From the Archives
Robert O’Byrne on Ignazio Hugford
How much do we delude ourselves about the merit of our era’s cultural output? The art of 18th-century Italy offers an instance of collective self-deception. To us, it has only the charm of dying embers from a fire that had burned so brilliantly for hundreds of years, but was now sputtering to a close. At the time, however, most Italians, and quite a number of visitors to the peninsula’s various states, considered the work produced by their own generation of painters and sculptors quite as fine as anything that had gone before. To their way of thinking, the flame burned as bright as ever.
This belief helps to explain the career of Ignazio Hugford, subject of a feature which appeared in Apollo 90 years ago, in September 1931. The author Ina Mary Harrower, daughter of the 19th-century Scottish photographer and art collector John Forbes White, was an intermittent contributor to the magazine, often picking recondite topics; so the once famous but now largely forgotten Hugford was an ideal subject for her.
Of English parentage, he was born in Pisa in 1703: towards the end of the previous century his clockmaker father, a Roman Catholic, had opted to move to Tuscany where he was patronised by the Grand Duke, Cosimo III. Hugford senior had two sons, the elder of whom, Ferdinando Enrico, was the better artist (which perhaps explains why he didn’t interest Harrower). After joining the Benedictine order of the monastery at Vallombrosa, Ferdinando Enrico became abbot, and there he perfected the art of scagliola panels, which were enormously popular among collectors of the period.
Ignazio, on the other hand, preferred the secular life and as a young man was apprenticed to a painter favoured by the Medicean court, Anton Domenico Gabbiani. Although clearly much taken by Gabbiani, even Harrower could not bring herself to exaggerate his merits. ‘It is interesting to find the later and feebler Medicis,’ she observed, ‘occupying themselves with the later and feebler painters!’ On the other hand, what they lacked in quality later and feebler artists often more than compensated for in quantity because, as Harrower admitted, for some 40 years Gabbiani ‘never paused, and covered acres of walls and ceilings with mythological or theological subjects’.
The pupil followed his master’s example and was equally prolific. Harrower acknowledges that Hugford got a start thanks to nepotism: Don Enrico, seeing lots of empty walls in the Abbey of Vallombrosa, arranged for his sibling to cover them with frescoes, and to paint canvases for the refectory. ‘His first “bel medaglione” represented the Benedictine
Saint Ildefonso receiving from the Blessed Virgin some consecrated vestments,’ explained Harrower. ‘This effort was greatly praised and procured for him commissions from churches all over Italy.’
Alas, it transpires that Hugford emulated Gabbiani in a second respect: his output can most kindly be described as competent. Harrower was obliged to concede that today ‘Few care to look at these works, fewer still know they are by him. They are somewhat monotonous and feeble, though for the most part accurate in drawing.’ On the other hand, she claimed, he had the distinction of being the only Englishman who decorated the walls of many Italian churches, although given that he was born in Italy and never visited England, even the question of his nationality is open to dispute.
It is a pity that Harrower decided to focus her attention on Hugford as a second-rate artist, rather than investigating in greater depth his many other activities. He was, for example, an extremely competent teacher, two of his finest pupils being Francesco Bartolozzi and Giovanni Battista Cipriani. Unlike Hugford, both of them moved to England where they were founder members of the Royal Academy. In addition, he published a number of books including a biography of Gabbiani and a new edition of Vasari’s Lives. Furthermore, while still a young man he was appointed a professore at the Florentine Accademia of which he would be elected provveditore, or steward, in 1762. And he became renowned for his connoisseurship, consulted by many of the young Englishmen then frequenting Florence while on their Grand Tour.
Hugford even found time to assemble his own art collection and, together with Thomas Patch, was among the earliest enthusiasts of early Italian art, owning work by, among others, Starnina, Masaccio and Filippo Lippi (though there have been suggestions that he painted some of these himself). He had an unrivalled private collection of drawings, running to some 3,100 sheets, which after his death in 1778 were acquired by the Uffizi. Strangely these aspects of his career were mentioned only in passing by Harrower, resolute in her intention to claim for England a rather mediocre painter. Sometimes, it seems, we can misjudge the merit, not just of the art in our own time, but also that of the past.
In the October issue Lotte Reiniger’s silhouettes, dancing with Poussin, minerals and museums, and a day at the Carnavalet. Plus a preview of Frieze Masters