De Loutherbourg, Philip James (1740-1812)

German-born painter and scene designer, active in England. He specialized in strange, wild landscapes of avalanches, shipwrecks, and battles. He worked for the actor and theatre manager David Garrick and the dramatist Richard Sheridan at the Drury Lane Theatre, London, where his innovations transformed the art of scene design.

He made the stage a ‘natural’ scene, extending the use of separate movable props for rocks, buildings, and so on, and projected light through transparent tinted materials and glass for moonlight, sunset, or other effects. His model theatre, the Eidophusikon (proscenium aperture about 180 cm/5 ft 10 in wide by 90 cm/35 in high), gave performances of storms and floods with moving models, to sound effects and music. A forerunner of the diorama and thus the cinema, it became extremely popular and was admired by Joshua Reynolds and influenced the work of Thomas Gainsborough.

De Loutherberg, the son of a miniature painter, studied in Paris and became a member of the French Academy 1762. After travel in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, he settled in England 1771. He exhibited at the Royal Academy 1772-1812, and became a member 1781.