The rake's progress

Good looks, a flair for the theatrical and an excellent marriage made John Astley’s fortune, but also swayed ‘le Titien Anglois’ away from painting into a dissolute life of wine and women, with some collecting on the side

- Carla Passino

ONE fine day at the end of 1759, Cupid swapped his arrow for a brush. When wealthy widow Penelope Dukinfield Daniell met painter John Astley at the Knutsford Assembly in Cheshire, she was so smitten that she asked him to paint her portrait. He turned up the following morning and, between a brushstroke and the next, they got on so well that, within a week, they were married. Astley (about 1724–87) had secured his fortune and all because of a chance encounter.

The son of a surgeon from Wem, Shropshire, Astley had moved to London in the early 1740s to train as an artist under Thomas Hudson, where he struck up a friendship with another pupil, Joshua Reynolds. The two met again in 1747 in Italy, where Astley, after a spell in Florence, secured a place with the celebrated Roman artist Pompeo Batoni. However, the Shropshire lad was desperately strapped for cash: when he (reluctantly) took off his coat at a picnic in the Roman countryside, it became obvious that his waistcoat had partly been fashioned from one of his canvases ‘and thus displayed a tremendous waterfall on his back,’ according to James Northcote’s The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, first published in 1813.

Nor did things get any better when Astley returned to Florence—despite commissions from his patron Horace Mann, whose portrait he would paint for Horace Walpole—or Paris, where Lord Cardigan called him somewhat optimistically ‘le Titien Anglois’, and even once he was back home in Britain. Although in London he painted many notable sitters, he also encountered sharp criticism. Walpole,

who had initially appreciated Astley’s portrait of Mann, albeit noting it was better coloured than drawn, later gave him short shrift: ‘He has got too much into the style of the four thousand English painters about town, and is so intolerable as to work for money, not for fame: in short, he is not such a Rubens.’