlet on the southern coast of Antigua, which provided an excellent natural harbour for British naval vessels on the Leeward Islands station. Although its channel was narrow and shallow, it was deep enough for eighteenth century men-of-war, while the surrounding hills offered good lookout and battery positions and some protection from hurricanes. From 1725-45 English Harbour increased in importance as a naval base with the construction of a naval dockyard, similar to Port Royal, Jamaica. Here, ships could be careened, repaired and refitted wihtout having to return to England, thus enabling a squadron to be permanently stationed in the Leeward Islands during the wars with France and Spain.

Hearne's panoramic view is taken from near the look-out point above the Halfmoon or Horseshoe Battery at the harbour entrance. On the opposite promontory is Fort Berkeley, constructed as early as 1704, with the King's Battery, ordnance stores and a guard house. Freeman's Bay is on the right and was the main warship anchorage in the eighteenth century; a shoreline battery of 20 guns provided additional defence. In the middle distance, just to the left and right of centre, is the naval dockyard known as King's Yard. It comprised a capstan house and wharves, a mast house, boathouse, smith's workshop, general workshops, and storehouses. In the central distance is Monk's Hill, with the walls of Great George Fort (constructed c. 1690-1705) just visible in on its summit. This was planned as Antigua's citadel or deodard - a seven acre area enclosed by stone walls, where women, children, old men and black slaves could retreat if the island was attacked. It was never used as a refuge, though it functioned as a signal station.

In the foreground Hearne had depicted a group of British military personnel attended by three servants and two slaves. Four men are wearing the blue uniforms of naval officers and may be personnel from the men-of-war anchored in Freeman's Bay. The three in red uniforms may be members of the regular army garrison from the St. John's barracks, or militiamen. The portly, seated figure on the right is probably Sir Ralph Payne himself, acting as host. Hearne's depiction of the two servants at the left and right of the group may well be satirical. Both imitate the actions of the whites in ways which were widely held to be ridiculous by the ruling elite: the black servant drinks straight from the bottle; the mulatto servant on the right, well-dressed with an elaborate head-dress, copies the relaxed pose of the seated man next to him. The two semi-naked, black slaves are just visible behind the main group of figures.

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