Important Works
A major example of Thornhill's work are the eight scenes executed in grisaille from the Life of St. Paul in the cupola of St Paul's Cathedral (1716–19). In Dorset, his birthplace, Thornhill decorated the reredos at St. Mary's Church, Weymouth, with a picture of the Last Supper.
Thornhill's vast murals in great houses often related to topical events, as seen through the eye's of his mainly Whig patrons. At Chatsworth, during 1707-8 Thornhill painted a number of walls and ceilings, the most notable being the continuous wall and ceiling painting of the Sabine room, then a lobby, but since used as a bedroom. Here he painted the The Rape of the Sabine Women, a vast panorama of mounted warriors carrying off the Sabine women to Rome. He chooses to feature strongly Hersilia, who was deified for her loyalty to her Roman husband, Romulus, as against her Sabine family - a deliberate reference to Mary, lauded by the Whigs for supporting her Protestant husband, William, against her Catholic father, James.
At Hanbury Hall, beneath an imposing view of the Olympian Gods, dominating the ceiling of the main staircase, Thornhill shows Rev Henry Sacheverell, a Tory propagandist put on trial for sedition by the Whig government in 1710, being cast to the Furies. In 1716 Thornhill painted the ceiling of the Great Hall in Blenheim Palace for John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, newly returned to the country after being prosecuted by the Tory ministry in the last years of Queen Anne. The subject is, inevitably, the Duke's 1704 victory at the Battle of Blenheim, during the War of the Spanish Succession. Thornhill was also a notable portraitist.
In 1718 Sir James took a large house on Covent Garden Piazza, and in 1725 he built Thornhill House in the south of Stalbridge, near Sturminster Newton, Dorset. He probably designed this house himself in the Palladian manner.
In 1720 Thornhill tried his hand at architecture. Along with Giacomo Leoni, he designed Moor Park, for which he also painted the entrance hall ceiling and other rooms.
By the end of his life Thornhill was receiving no major commissions. So he began to copy the Raphael Cartoons at Hampton Court. Apart from full-size copies, completed in 1731, he made 162 smaller studies of heads, hands and feet intending to publish them in printed form for the use of art students, but his death left this work unfinished. The original small wash designs of details of the Raphael Cartoons are now kept in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
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