272 MEMOIR OF THOMAS BEWICK. 



nursed with watchful care at home. He however 

 became quite well by the time he was freed from 

 his servitude with us, and he then commenced 

 painting and engraving on his own account. In 

 the former art he seemed to be much patronised, 

 and had, I believe, turned his attention to oil- 

 painting. The last of his efforts in this line was 

 done under the patronage of the Earl of Buchan* by 

 whom he was employed to copy some portraits and 

 perhaps some other things at [Kenmore], where he 

 took ill of a fever and died in the year 1796 and in 

 the 26th of his age.f It always appeared that he 



[* Breadalbane.] 



[f Robert Johnson died on the 2gth October, 1796. A few addi- 

 tional particulars respecting him, from Sykes and other sources, may 

 be added here. He was born at Shotley in Northumberland, his 

 father being a joiner and cabinet maker. Besides his successes as a 

 water-colour artist, some of which are still to be seen in Newcastle, 

 he obtained considerable popularity about 1793 for certain caricatures 

 of the Cruikshankian order, his chief butt being an ultra-Tory New- 

 castle bookseller, Joseph Whitfield. Hugo gives the titles of some 

 of these performances in his "Bewick Collector," 1866, i., 545: 

 "The Asses in Danger," "A Real Friend to His Country Begs," "The 

 Overthrow ; or, The Crisis is Awful and Momentous." One of 

 Johnson's best known drawings, that of St. Nicholas's Church, taken 

 from the north, was engraved on a large scale by Charlton Nesbit, 

 who obtained for it in 1798 the lesser silver palette of the Society 

 of Arts. He also made a drawing of Sunderland Bridge, engraved 

 by himself and Mr. Hunter. The circumstances connected with 

 Johnson's death are thus related by Sykes, " Local Records," 1833, 

 i., 381 : " He was engaged by the Messrs. Morrison, booksellers, 

 of Perth, to reduce the set of portraits by [George] Jamesone, [the 

 Scotch Van Dyck,] and was sent to Kenmore, the seat of the Earl of 

 Breadalbane, to copy them for Pinkerton's, "Gallery of Scottish Por- 

 traits." He had finished fifteen, and there remained four to copy, 

 when, by his premature death, the fine arts sustained an irreparable 

 loss. . . In a letter from the Messrs. Morrison to Mr. Pinkerton, 

 dated i8th November, 1796, it states, that a few days before [?] they 

 had received a letter from the man with whom Johnson lodged at the 

 village of Kenmore, desiring them to send for him, as he was quite 

 delirious; and by express the day following, they were informed of his 



