John Colley Nixon

One of the best-known amateur artists of the late eighteenth century, producing landscape paintings, engraved cartoons, and illustrations, Nixon made the greatest impact with his caricatures of urban life and was secretary of the Beefsteak Club.

Some of his topographical drawings were included in William Watts‘s Seats of the Nobility and Gentry (1779–1786), and in 1786 the Royal Academy hosted an exhibition of his illustrations for Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

He became a friend of the writer Elizabeth Craven while she was living at Brandenburgh House, Hammersmith, and notably acted in plays staged there.

While he was curate at Foots Cray, in 1793, he was visited by J. M. W. Turner, who gave him lessons in landscape painting, and he was also taught by Stephen Rigaud.

[1] In later life Nixon inherited an estate called Upland, at Ilford, Essex, from Richard Eastland, who was his great uncle.