Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Lupton, Thomas Goff
LUPTON, THOMAS GOFF (1791–1873), engraver, born in Clerkenwell, London, on 3 Sept. 1791, was son of William and Mary Lupton. His father, a working goldsmith, apprenticed him to George Clint [q. v.], by whom he was instructed in mezzotint engraving. Later he became assistant to Samuel William Reynolds [q. v.], and when Samuel Cousins [q. v.] was articled to the latter in 1814 Lupton gave him his first lesson. Between 1811 and 1820 he exhibited a few crayon portraits at the Royal Academy. Lupton was the youngest of the engravers employed by Turner upon the ‘Liber Studiorum,’ and he executed four of the best of the published and several of the unpublished plates. To Lupton is mainly due the introduction of steel for mezzotint engraving. Desiring to discover a substitute for copper which would be more durable, he made experiments on plates of nickel, the Chinese alloy called tutenag, and steel, and, deciding upon the last, used it for a successful portrait of Munden the actor, after Clint. In 1822 he received the Isis medal of the Society of Arts for his application of soft steel to the purpose, and exhibited good impressions from a plate which had already yielded fifteen hundred; all his subsequent works were produced on steel. In 1825 six plates by Lupton, after Turner, were published with the title ‘Views of the Ports of England,’ and these were reissued in 1856, with six more by Lupton, as ‘The Harbours of England,’ with text by J. Ruskin; he also engraved many of the plates for ‘Gems of Art,’ 1823, ‘Beauties of Claude,’ 1825, Turner and Girtin's ‘River Scenery of England,’ 1827, and Lady Charlotte Bury's ‘The Three Great Sanctuaries of Tuscany,’ 1833. Among his best single plates are: ‘The Infant Samuel,’ after Reynolds; ‘Belshazzar's Feast,’ after Martin; ‘Wellington surveying the Field of Waterloo,’ after Haydon; ‘The Eddystone Lighthouse’ and ‘Fishing at Margate,’ after Turner; some theatrical groups after G. Clint, and portraits after Sir Thomas Lawrence, Henry Perronet Briggs, Thomas Phillips, Watson Gordon, and others. Lupton commenced, under Turner's direction, a large plate from his picture of ‘Calais Pier,’ but in consequence of the frequent alterations made by the painter it was never completed.
Between the years 1858 and 1864 Lupton re-engraved fifteen of the ‘Liber Studiorum’ subjects for a series which it was intended to issue in parts, but the project failed and the plates remained unpublished. Lupton was an active supporter of the Artists' Annuity Fund, of which he was elected president in 1836. He died at 4 Keppel Street, Russell Square, London, where he had resided for thirty-six years, on 18 May 1873. By his marriage in 1818 to Miss Susanna Oliver he had a family of six sons and one daughter. His youngest son, Nevil Oliver Lupton, born in 1828, gained the ‘Turner’ gold medal of the Academy at the first competition in 1857, and was a frequent exhibitor of landscapes up to 1877.
[Bryan's Dict. of Painters and Engravers (Armstrong); Redgrave's Dict. of Artists; Graves's Dict. of Artists, 1760–1880; Athenæum, 1873, i. 702; Rawlinson's Turner's Liber Studiorum, 1878; Universal Cat. of Books on Art; Penny Cyclop. xxiii. 6; Clerkenwell par. reg.; information from the family.]