George Don [q. v.], and collected several of the rarest species of British grasses. In 1804 he published ‘Gramina Britannica, or Representations of the British Grasses on 119 coloured plates, with Descriptions,’ 4to, the figures being executed by himself. This edition was, with the exception of a hundred copies, destroyed by a fire at Bensley's, the printers, and the book was not reissued until 1842. In 1818 Knapp published anonymously a poem entitled ‘Arthur, or the Pastor of the Village,’ and between 1820 and 1830 a series of articles, under the title of ‘The Naturalist's Diary,’ in ‘Time's Telescope.’ These formed the germ of his most successful work, the ‘Journal of a Naturalist,’ a botanical companion to White's ‘Selborne,’ which was published anonymously in 1829, and went through three editions during his lifetime. He lived till 1813 at Llanfoist, near Abergavenny, and subsequently at Alveston, near Bristol, where he died 29 April 1845. In 1804 he married Lydia Frances, daughter of Arthur Freeman of Antigua, by whom he had seven children; two sons and a daughter survived him.
Knapp became in 1796 a fellow of the Linnean Society, and was also a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. The genus of grasses previously named Mibora by Adanson was called Knappia by Smith, and Rhynchoglossum of Blume was similarly renamed by F. Bauer.
[Proc. Linnean Soc. i. 244; Athenæum, 1845, p. 463; Life-lore, 1889, i. 257.]
KNAPP, WILLIAM (1698–1768), musical composer, was born at Wareham, Dorset (Hutchins), in 1698. He was for thirty-nine years parish clerk of Poole, and died there in September (he was buried on the 26th) 1768. He published ‘A Sett of New Psalm Tunes and Anthems in Four Parts, with an introduction to Psalmody after a plain and familiar manner,’ London, 1738, 7th edition, 1762, and ‘New Church Melody,’ London, 1753, with portrait prefixed. To the latter work is added an ‘Imploration to the King of Kings, wrote by Charles I during his captivity in Carisbrook Castle, 1648.’ Both works consist of original compositions, and each contains the long-metre psalm-tune called, after the composer's birthplace, ‘Wareham,’ which constitutes Knapp's chief claim to remembrance. In the first-named publication the tune appears under the title and in the form now known; in the other work it is called ‘Blandford,’ and is printed in common instead of triple time.
[Hutchins's Hist. of Dorset, 3rd ed. 1861–1873, i. 67; Noble's Continuation of Granger, iii. 306; Parr's Church of England Psalmody; information from the rector of Poole.]
KNAPTON, GEORGE (1698–1778), portrait-painter, born in London in 1698, was a son of James Knapton, a prosperous bookseller in Ludgate Street. He studied under Jonathan Richardson [q. v.], and at first practised chiefly in crayons. He spent some years in Italy, where he became known to English travellers as a sound judge of the works of the old masters, and an interesting account, which he sent to his brother Charles, of a visit to the newly-opened-up city of Herculaneum, was printed in the ‘Philosophical Transactions’ of 1740, No. 458. Knapton was an original member of the Society of Dilettanti and their first portrait-painter; at a meeting of the society, 4 Jan. 1740, it was ordered ‘that every member of the society do make a present of his picture, in oil-colours, done by Mr. George Knapton, a member, to be hung up in the room where the society meets,’ and at a meeting in February 1744 ‘that every member who has not had his picture painted by Mr. Knapton by the meeting in February next year shall pay one guinea per annum till his picture be delivered in to the secretary, unless Mr. Knapton declares it is owing to his want of time to finish the same.’ Accordingly, before 1749 he painted the portraits of the first twenty-three members, most of them in fancy characters or costumes; these, which are some of his best works, include the Duke of Dorset as a Roman general, Viscount Galway as a cardinal, Sir Francis Dashwood as St. Francis adoring the Venus de' Medici, the Earl of Holdernesse as a waterman, Mr. Howe drawing a glass of wine from a terrestrial globe, the Earl of Bessborough as a Turk, and Sir Bourchier Wray holding a punchbowl and ladle; they are all still in the possession of the society and were contributed to the National Portrait Exhibition of 1868. Knapton resigned the appointment in 1763, and was succeeded, after an interval of six years, by Sir Joshua Reynolds. In 1750 the Prince of Wales commissioned Knapton, in conjunction with Vertue, to prepare a critical catalogue of the pictures at Kensington, Hampton Court, and Windsor, and in 1765 he succeeded Stephen Slaughter [q. v.] as surveyor and keeper of the king's pictures; he also had charge of Lord Spencer's collection at Althorp, Northamptonshire. Knapton's largest work was the group of the widowed Princess of Wales and her family, painted in 1751, now at Hampton Court, but that of the Earl of Upper Ossory and his brother and sister, at Woburn, and the portrait of the Earl of Burlington, at
