The extraordinary Mr Robins

AT his death in 1770, a poem in the Bath and Bristol Chronicle lamented the loss of Mr Robins, Landscape Painter, of Bath—‘Where now, O Nature, is thy favourite child?’ whose ‘strokes could call such wondrous scenes to view’. Forgotten for almost 200 years, a new biography charts the varied career of this most gifted of Rococo artists.

With his rosy cheeks and bulbous nose, Robins must have been convivial company, painting himself into his ‘wondrous scenes’, often in impossibly risqué situations, as when he canoodles closely with Mrs Townsend of Honington Hall in Warwickshire. He appears drawing the prospect or looking along a level to get the perspective right; sometimes, he enjoys an intimate picnic with the family and, in one Thames-side garden, as gardeners sweep the leaves, he throws them back up