Peter Tillemans

PETER TILLEMANS Antwerp 1684 – 1734 Suffolk Pieter Tillemans was born in Antwerp in 1684 and probably worked in the studio of the battle and landscape painter, Jan Baptist van der Meiren. In 1708 he came to England with his brother-in-law, the bird painter Pieter Casteels. By 1711 he was a member of Kneller’s Academy of Painting; in 1725 he was Steward of the Society of St Luke. Tillemans painted decorative works, landscapes, copies of Old Masters and the occasional portrait. From 1715 his major patron was George II’s Chaplain, Dr Cox Macro of Little Haugh Hall, Norton, near Bury St Edmunds; he also worked for Earl Spencer, the Earl of Derby and the Dukes of Devonshire, Rutland, Bolton and Somerset. From 1719-21, Tillemans made drawings for John Bridges’s projected History and Antiquities of Northamptonshire. In the 1720s, Tillemans travelled England making country house views which depict mansions in rolling, panoramic landscapes peopled with lively figure groups, such as hunting scenes. These country house portraits, derived from Flemish landscapes, were very influential on succeeding generations of painters, as were Tillemans’ views of racing at Newmarket, in which he rivalled John Wootton. In 1724 Tillemans collaborated with Joseph Goupy on scenery for the Opera House in the Haymarket. In 1733 he retired to Richmond; he died suddenly at Little Haugh Hall in 1734. Among Tillemans’s pupils were Joseph Nollekens and Arthur Devis. The work of Pieter Tillemans is represented in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Chatsworth, Derbyshire and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven.