User:Blfstk/mcswiny

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. Twenty are now known. They are of allegorical tombs in landscapes, commemorating English heroes of recent history, especially those involved with the Glorious Revolution. 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. When the volume finally came out, possibly first in 1736 in Paris and then in London in 1741, as Tombeaux des princes, grands capitaines et autres hommes illustres, qui ont fleuri dans la Grande-Bretagne vers la fin du XVII et le commencement du XVIII siècle, it included only nine of the paintings, McSwiny had planned a second series of six such paintings on the duke of Marlborough's deeds that remained incomplete on his death.