acquaintance with the older Scottish poets. Watson died on 22 July 1722. In the obituary notice of his widow, then Mrs. Heriot, who died on 20 July 1731, it is stated that by Watson, her previous husband, she had a very considerable estate.
[Preface to the Reprint of the Choice Collection, 1869; Lee's Memorial for the Bible Societies; Preface to Watson's History of Printing; Dickson and Edmonds's History of Printing in Scotland.]
WATSON, JAMES (1739?–1790), engraver, was born in Ireland in, or more probably before, 1740, and came when young to London, where he is supposed to have been a pupil of James Macardell [q. v.] He became one of the leading mezzotint-engravers of his time, and produced many excellent plates from pictures by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Cotes, Catherine Read, Van Dyck, Metzu, Schalken, Rubens, and others. He engraved about fifty portraits after Reynolds, among the finest of which are those of the Duchess of Cumberland; the Duchess of Manchester, with her son; Countess Spencer and her daughter; Barbara, countess of Coventry; Anne Delaval, Lady Stanhope, and Nelly O'Brien. Watson published some of his works himself at his house in Little Queen Anne Street, Portland Chapel; but the majority were done for Sayer, Boydell, and other printsellers. He exhibited engravings with the Incorporated Society of Artists between 1762 and 1775, and died in Fitzroy Street, London, on 20 May 1790.
Caroline Watson (1761?–1814), daughter of James Watson, was born in London in 1760 or 1761, and studied under her father. She worked in the stipple method with much skill and refinement, and her plates are numerous. In 1784 she engraved a portrait of Prince William of Gloucester, after Reynolds, and in 1785 a pair of small plates of the Princesses Sophia and Mary, after Hoppner, which she dedicated to the queen, and was then appointed engraver to her majesty. Of her other works, the best are the portraits of Sir James Harris and the Hon. Mrs. Stanhope, both after Reynolds; Catherine II, after Rosselin; and William Woollett, after G. Stuart; S. Cooper's reputed portrait of Milton; ‘The Marriage of St. Catherine,’ after Correggio, and the plates to Hayley's ‘Life of Romney.’ For Boydell's Shakespeare Miss Watson engraved the ‘Death of Cardinal Beaufort,’ after Reynolds, and a scene from the ‘Tempest,’ after Wheatley. She also executed a set of aquatints of the ‘Progress of Female Virtue and Female Dissipation,’ from designs by Maria Cosway. She engraved several pictures belonging to the Marquis of Bute. She died at Pimlico on 10 June 1814.
[Redgrave's Dict. of Artists; Graves's Dict. of Artists, 1760–93; J. Chaloner Smith's British Mezzotinto Portraits; Le Blanc's Manuel de l'Amateur d'Estampes; Gent. Mag. 1814, i. 700; Thomas Watson, James Watson, and Elizabeth Judkins, by Gordon Goodwin, 1904.]
WATSON, JAMES (1766?–1838), Spencean agitator, born about 1766, was probably a Scotsman, and may have been the person of that name who in 1787 published at Edinburgh a ‘Dissertatio Inauguralis Medica de Amenorrhea.’ He afterwards came to London, and was officially described in 1817 as ‘surgeon, late of Bloomsbury,’ where he lived in Hyde Street with his son, who bore the same name and is similarly described. He may, however, have been only a chemist and apothecary, as he is called in his obituary notice; and in any case he could have had little practice, as he was in very poor circumstances. “Dr.” Watson and his son James early connected themselves with the ‘Societies of Spencean Philanthropists’ founded in 1814 by Thomas Evans, a traces-maker, to carry on the designs of Thomas Spence [q. v.] They held that private ownership of land was unchristian, and advocated ‘parochial partnership.’ They met weekly at one or other of four London taverns, the chief of which was the Cock in Grafton Street, Soho. In spite of the alarmist reports of the secret committees of the two houses of parliament in 1817, the Spenceans were very harmless as a body, and not only never had provincial branches, but, as Evans told Francis Place (1771–1854) [q. v.], at no time numbered more than fifty persons. The peace of 1815 was followed by great distress and discontent among the labouring population, and of this some of the Spenceans, including the Watsons (father and son) and Arthur Thistlewood [q. v.], constituted themselves exponents. They were joined by a man named Castle, a figure or doll maker, and a committee was formed consisting of themselves and two others, operatives named Preston and Hooper. They met in Greystoke Place, near Fetter Lane. Castle, it seems highly probable, acted throughout as an agent provocateur for the government. According to his story, he struck up an acquaintance with the others at a Spencean meeting in the autumn of 1816, and went about with Watson preparing a revolution which was to follow public meetings in Spa Fields. Thistlewood was to be the head, and the other five, generals under him, Watson the elder being second in command.
