Angelica Kauffmann, but he raised the prettiness of their school above insipidity and affectation. By constant study of nature and his affinity for all that was pure and beautiful in older art (especially the Elgin marbles and the designs of Raphael and Rubens) he formed a style of his own which, in spite of some mannerism, has exercised an unabated charm from his own day to the present. He illustrated almost the whole range of English literature with a taste that seldom failed and a sympathy that was often remarkable. He was deficient in vigour and passion, but he had an exquisite sense of beauty; and his drawing, if not always accurate in detail, was of exceeding grace. He had a true genius for composition and excelled in tender pathos and gentle humour, and in the rendering of virginal purity, womanly grace, and the charms of childhood he has few rivals.
More than three thousand of Stothard's designs were engraved, and nearly all of them are to be found in the Balmanno collection at the British Museum, where are also other engravings after Stothard and a number of drawings. There are many of his pictures in the National Gallery and at South Kensington Museum, principally from the Vernon and Sheepshanks collections.
There are several portraits of Stothard. He introduced himself, his wife, and his son Alfred into a picture of ‘Speech-Day at Christ's Hospital,’ exhibited in 1799. There are later portraits by Harlow, Jackson, and Wood, and busts by Chantrey, Baily, and Behnes.
[Mrs. Bray's Life of Thomas Stothard, R.A., 1851 (with lithographed portrait after Harlow), and the same writer's Memoir of Charles A. Stothard; Cunningham's Lives of Painters, ed. Heaton; Magazine of the Fine Arts, 1833; Watt's Bibliotheca Britannica; Redgrave's Dict.; Redgraves' Century; Bryan's Dict. ed. Armstrong; Pilkington's Dict.; Gilchrist's Life of Blake; Letters of James Smetham; Wedmore's Studies in English Art, 1st ser.; Dobson's Eighteenth-Century Vignettes, 1st ser. (‘The Quaker of Art’); Colvin's Children in Italian and English Design; Monkhouse's Earlier English Watercolorists; Sandby's Hist. of the Royal Academy; Catalogues of the National Gallery and South Kensington Museum.]
STOTHERD, RICHARD HUGH (1828–1895), major-general royal engineers, director-general of the ordnance survey of the United Kingdom, son of General Richard J. Stotherd (1796–1879), colonel commandant royal engineers, by his first wife, Elizabeth Sydney (d. 1853), daughter of Hugh Boyle, of Dungiven, co. Londonderry, was born at Angler Castle, co. Tyrone, on 25 Nov. 1828. His father, who came of a Lincolnshire family, was long employed upon the ordnance survey of Ireland, was commanding royal engineer in succession at Limerick, Halifax, Nova Scotia, and at Dover, and was promoted general 19 June 1872.
Educated at University College school, and at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, Stotherd received a commission as second lieutenant in the royal engineers on 2 May 1847, and first lieutenant on 28 Oct. He went through the usual course of professional study at Chatham, and then served at Woolwich and at Gibraltar, and on his return home was posted to the ordnance survey of Great Britain and sent to Dumfries. He was promoted to be second captain on 21 May 1855, and first captain on 17 May 1860. After quitting the ordnance survey in 1861 Stotherd went to Weymouth, and then, in connection with the Trent affair, to North America, where he acted as brigade major and assistant to the commanding royal engineer. He was commended for his services during the four years he served in Canada and New Brunswick.
On Stotherd's return to England on 13 Feb. 1866 he was appointed instructor in electricity, chemistry, and photography at the school of military engineering at Chatham. There he took up the question of the application of electricity to mining and to submarine mining (then in its infancy), and he also organised the first field telegraph. In 1867 he was sent to the Paris Exhibition to report on military telegraph apparatus and engineering exhibits. In 1868 Prince Arthur (afterwards Duke of Connaught) was under his instruction.
While at Chatham Stotherd took great interest in the system of army signalling, of which he was the chief instructor, and the army is indebted to him for his advocacy of the Morse system now in use. He was promoted to be brevet major on 22 Nov. 1870, regimental major on 5 July 1872, and regimental lieutenant-colonel on 3 Aug. 1872.
In 1871 Stotherd accompanied Colonel C. C. Chesney of the royal engineers to the continent to report upon the military operations of the Franco-German war, and of the siege of Paris by Marshal MacMahon during the Communist insurrections. In April 1873 he was appointed to the war office in London, to advise the inspector-general of fortifications on the subject of submarine mines and of military telegraphs. He was from 1873 to 1876 president of the first war office torpedo committee, which became a standing committee and still exists.
