The extraordinary Mr Robins
Timothy Mowl takes a look at the convivial Thomas Robins, whose paintings provide a rare glimpse into the lost Rococo gardens of the mid 18th century
AT his death in 1770, a poem in the Bath and Bristol Chronicle lamented the loss of Mr Robins, Landscape Painter, of Bath— ‘Where now, O Nature, is thy favourite child?’ whose ‘strokes could call such wondrous scenes to view’. Forgotten for almost 200 years, a new biography charts the varied career of this most gifted of Rococo artists.
With his rosy cheeks and bulbous nose, Robins must have been convivial company, painting himself into his ‘wondrous scenes’, often in impossibly risqué situations, as when he canoodles closely with Mrs Townsend of Honington Hall in Warwickshire. He appears drawing the prospect or looking along a level to get the perspective right; sometimes, he enjoys an intimate picnic with the family and, in one Thames-side garden, as gardeners sweep the leaves, he throws them back up into the air, mischievous and child-like.
With his rosy cheeks and bulbous nose, he must have been convivial company
Robins made delicate watercolours of gardens caught at that moment in the mid 18th century when sinuous layouts glittered with garden buildings of every conceivable style —chinoiserie tea houses, Gothic summerhouses, Turkish tents and Classical temples —the so-called ‘Rococo Gardens’. His views are matchless records of gardens either long gone or now in decay. Without them, we would know next to nothing about this short-lived period of garden history. John Harris rediscovered him in the 1970s and published a seminal COUNTRY LIFE article in September 1972, working from the few surviving gouaches on vellum held in private collections. He followed this up, after a sketchbook of Robins’s drawings came to light that was later deposited in the V&A Museum, with a lavishly produced and illustrated twovolume study, Gardens of Delight. Since then, there has been little new information on this most evocative of Rococo painters.
The keys to an understanding of Robins and his art are, therefore, a handful of exquisite paintings and the sketches, some of which are titled or annotated. These set Cathryn Spence, a historian and museum curator, who had helped accession the V&A sketchbook, on an extraordinary journey of detection in an attempt to track down every site Robins sketched. It became an obsession to pinpoint the exact spots from which he had taken his view; when found, these became known as ‘Tommy moments’. Her 15 years of research took her from deepest Dorset to Sutherland in the Highlands, up the River Severn into Shropshire, to Knowsley Hall, Merseyside, along banks of the Thames, to Kelvedon in Essex and to Wrest Park in Bedfordshire.
These sites threw up owners that could be linked with others to create a patronage network. A chance visit to Hanford House in Dorset, which Robins had drawn, produced the Seymer diaries that mention Robins and his artist sons. Henry Seymer was engaged with Robins’s son Luke in the trade in exotic specimens from Jamaica. Robins must have met many of these prospective patrons in Bath, where he advertised his talents as a drawing master in George Sperin’s toyshop, the Fan and Crown, by the Abbey on Orange Grove.
As well as producing garden prospects, Robins travelled the country investigating antiquarian sites for engravings and painting flora and fauna—insects, butterflies, birds and botany—to sell to the burgeoning coteries of avid collectors, such as the Duchess of Portland. Robins was born in 1716 in Charlton Kings, east of Cheltenham under the Cotswold edge, and began his career as an apprentice to the fan painter Jacob Portret, producing tourist
souvenirs for the fashionable spa. His early fan designs reveal his prodigious talent as a miniaturist, his delight in the fretwork and sinuous curves of the Rococo and a tendency to add a touch of chinoiserie. His seasonal stays to work in Bath were important for a young man hoping to make his name. Always with an eye on future sales, Robins made a drawing, later engraved, of the Baths, which he framed with his signature Rococo tendrils. His presence in the city coincided with Bath’s Georgian growth, his meticulous sketches capturing the spa as its polite squares and terraces were going up. He also ventured out to draw gardens such as that at Lilliput Castle on Lansdown, where the surgeon Jerry Peirce had conceived a Classical summerhouse for intellectual soirees and a Gothic hermitage for studious contemplation.
The only restored 18th-century Rococo garden in the country is Benjamin Hyett’s at Painswick in Gloucestershire, for which Robins made two paintings. The artist also painted Hyett’s Gloucester town garden with its striking Chinese pagoda, and his drinking retreat—pan’s Lodge—on the opposite side of the Painswick valley. Robins produced two pendant views of the lodge, one by night framed with nocturnal birds; the other of the prospect from the pavilion by day is bordered with his sinuous flowers, fretwork and butterflies. Unsurprisingly, his evening view includes a riot of debauched bacchanalian revels with the lascivious goat god Pan at centre stage.
His early fan designs reveal his prodigious talent as a miniaturist
The sketchbook provides further clues as to Robins’s varied artistic work and his movements about the country. He made at least two journeys up the Severn into the Midlands, his progress tracked through the topographical sketches. He also stopped off to draw the ruined abbeys at Wenlock and Buildwas, perfect for working up later into engravings to be sold. There are surviving paintings of the house and gardens at Davenport and sketches of the deer park and house at Apley, both in Shropshire, so he may have been travelling up the river to fulfil those commissions. Nothing survives of 18th-century Apley, but his three paintings of the Davenport estate have been used to trace the lost landscape there, which includes a numinous grotto and the footings of ephemeral garden seats set high on a red sandstone ridge above the River Worfe.
Easily the most lucrative area for Robins was the Thames near London, a rural bolthole