Take five: moments in the life of Sir James Thornhill

LAST month’s opening of The Sherborne in Newland, Dorset, not only marks the arrival of a new culture venue and the restoration of a Grade I-listed building that had been empty since 1992, but also provides an opportunity to admire the magnificent mural painted there by Sir James Thornhill and reconsider the work of this long-neglected artist.

1. Thornhill had a Dorset connection: he was born near Weymouth in about 1675–76

2. His big break came in 1707, when he was asked to paint the Painted Hall (right) at Greenwich’s Royal Naval Hospital, a 40,000sq ft celebration of Britain’s maritime, scientific and royal glories. Thornhill, however, faced a conundrum: where to paint George I’s estranged wife. The King himself apparently provided the answer: ‘Brush her under the carpet!’

3. Thornhill’s greatest moment came in 1715, when he won the competition to decorate the cupola of St Paul’s Cathedral. This may not have been entirely on artistic merit: a (possibly spurious) anecdote has it that Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury, had decreed the winning painter should be an Englishman and a Protestant

4. Enormously successful in his lifetime, Thornhill became the first English-born painter to be knighted, as well as an MP and a fellow of the Royal Society, before dying in 1734

5. In later centuries, he was vilified, with Joseph Vernon Whitaker dismissing him in his 1875 The Art Treasures of England, as ‘no artist’. Today, Thornhill’s reputation has improved, but he remains in the shadow of his son in law: William Hogarth