WORLIDGE, Thomas

English painter and etcher. He took drawing lessons from the Genoese painter Alessandro Maria Grimaldi (1659-1732), and with Grimaldi’s son Alexander (1714-1800) he went c. 1736 to Birmingham, where he worked as a glass painter. He married Grimaldi’s daughter, Arabella, and moved to London in the mid-1730s. He lived in Covent Garden and while there became acquainted with the engraver Louis Pierre Boitard (d. 1758).

Possibly because of his proximity to the London theatres, Worlidge’s early works were often theatrical portraits. He made a drawing on vellum of Theophilus Cibber (1735; Windsor Castle, Royal Collection), a painting of David Garrick as Tancred (c. 1745; London, Victoria and Albert Museum) and a miniature of the mimic Samuel Foote (London, Victoria and Albert Museum). His watercolour of the comic actress Kitty Clive as the Fine Lady in Garrick’s ‘Lethe’ (untraced) was copied for a Bow porcelain figurine (c. 1750-52).

In the 1750s and 1760s Worlidge worked in the Bath area, drawing and painting portraits in miniature, pencil, crayon and oil. His most popular works were portrait heads in pencil, which were much in demand by fashionable Bath society. He exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1761 and 1765, and at the Free Society in 1762 and 1765-66.