Owen Swiny

[3][4] He then went traveling in France, the Netherlands and Italy, settling in Venice by 1721 as an agent signing Italian opera talent and works for the London stage and commissioning works from Italian artists for collectors back in England - those artists included Antonio Canaletto (on whose arrival in England in 1746 he introduced to the duke of Richmond) and Rosalba Carriera.

[6] With Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond as the project's main patron, McSwiny got together a Venetian-Bolognese team of painters (including Piazzetta, Sebastiano and Marco Ricci, Canaletto, G. B. Pittoni, Giovanni Battista Cimaroli, Donato Creti and Francesco Monti) in the 1720s to produce a series of twenty-four paintings.

He intended to have the paintings engraved in a single volume, publishing the prospectus To the Ladies and Gentlemen of Taste of Great Britain and Ireland in the 1730s to try to raise the funding for this by subscription.

In around 1733, after about 20 years abroad, Swiny came back to London, where he won posts in the custom house and as Storekeeper of His Majesty's Stables in Ordinary and received a residence at the King's Mews.

His estate was left in trust for the actress Margaret (Peg) Woffington (for whose benefit his large paintings collection was also sold, in 1755), with his will leaving as trustees Robert Maxwell (secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland) and Francis Andrews (a lawyer and fellow of Trinity College, Dublin).