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A student of John Brown (cat. 58) and a friend of John Flaxman (cats.. 34-5), Ottley was a connoisseur, collector, writer on art, and an amateur draftsman of distinction. He studied with Brown at the Royal Academy shortly before Brown's death in 1787, at which time he acquired the contents of the artists studio, including 219 drawings that formed the basis for Ottley's distinguished collection of Old Master Drawings. During an extended period of study in Italy from 1791 to 1799, he added groups of drawings by Parmigianino, Raphael, and Michelangelo to his collection.
This drawing of a scene from the first act of Shakespeare's The Tempest, with its figure of Prospero clearly recalling Michelangelo's figure of Christ in the Sistine Chapel Last Judgment, probably dates from shortly after Ottley's return to London. It is almost certainly one of the group of drawings illustrating The Tempest included in the sale of Ottley's works in 1838. Other Tempest drawings by Ottley are in the British Museum and the Stanford University Museum of Art. That most of these drawings have traditionally been attributed to either John Brown (as is the case with Prospero Summoning Ariel) or John Flaxman is indicative of Both Ottley's stylistic indebtedness to his mentor and his friend but also of the assured quality of his draftsmanship.

Scott Wilcox

Wilcox, Forrester, O'Neil, Sloan. The Line of Beauty: British Drawings and Watercolors of the Eighteenth Century. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2001. pg. 54 cat. no. 42