Thomas Jenkins (antiquary)

Thomas Jenkins ( born December 21, in 1722 in Sidbury, East Devon, England, † May 15 in Yarmouth (Isle of Wight ), England 1798) was a British painter, art collector, antiques dealer and banker in Rome.

Life

He was the son of William Jenkins and studied painting with the portrait painter Thomas Hudson (1701-1779) in London. In 1750, Jenkins came up with the landscape painter Richard Wilson to Italy, stayed from 1750 to 1751 in Venice, as in Bologna and Florence, and finally settled in 1753 in Rome, where he initially worked with Wilson, who in 1752 also portrayed him until 1755 still modest living as a painter in a house on the Piazza di Spagna.

In Rome he was a member of the Academy of English Professor of the Liberal Arts. In addition, he was welcomed, together with Gavin Hamilton on February 2, 1761 at the Accademia di San Luca as Accademici di Merito. As a painter he was, however, quite unsuccessfully. Instead, he came very quickly (from 1755) as an archaeologist and art dealers to success.

He has worked as one of the most successful, if somewhat unscrupulous antiques and art dealer in Rome who also partially fake antiques or often in disregard of existing laws by supporting a widely ramified network of middlemen. He sold, inter alia, Antiquities from the collection of Sixtus V from the Roman Villa Montalto Negroni and Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Neptune and Triton, now on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He worked among others even with his British fellow painter and archaeologist Gavin Hamilton together and worked as antiques dealers who are its major competitor.

As one of the most successful traders with best customer contacts - he dominated at times the Roman art market - he lived in Castel Gandolfo in the Villa Torlonia, where he owned an antiques collection of mainly cameos and statues, and in Rome in Casa Celli, Corso No. 504, where his house was a social and business center for artists and aristocrats on their Grand Tour; here lived diagonally across from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Jenkins had good contacts to Pope Clement XIV - he was officially English Consul at the papal court, however, creating the title - and was in the inner circle of Cardinal Alessandro Albani, who later became Pope Pius VI. and the German archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Among his acquaintances included the painter and art dealer Johann Friedrich Reiffenstein, Christopher Hewetson and Anton Raphael Mengs. Jenkins was one of the most influential and wealthiest acquaintances of the young painter Angelika Kauffmann, who also portrayed him together with his niece.

With the beginning of the French occupation in 1797 as a result of the Napoleonic Italian campaign all his property was confiscated, why Jenkins returned to England. There only a few months later he died.

Publications

• Catalogo di monumenti scritti del museo del Signor Tommaso Jenkins, 1787