Chiswick, where she died on 12 Nov. 1757, aged 84, and was buried in Chiswick church. A picture, executed jointly by Thornhill and Hogarth, representing the House of Commons in session, with Sir Robert Walpole and Speaker Onslow, is in the possession of the Earl of Onslow. Having obtained, through the favour of the Earl of Halifax, the commission to paint the ceiling of the queen's state bedroom at Hampton Court, Thornhill obtained through the same agency special permission to make copies of Raphael's cartoons. He completed two sets, the larger of which now belongs to the Royal Academy and the smaller to Christ Church, Oxford. They had been purchased by the Duke of Bedford at the sale of Thornhill's collections which took place about a year after his death.
Thornhill frequently introduced his own portrait into his decorative paintings, as at Stoke Edith. His son-in-law Hogarth painted more than one portrait of Thornhill and his family, singly or in conversation. A portrait by Joseph Highmore, painted in 1732, was engraved in mezzotint by John Faber, junior. Two portraits drawn by Jonathan Richardson, senior, in the last year of Thornhill's life are in the print-room at the British Museum.
[Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting, ed. Wornum; Vertue's Manuscript Diaries (Brit. Mus. Addit. MSS. 23068 &c. passim); Hutchins's Dorset, 1863, ii. 463; Cunningham's British Painters; Nichols's Anecdotes of Hogarth; Austin Dobson's Hogarth (2nd ed. 1898); Law's Hampton Court; Freethinker, 1742, i. 170, iii. 69; Dugdale's History of St. Paul's Cathedral (Ellis's edition, 1816); Gent. Mag. 1734, p. 274.]
THORNHILL, WILLIAM (fl. 1723–1755), surgeon, a member of one of the younger branches of the great Dorset family of Thornhull of Woolland, a nephew of Sir James Thornhill [q. v.] He was educated in Bristol under ‘old Rosewell,’ a noted barber-surgeon of the city. He was elected on 20 May 1737 at the surgeons' hall in the market-place to be the first surgeon to the Bristol Infirmary founded in 1735.
His attendance at the infirmary was so remiss that he more than once fell under the censure of the ‘house visitors,’ and in 1754 he was called upon to resign his office. He refused to do so, and it was not until June 1755 that he retired. His services were, however, recognised by a unanimous vote of the committee. He left Bristol and practised for a short time at Oxford, but without much success, and he finally retired to Yorkshire, where he died.
He married, in 1730, Catherine (d. 1782), daughter of Richard Thompson, a wine merchant of York, and by her had a daughter Anne, who married in 1749 Nathaniel Wraxall of Mayse Hill, near Bristol, and by him became the mother of Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall [q. v.], who wrote the ‘Historical Memoirs of my Own Time.’
Thornhill claims notice as one of the earliest English surgeons to adopt and improve the operation of suprapubic lithotomy. The records of his work, published by his colleague, John Middleton, M.D., prove that his experience in the operation and his success were greater than any contemporary English surgeon could show. He performed his first suprapubic operation on a boy privately on 3 Feb. 1722–3. In 1727, when his cases were recorded by Middleton, he had performed like operations thirteen times. He did not confine his attention to this part of his profession, for he was also celebrated as a man-midwife. He was a handsome man, of polished manners, and habitually wore an entire suit of black velvet with an elegant steel-handled rapier.
[Hutchins's History of Dorset, iv. 417; Foster's Yorkshire Pedigrees; Bristol Infirmary Records in sixteen manuscript volumes compiled by Richard Smith; Middleton's Essay on the Operation of Lithotomy, London, 1727; additional information kindly supplied by the late J. Greig Smith, M.B., Professor of Surgery at University College, Bristol, and by Harold Lewis, B.A.]
THORNTON, BONNELL (1724–1768), miscellaneous writer and wit, son of John Thornton, apothecary, of Maiden Lane, and afterwards of Chandos Street, Westminster, was born in Maiden Lane in February 1724. He was admitted a queen's scholar at Westminster in 1739, and while at school made an associate of William Cowper, who was two years his junior; through Cowper he became intimate later on with George Colman the elder, and with Robert Lloyd. He was elected to Oxford in 1743, matriculated from Christ Church on 1 June 1743, and graduated B.A. 1747, M.A. 1750, and M.B. 1754. His father intended him to pursue the profession of medicine, but long before he left Oxford he had commenced a literary career. Having contributed to the ‘Student, or Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany,’ a periodical of which Christopher Smart was the guiding spirit, he essayed a venture of his own on somewhat similar lines, ‘Have at ye all, or the Drury Lane Journal,’ in emulation of Fielding's ‘Covent Garden Journal,’ but this had a very short life. He also wrote papers in the ‘Adventurer,’ the
