Turning the pages of Susanna High more Duncombe's sketchbook (Tate Archive) the viewer comes across a calling card, decorated with a hand painted red and black feather, confirming a meeting between the artist and a female friend. The sketchbook is filled with drawings of scenic views mostly of places which the artist is likely to have seen on her travels in England, such as 'Ramsgate Lighthouse' or 'Rotten Dean near Brighton', executed in a mixture of pencil, ink and wash and often delicately tinted. Although they appear to be drawn from direct observation, they are composed with a clear feeling for their design possibilities; a view of a castle in ink. for instance, with sea and ships behind, is enclosed in a decorative oval.
In many ways Duncombe exemplifies the woman amateur artist of the eighteenth century, producing small-scale, prettily delicate work. Nevertheless, her access to cultural circles through her father, the successful painter Joseph Highmore, and her parents' enlightened attitude towards the education of girls allowed her to develop her talents more than many other women of her class and time. She was taught to draw by her father, whose studio was at the family's London home in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Her parents also gave her an entree to the literary circles in which she was to make her name, and not only as an illustrator. She learned languages, including Latin, French and Italian. Both her parents wrote poetry and she followed their example, composing her own verse and publishing translations of Italian poets.
Through her father, who had illustrated Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela, Duncombe met and became a friend of the author. The second volume of his correspondence (London 1804) contains a group of letters between
Richardson and Duncombe, and also between the latter and her close friend
Hester Mulso. It is prefaced by an engraving after a drawing by Duncombe showing Richardson reading aloud from his novel Sir Charles Grandison at his home. North End, in the mid-1750s. Those listening attentively include Duncombe's friends Mulso and Mary Prescott, and also the artist, who portrayed herself sitting at the front of the scene, sketchbook in hand. In a letter to Duncombe of 1751, Hester Mulso wrote: 'yet is my fancy never so well pleased as when it places me amongst the dear circle at North End, which your pencil so prettily described. You do not know how much pleasure I take in surveying that sketch, nor how often I contemplate every figure in it, and recal the delights of that day.' Mulso, later Mrs Chapone, became a bluestocking, whose works were published in four volumes in 1809.
The artist and her circle enjoyed the pleasures available to their class. Her correspondence mentions visits to the theatre and excursions to the countryside. A drawing in her sketchbook entitled View at the entrance of Kew Gardens reflects the contemporary fashion for the garden and for the Orient A stream snakes around the foreground of the scene; in the distance is the Kew pagoda.
Through the centre of the drawing walks a lady wearing a pink dress and hat, perhaps representing the artist who enjoyed such diversions.
Duncombe's drawings housed in the Tate Collection show an imaginative variety of styles and subject matter. There are airborne monsters and unicorns, classical figures such as Athena, and also gothic works, including the ghost scene from The Castle of Otranto, an illustration for the popular novel by Horace Walpole (London 1764). She also made many drawings of women. Her skills at the 'polite' accomplishment of cut paper work are evident in tiny, exquisite, colored cut-outs of women wearing fashionable dress.
Following her marriage to a clergyman in 1761 Duncombe moved to Kent She produced designs for engravings, and made topographical studies of the area, such as those illustrating The History and Antiquities of Reculver and Herne of 1779. Her only child, a daughter, was born in 1765. |
