Arthur Pond was an English painter and engraver.

Life

Born about 1705, was educated in London, and stayed for a time in Rome studying art, in company with the sculptor Roubiliac. He became a successful portrait-painter.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1752, and died in Great Queen Street

Great Queen Street

Great Queen Street is a street in central London, England in the West End. It is a continuation of Long Acre from Drury Lane to Kingsway. It runs from 1 to 44 along the north side, east to west, and 45 to about 80 along the south side, west to east...

, Lincoln's Inn Fields

Lincoln's Inn Fields

Lincoln's Inn Fields is the largest public square in London, UK. It was laid out in the 1630s under the initiative of the speculative builder and contractor William Newton, "the first in a long series of entrepreneurs who took a hand in developing London", as Sir Nikolaus Pevsner observes...

, 9 September 1758. His collection of old master drawings was sold the following year, and realised over £1400.

Works

His numerous original portraits include Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...

, William, Duke of Cumberland, and Peg Woffington. Pond was also a prolific etcher, and used various mixed processes of engraving by means of which he imitated or reproduced the works of masters such as Rembrandt, Raphael

Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino , better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur...

, Salvator Rosa

Salvator Rosa

Salvator Rosa was an Italian Baroque painter, poet and printmaker, active in Naples, Rome and Florence. As a painter, he is best known as an "unorthodox and extravagant" and a "perpetual rebel" proto-Romantic.-Early life:...

, Parmigiano, Caravaggio

Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. His paintings, which combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, had a formative influence on the Baroque...

, and the Poussins.

In 1734–5 he published a series of his plates under the title Imitations of the Italian Masters. He also collaborated with George Knapton

George Knapton

George Knapton was an English portrait painter and the first portraitist for the Society of Dilettanti in the 1740s. He became Surveyor and Keeper of the King's Pictures from 1765-1778.-Life and work:...

 in the publication of the Heads of Illustrious Persons, after Jacobus Houbraken

Jacobus Houbraken

Jacobus Houbraken was a Dutch engraver, who was born in Dordrecht.-Biography:Jacobus learned the art of engraving from his father, Arnold Houbraken...

 and George Vertue

George Vertue

George Vertue was an English engraver and antiquary, whose notebooks on British art of the first half of the 18th century are a valuable source for the period.-Life:...

, with lives by Thomas Birch

Thomas Birch

Thomas Birch was an English historian.-Life:He was the son of Joseph Birch, a coffee-mill maker, and was born at Clerkenwell....

 (London, 1743–52); and engraved sixty-eight plates for a collection of ninety-five reproductions from drawings by famous masters, in which Knapton was again his colleague. Another of his productions was a series of twenty-five caricatures after Pier Leone Ghezzi

Pier Leone Ghezzi

Pier Leone Ghezzi was an Italian Rococo painter and caricaturist active in Rome.Ghezzi was born in Rome. His father, Giuseppe Ghezzi, , also trained Antonio Amorosi, and was a secretary to the Roman Accademia di San Luca...

, republished in 1823 and 1832 as Eccentric Characters.