Philip Thicknesse

Captain Philip Thicknesse (1719 – 23 November 1792) was a British Army officer and writer who was a friend of the artist Thomas Gainsborough.

[2] He obtained a commission as a captain of an independent company of the British Army in Jamaica after 1737.

He also published The Speaking Figure and the Automaton Chess Player, Exposed and Detected, a none-too-accurate exposé of a chess-playing machine, The Turk.

In 1742, Thicknesse eloped with Maria Lanove, a wealthy heiress, whom he abducted from a street in Southampton.

In later life, he lived in the Royal Crescent, Bath[6] in a house he then let out and sold.

He moved to another, St. Catherine's Hermitage, and landscaped the grounds to create a "hermit's cell" for himself.

A 1790 caricature of Philip Thicknesse, trampling on moral and religious duties, his person covered with defamatory inscriptions
Thomas Gainsborough, Ann Ford, later Mrs Philip Thicknesse , 1760