page_title: Peter Tillemans
section_title: Sporting and topographical works
hierarchical_section_title: Peter Tillemans / Painting / Sporting and topographical works
caption_attribution_description: Chirk Castle from the North
context_page_description: Peter Tillemans was a Flemish painter, best known for his works on sporting and topographical subjects. Alongside John Wootton and James Seymour, he was one of the founders of the English school of sporting painting.
  From 1708 until his death he lived and worked in England.
context_section_description: The greater part of Tillemans's oeuvre was painted from approximately 1720 onwards, and it is from the works painted over these years that he chiefly derives his fame. 
  During the early 1720s, Tillemans moved successfully into the field of painting dogs, horses and racing scenes and was one of the earliest painters of sporting scenes in England; four of these works, "engraved by Claude du Bosc and published in 1723, are among the most spectacular early sporting prints in England". 
  The development of painting on sporting themes was centred on the Newmarket Racecourse in the market town of Newmarket in Suffolk. Together with his friend John Wootton (a pupil of Jan Wyck) and James Seymour, Tillemans was one of the three founders of the English sporting school; their paintings "show the first marriage of the topographical tradition of landscape with a sporting element".  Because both Wootton and Tillemans omitted to sign many of their works, some of them are difficult to tell apart. Tillemans's Newmarket: the Long Course (1723) is in the Government Art Collection. Another Newmarket scene, The Newmarket Watering Course and a sporting scene, Three Hounds with Horsemen, a Hunt to the Left, both in Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, were originally part of John Patteson's collection. Patteson had inherited many of Tillemans's paintings by his marriage into Dr Macro's family, and these now form part of the Patteson Collection at Norwich Castle Museum. Tilleman painted numerous portraits of racehorses for his patrons, among whom were the Dukes of Somerset, Rutland, and Bolton, and the Earl of Portmore.
  According to Sir Walter Gilbey in his Animal Painters of England From the Year 1650: A brief history of their lives and works:
  The excellent plates engraved by Js. Sympson and Jn. Lloyds, from a set of three pictures descriptive of " Newmarket Horse Races," enable us to measure Tilleman's talent as a horse painter. Equine anatomy had not yet been mastered — had been hardly approached seriously — by artists when these pictures were painted, but the "different actions and postures," to quote from the inscription on the first of the series, are rendered with a skill that shows no inconsiderable advance in the art of horse portraiture.
  In 1724, Tillemans worked with Joseph Goupy on scenery for the Haymarket opera house.
  Tillemans was also a member of the Rose and Crown Club, and in 1725 was recorded by George Vertue as steward to the Society of the Virtuosi of St Luke. Vertue noted that Tillemans was acquainted with "people of Fashion & persons of Quality" and was in demand as a painter of country-house and estate views. 
  His country house paintings include Chatsworth House (1720s), Holker Hall, and Chirk Castle in Denbighshire (1725). In such work the houses often stand in landscapes brought to life by animals and hunting scenes.
  Tillemans painted several topographical works of views in Richmond and Twickenham, to the west of London, including A View of Richmond from Twickenham Park (later engraved by P. Benazech), A View from Richmond Hill and The Thames at Twickenham (known also as A Prospect of Twickenham). This last painting, the "earliest complete topographical view of the river frontage in the 18th century", was commissioned either by the poet Alexander Pope (his villa by the Thames is shown in the painting) or John Robartes, later 4th Earl of Radnor. His panorama of The Thames from Richmond Hill (c. 1723) was one of three paintings done for the Earl of Radnor.
caption: Chirk Castle from the North, 1725
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