If Woollett reigned supreme among engravers, Luke Sullivan and François Vivares were not far behind in their series of large garden prints, to be followed in turn by Anthony Walker, who also produced quality work.

Luke Sullivan

Sullivan's landscape engravings have been covered in an article by the author in 1984, but here the emphases will be different. To start with some biographical details: there seem to be conflicting accounts of his early life, but general agreement that he lived an erratic life on the wrong side of the tracks, spending most of his time in taverns and brothels. The French author Basan claimed that he was born in Troyes in France in 1698, but that appears to be wishful thinking, since Sullivan (a not uncommon Irish name) was born in 1705 in County Louth. At an early age he moved with his family to Badminton, where his father was one of the grooms of the Duke of Beaufort, and the young Sullivan worked in the stables there. He showed a natural talent for drawing, and was exposed at Badminton to one of the most vast and most overwhelming landscapes imaginable. Under the duke's patronage he was apprenticed to a master engraver, but there is some mystery surrounding his identity. Some authorities maintain that he was Thomas Major, but since Sullivan was considerably older than Major this is unlikely. On the other hand, he may have concentrated on drawing in younger years and taken up engraving in his maturity. T Dodd, in his Memoirs of British Engravers (manuscript), considered that Sullivan worked in the style of Jacques Le Bas of Paris, but admitted there was no evidence to link them as master and apprentice.

Unlike Woollett, who was producing plates at 17, Sullivan was in his forties when he came up with his earliest known work, a view of the Battle of Culloden (1746) after a painting by Augustin Heckel. Hogarth took him on as assistant, but Sullivan's dissipated lifestyle rendered him unreliable and he would disappear for weeks at a time. A favourite hostelry was The Feathers in Leicester Square, where he would meet many fellow artists. Nollekens, trying to present him in a favourable light, described him as ‘a handsome lively fellow’.