Zoffany painted heroic Sharp family c1780

As well as individual achievements, the Sharp family functioned collectively. The son of an arch­deac­on, William Sharp (1729-1810) lived with his 3 brothers & 3 sisters in a Northumberland rectory, where they created strong family ties that lasted for life. Clearly the Sharps had a common value system of free think­ing; they neg­otiated the competing demands of an elev­at­ed social position with their commitment to social reform.

a musical water party on the Thames near Fulham.

The Sharp family by Zoffany, c1780. Wiki

 

The Union, William’s large, elegant pleasure boat, sailed from Kew Bridge in 1777 on its first voyage. As she sailed along the Thames to Reading, her passengers lived in great comfort with all am­en­it­ies. And the entire Sharp family gave fortnightly orch­es­tral con­certs on board.

Despite the boat and orchestra, William Sharp was not a gilded ar­is­tocrat of independent means, but a hardworking Lon­­don surgeon from an educated background. He was accomp­anied on the voyage by most of his siblings, dem­ons­trating the extent of the doctor’s pro­fessional success and his fame as surgeon to King George III.

The siblings were known by the art world as the subject of Johan Zof­fany’s celebrated group portrait, The Sharp Family. Will­iam, who commissioned the work in 1779, wanted the art­ist to depict the 7 sib­lings playing music on their Thames barge. The Zof­f­any master­piece com­mem­or­at­ed the concerts they gave on board their barge Ap­ollo at Ful­ham, when Sharps were at the height of their soc­ial suc­c­ess. Their harmonies were an apt meta­phor for the strong ties that bound them together.

 
How appropriate! Sharps were a famously musical family, who had played music together from early childhood and be­tween them master­ed a wide array of instruments. Youngest broth­er Granville Sharp (1735–1813) was skilled on the oboe, clarinet, flute, double flute, trav­erse harp & kettle­drums. William gave famous concerts at his City mansion, with per­form­­an­ces by the most popular virt­uosi back then; and the family hosted water parties on barges sail­ing along the Thames in summer. In the Sharp band, often led by the Italian violinist Felice Giardini, family members and profess­ional musicians played chamber music. To a rous­ing Hand­el overture, the Sharp barge was accompanied by many boats who sailed to enjoy the festivities.

Examine the painting carefully. Granville held his favoured flutes in one hand, his clarinet being nearby on the piano he was shown hold­ing a sheet of music. Beside him was his sister, Elizabeth Sharp Prowse (1733-1810), who was play­ing the harpsichord /forte-piano. Dr John Sharp was on the right and had laid his cello aside, next to Franc­es Sharp (1738-1799) with an oboe, in blue. James Sharp, an engineer, held a serpent brass instrument. James’ wife was Mrs Lodge Sharp, his daughter was Catherine Sharp (1770-1843). William Sharp was seen standing at the tiller, hat raised, wearing the Windsor uniform with its distinctive red collar. His instrum­ents were the French horns that rested on the piano. William’s dau­ghter was Mary Sharp Lloyd-Baker (1778-1812), his wife was Cather­ine Barwick Sharp (c1741-1814). Judith Sharp (1733-1809), music in hand, played the lute.

These amateur music­ians illustrated the transition between private music part­ies and public concerts in C18th musical life. The private world of the barge open­ed into that of an invisible audience list­en­ing from the bank to the open-air concert, a fashion set by Hand­el’s Water Music.

Johan Zoffany’s glowing depiction of the siblings was their defining image. But the family was not just about music. Granville Sharp was a  civil servant, philanthropist and a leading campaigner for the abolition of sl­av­ery. In 1772 Granville was visited and asked for help by a young African who had been sold into slavery. This eventually led to one of the great set pieces of Eng­lish legal history, deliv­er­ed by Lord Mansfield in West­min­ster Hall in 1772: the slave was freed since no English law sanct­ioned slavery. So Sharp co-founded the Soc­iety for the Abolition of the Slave Trade!

When Granville gave up his Ordnance Office post, he totally relied on his brothers’ incomes. Fortunately William was a noted surgeon. Was Granville’s commitment to the emancipation of slaves supported by his family? Yes! His political idealism began at Will­iam’s Surg­ery for the Poor, Mincing Lane; it was James’ membership of the Common Coun­cil of London that most supported Granville.

4 siblings contrib­uted to John’s char­it­ab­le enterprises at Bamburgh, which in turn pro­vided the model for Elizabeth’s philanthropy at Wick­en Park. The 2 unmarried sis­t­ers, Judith and Frances, enjoyed priv­il­eged positions in their bro­thers’ households in their adult lives. Judith actually tur­ned down two good marriage offers, concluding that fem­ale autonomy would flourish better in the household of a compliant brother. And when James became paral­ysed in 1783, 9 members of the extended family accompanied him to Weymouth for a seaside cure.

The Sharps were remarkable late C18th individuals in their own right. John, the eldest brot­h­er, established an extra-ordinary social enterprise at Bamburgh Cas­tle in Northumberland, providing free healthcare and education and subsidised food to the poor. Elizabeth ran a large estate in Northamptonshire on the philanth­ropic principles espoused by her brothers. James was a manufacturer, invent­or and canal pioneer.

 

William Sharp

surgeon

Granville Sharp
Clerk in the Ordnance Office and abolitionist

Thanks to,  and I recommend Ariane Bankes in Spectator Australia.

Great C17th women artists: Antwerp-Amst

Old masters too’: Ghent exhibition celebrates female artists of the baroque. Show in part a rediscovery of 40+ mostly forgotten women who plied their trade in the Low Countries

Judith Leyster, a Dutch golden age artist, was about 21 when she painted her self-portrait in 1630. In the picture she presented to the world, Leyster exuded sunny confidence. Clad in shimmering silks and a stiffly starched lace collar, she leant back in her chair, holding palette and brushes, a painting by her side. This work, completed in the year she was admitted to a painters’ guild in Haarlem, proclaimed her arrival as an established artist. It was one of the first self-portraits by an artist in the Dutch republic, a device most male painters did not adopt until years later.

Boy and a Girl with a Cat and an Eel, 1635

by Judith Leyster

While celebrated in her lifetime, Leyster was quickly forgotten after her death. A posthumous inventory attributed some of her paintings to the wife of the deceased, referring to her artist husband, Jan Miense Molenaer. Then she disappeared. Her works were attributed to Frans Hals, other male contemporaries, or simply unknown master. Those paintings under her name were little esteemed. In the 1970s a major US museum sold one; other institutions left her work unseen in their vaults. Now the painter, enjoying a revival, is back in the spot-light. She's one of 40+ female artists who worked in the Low Countries in the baroque period featured in this new exhibition

Unforgettable: Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam 1600-1750 opened Mar 2026 at Ghent Museum of Fine Arts/MSK, after the earlier Washington DC exhibition. The MSK exhibition seeks to restore women to one of the most feted eras of art history, best known for works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer and Anthony van Dyck. As MSK puts it in its slogan: Old masters were women too.

Curator Frederica Van Dam said the exhibition asked visitors to reflect on “why haven’t we seen many artworks by women before?” The catalogue mentioned 179 women who were active in the art economy of the Low Countries, which corresponded to the modern-day Netherlands, and Flanders in northern Belgium. Many of them were admired in their lifetimes. Still-life paintings by Maria van Oosterwijck, for example, adorned palace walls throughout Europe. 

Still Life with Flowers in a Decorative Vase

Maria van Oosterwijck c1673

In 1697 Russian Tsar Peter I visited the Amsterdam home of Johanna Koerten, a woman who specialised in paper-cutting art on paper, a craft blending drawing, calligraphy and sculpture. Koerten was paid handsomely for her talents: a work of woven silk in a rustic manner made for the Holy Roman Empress was said to earn her more than twice what Rembrandt made for The Night Watch.

 

Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria,

c1616, National Gall London

Women were written out of the story in the C19th when art history became a discipline. Art historians, who were mainly men, decided what was good art and what was worth writing about. When women did have a walk-on role, they were deemed imitators. That fate befell Rachel Ruysch. Although collectors had long sought her floral stilllifes, admired for their great attention to detail and refined brushstrokes, scholars dismissed her work as derivative. I have seen all her stilllifes, but this self portrait is sublime.

The exhibition is part of growing rediscovery of women who were long absent from art history records, from Italian baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654) and her near contemporary of Southern Netherlands, Michaelina Wautier, to the Belgian modernist Marthe Donas.

Two Girls as Saint Agnes and Saint Dorothea,

Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. c1650

 

The C19th was also when painting became the apex of the art museum, over-shadowing the applied arts that women excelled at, such as paper-cutting, calligraphy and lace-making. In the early modern era, lace commanded very high prices, although poorer women, nuns and orphaned girls who usually made the exquisite fans, veils, aprons and tableware earned a pittance. These artists remained anonymous in their lifetimes, signing contemporary records with an “X”.

While many female artists will remain lost to history, some are being re-discovered. The painter Catrina Tieling had been almost entirely forgotten until 2025, when a Dutch art historian reexamined works long attributed to her brother, Lodewijk, and concluded they were in fact signed CT. The exhibition shows Catrina Tieling’s rustic scene of two shepherdesses resting beside a herd of cows, a rare example of an Italianate landscape by a woman.

It also charts some women’s life-changing and unusual decisions. Louise Hollandine converted to Catholicism and entered a convent to maintain her artistic freedom. The daughter of exiled royalty, Hollandine had a gilded childhood in The Hague, becoming a talented portrait painter of friends and family. But she fled her comfortable princess life in 1657 to become a French Benedictine nun, rather than marry her nephew, as her fa-mily wanted. At the convent, she switched to religious genre scenes, although many did not survive the French Revolution. The exhibition shows self-portraits of Hollandine in both lives. In the first, she was cool and poised, fancy in rich silks and a big beribboned hat; in a lat-er work, she made an austere impression, wearing a cross and dressed in a black and white nun’s habit.

Van Dam said art literature needs to see more research into female art-ists and efforts to make their work accessible. Through this exhibition a clear expression of how valuable the works were for the artistic community; it recovered the history of a largely forgotten creative economy in the C17th, when women were vital participants.

Ghent Museum of Fine Arts/MSK

CODART

On 21-22nd May MSK Ghent and the University of Antwerp is running a two-day symposium together with the exhibition Unforgettable. Women artists from Antwerp-Amsterdam The symposium unites art historians, museum professionals and art market experts, sharing their insights on 5 themes: identity, choices, networks, legacy and technique.

Russian Grand Duchess Anna Anderson?

Romanov family with Grand Duchess Anastasia seated far right.
Credit: Ati

In July 1918 Bolshevik revolutionaries shot Czar Nicholas II, Czarina Alexandra, four Grand Duch­esses Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, son Tsarevich Alex­ei and 4 servants. Their bodies were taken from the Yekaterinburg cellar in the Urals, and buried in the forest, yet rumours started that the body of the Grand Duchess Anastasia had not been accounted for. Did she hide in the closed cellar?

Since 1918 many women called them­selves Missing Anast­asia. But only two women gathered subs­tant­ial support. See an earlier post about Anna Anderson and the other pretenders.

The princesses Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia

Alexander Palace, 1916

Anna Anderson was suicidal and was sent to Dall­dorf Mental Asylum in Berlin in 1920. One of the pat­ients believed Anna was the Grand Duchess and two years later Anna also started believing the story. So the Czarina of Russia’s brother, Ernest Louis Grand Duke of Hesse, hired private investigator Martin Knopf in 1927 to discover who she really was.

He found she was Franziska Schanzkowska, who’d worked in a munitions factory in WW1. After her fiancé was killed at the front, a grenade fell out of her hand and exploded. She had head in­juries and a foreman was killed in front of her.

In 1928 she moved to USA and liv­ed off Rus­sian Princess Xenia Georgievna, a distant rel­ative of the Romanovs. But Anna had to return to Germany. For 20 years she struggled to get her name recognised by the Eur­op­ean courts.. and failed. In 1968 she moved back to the USA wh­ere she married a wealthy man. And­ers­on died in the USA in 1984.

More recent events Canonisation of the dead Romanovs in Nov 1981 told the world the Orthodox Church made them saints. This was based on the bel­ief that all the ro­y­al family were all totally, irrev­oc­ab­ly murdered.

The bodies of Tsar, Tasarina and 3 of the daughters were found in the woods outside Yekaterinburg in 1991. Exhaustive post mortem exam­in­ations con­firm­ed that the bodies were indeed the Romanovs, so they were quickly was buried in a vault in Saints Peter & Paul Cathed­ral, St Petersburg. But this did not end the rumours because the son and one of the 4 daugh­t­­ers might still have been alive.

Questions remained: had Grand Duchess Anastasia really es­c­aped from Russia and later resurfaced as Anna Anderson? Tissue samples were kept after And­ers­on died, so plans could fin­ally made for post-mortem DNA tests. In 1994 DNA tests on a lock of Anna's hair and sur­v­iving med­ic­al tissue samples sh­owed that her DNA did NOT match any Romanov rem­ains.

Anastasia, c1914                                                                            Anna Anderson, c1917

Ati                                                                                                   Ati 

This claim was investigated by com­paring Anna’s DNA with DNA ext­racted from the Ro­m­­anov bones. Mat­ernally inherited mitochondrial DNA, which is pass­­ed un­ch­anged from mother to child, was analysed from each of the samples. If Anna had really been Anastasia, her mitoch­ond­rial DNA should have been a perfect match to her mother’s and sister’s DNA. As most historians ex­pected, multiple diff­erences were detected between Anna’s DNA prof­ile and the DNA profile of her mother and sisters. Anna Anderson was just an imposter!

So who WAS Anna Anderson? Instead Ander­son's mitochondrial DNA was compared to that of Carl Maucher, a great-nephew of Franz­iska Schanz­kowska via the maternal line. The DNA profiles from Anderson and Mau­ch­er were a close match, provid­ing strong evidence that Anna And­er­son was indeed Franzisca Schanz­kow­ska. We may never know the rea­s­ons she claimed to be a Romanov, but perhaps her mental illness led her to believe that she truly was a Grand Duchess.

Unexpectedly, in 2007, the 4th daughter and the son were found cremated near Yek­ater­in­burg. It was never verif­ied if the 4th sister was Maria or Anastasia, but ALL 4 girls had been proven by DNA testing to be part of the royal family.

Her story has been adapted into plays, cartoons and films includ­ing the film Anastasia (1956) that earned Ingrid Bergman an Oscar for her role as the Romanov princess. And the award-winning film Anastasia: The Myst­ery of Anna (1986). But remember that the DNA tests from the above studies had not been carried out before the plays and films were made. The true DNA profile of Anna Anderson had not been confirmed, or denied, before 1994.

Thanks to allthatsintersting. 

 

London's worst 2 years ever: 1665, 1666

 The Bubonic Plague of 1665-1666 had been known in Europe for cent­uries. In England, this was the worst out-break of plague since the Black Death of 1348.

The Plague Window in Eyam Church

Historic UK

It was the rat, attracted by impoverished, rubbish-filled city streets, that brought in the black rat-flea. It was the flea that carried bacteria and caused the plague. The Bubonic Plague created buboes i.e swellings in the lymph nodes found in the armpits, groin & neck, and victims experienced splitting headaches, vom­iting, swollen tongue and fever, turning the victim’s skin black.

Incubation took only 4-6 days and when the plague appeared in a household, the house was sealed, thus condemning the whole family to death! These houses were distinguished by a red cross and the words ‘Lord have mercy on us’ on the door.

The plague started in the Far East and quickly spread through Eur­ope. In London it began in the poor, overcrowded parish of St Giles-in-the-Field outside the city walls. In May 1665, only 43 people died. But the death rate began to rise during the hot summer months and at its peak in August, 31,160 people died. While 68,600 deaths were formally recorded in the city in 1665, the true number was probably 100,000, c15% of London’s population.

Sometimes whole communities died and corpses littered the streets, since there was no one left to bury them. In other places the corpses were brought out at night in answer to the cry,’ Bring out your dead’, put in a cart and taken away to the great gaping plague pits dug into the earth.

King Charles II and his Court fled for Hampton Court in Surrey, then to Oxford. People who could afford to send their families away from London in these months did so - most doctors, lawyers & merchants fled the city. So Parliament was postponed and had to sit in October at Oxford. Court cases were also moved from Westminster to Oxford.

The Lord Mayor of London and the aldermen remained in London to enforce the King’s orders to try and stop the spread of the plague. The poorest families had no choice but to remain in London with the rats and the plague victims. Watchmen locked and kept guard over infected houses. Parish officials provided food. Searchers looked for dead bodies and took them, always at night.

Consider the measures taken by King Charles II in response to the plague. All trade with London and other plague towns was stopped. The Council of Scotland declared that the border with England would be closed. There were to be no fairs or trade with other countries. This meant many people lost their jobs, including those who worked on the River Thames. Orders to the mayors ensured that no stranger was allowed to enter a town unless he had a formal Certificate of Health. No furniture was to be removed from an infected house. There were to be no public gatherings like funerals.

A couple suffering the buboes of bubonic plague

C15th Toggenburg Bible

The plague spread across England. York was one city badly affected. The plague victims were buried outside the city walls and it is said that they have never been disturbed since then, as a pre­cau­tion against a resurgence of the dreaded plague. The grassy emb­ankments below the city walls are the sites of these plague pits.

Memorials were placed everywhere. In some towns and villages in England there are still the old market crosses which have a dep­res­sion at the foot of the stone cross for vinegar. In Derbyshire the small village of Eyam, 6 ms north of Bake­well, has a story of tragedy and courage that will always be remembered. The Plague Window in Eyam Church still recalls the era.

So how did the plague ever end? Did the black rat develop a greater resistance to disease? If the rats did not die, their fleas would not have needed to find a human host and fewer people would have been infected. And the humans who had not died also started to develop a stronger immunity to the dis­ease. After 1666, more effective quarantine methods were used for ships coming into the country.

King Charles II returned to London in Feb 1666, then the gentry returned. Tradesmen opened their businesses again, and life might have returned to normal. Then in Sept 1666 the Great Fire of London destroyed much of cent­ral London. Fortunately the fire also helped to kill off the black rats and fleas that had carried the plague bacillus. When the City was rebuilt after the Fire in brick and stone (not wood), the streets were widened and the open sewers were eradicated. This was the last major plague that London ever saw! 

Two men discovering a dead woman in the street in London, 1665.
Photo credit: Wellcome Trust

Read Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722. And Samuel Pepys’ Diary gave a vivid account of London’s empty streets. The Lost City of London – Before the Great Fire of 1666 is an excellent blog.