9 - William Woollett

Summary

The outstanding engraver of gardens was William Woollett (1735–85), whose arrival on the scene coincided with the full flowering of the pictorial landscape garden. He often combined etching and engraving, with immensely subtle depiction of trees and foliage and an ability to make objects in the foreground stand out. Born in Maidstone in August 1735, William, the son of Philip Woollett, a flax-dresser, had little education and did not travel in his youth. His father had to give up working with flax because of asthma, and turned to renting an inn called the Turk's Head. William's schoolmaster, Simon Goodwin, noticed his graphic talents, including when Woollett drew on a slate the head of a schoolfellow named Buttershaw, who had a prominent nose. Goodwin glimpsed the drawing, asked Woollett to finish it, and then kept it. He also drew his father's acquaintances.

A Mr Poole of Maidstone reported that when Woollett was a boy he had a mouse on a chain that was ‘so delicately formed that the mouse scarcely felt its confinement’. Having witnessed this, a stranger from London visiting the Turk's Head commended the boy's ingenuity, whereupon the proud father informed him that William also had a talent for drawing. This stranger is probably identifiable with the merchant who is said to have shown a drawing of Woollett's to John Tinney. It has even been suggested that the stranger was Tinney himself.

After winning a share of a lottery prize, Philip Woollett could now afford to apprentice William to Tinney, who in due course became better known as Woollett's master than as an engraver himself. The young Woollett learned fast, and his first engraving on copper was a portrait of the father of a silversmith at Maidstone. He may have had to struggle with weak eyes, however: William Alexander claimed that Woollett was so near-sighted that he worked with an optical glass in his hand and could hardly distinguish a cow from a horse. Whether this was the case or not, it does not seem to have hindered the progress and career of the precocious engraver, who was producing admirable plates before he was 18.