JOHN HAMILTON, a noted artist, was the son of a collector of customs, and was born at Eastbourne in Sussex in 1741. His early-developed talent for painting found congenial subjects among the rocks and woods of his native shore. He repaired to London about his eighteenth year, and studied his art first under Hudson, and afterwards under Pine. At the same time he executed several imitations of the antique figures in the gallery of Mortmain, the Duke of Richmond. Some of these secured for him premiums from the Society for the Encouragement of Art, and facilitated his admission into the private academy in St Martin's Lane. But his first introduction to general notice was his representation of "Edward the Confessor seizing the Treasures of his Mother," a painting which, by the judgment of Sir Joshua Reynolds, received the prize of fifty guineas, in preference to a rival picture by Romney. His great work, "St Paul preaching to the Britons," was executed soon afterwards, and raised him to the height of popularity. Yet owing to his rapidity of execution, and his tameness in colouring, Mortimer did not reach a high excellence in historical painting. He excelled far more in the designs which he threw off for the booksellers. In these his facile hand sketched with unerring skill the forms that his happy fancy conceived or his well-stored memory suggested. He was also unrivalled in his feats of rapid and dexterous drawing; and in his creation of fantastic and striking images. This eccentricity and fondness for display was not confined merely to his art—it extended also to his ordinary life. Gaudy dress, convivial pleasures, athletic contests, and grotesque buffoonery, occupied a great part of his time and attention. At length he married and settled down into sobriety of life, but not before his constitution had become prematurely weak. In 1775 his health began to decline, and rendered it necessary that he should retire into the pure air of the country. His rapid power of painting, however, remained unimpaired; and in his rural retreat at Aylesbury in Berks he produced in one year a number of pictures of the united value of L900. He returned to London in 1778, and died of a fever in February of the following year. The best known historical paintings of Mortimer, in addition to the two already mentioned, are "King John signing the Magna Charta," "The Battle of Agincourt," "The Origin of Health," "The Tragic and Comic Muses," "Sextus consulting Erichtho from Lucan," "The Incantation," and "Vortigern and Rowena." (See Cunningham's Lives of British Painters, &c.)