Guy Head

Guy Head was an English history and portrait painter of the late eighteenth century, admired in his day as a copyist of the Old Masters. In our catalogue he is represented by The Fall of the Damned, a large monochrome copy after Peter Paul Rubens that is attributed to him and belongs to the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Life

Head was the son of a house-painter in Carlisle and was baptized in 1760. He learned drawing from Captain John Bernard Gilpin and then entered the Royal Academy Schools in London, where his work came to the notice of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1779, showing portraits, a landscape with the story of Europa, and the actor John Henderson as Richard III.

With Reynolds's introductions he went to Italy and settled in Rome for many years. There he became known for copies of Correggio, Titian and Rubens, as well as decorative classical subjects in the Neoclassical manner then fashionable in Rome. Revolutionary upheaval in Italy drove him home around 1798, carrying a large collection of drawings and copies he meant to exhibit. He died suddenly in London on 16 December 1800, his works were sold at auction in 1805, and his reputation faded quickly.

Work

His best-known original painting is Echo Flying from Narcissus, the subject of a 1982 study in the Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Prints after his Echo and Iris were published in 1814.

The Royal Academy copy of The Fall of the Damned shows why his copies were valued. Painted in warm browns, it follows Rubens's tumbling mass of bodies falling from the light into the abyss. Copying on this scale was a standard part of an artist's training and a way to bring famous Continental pictures to British students.

For the theme, see angels and demons in art and fallen angels in art.