Owen Swiny

Owen Swiny (1676, near Enniscorthy, Ireland - 2 October 1754) was an Irish theatre impresario and art dealer active in London.

Having attended Trinity College, Dublin from 1694, he was working at the Drury Lane Theatre by spring 1703 with Christopher Rich. He also adapted Molière's L'amour médecin as The Quacks, putting it on at the Drury Lane Theatre on 29 March 1705. He was evicted from Drury Lane in 1709 by William Collier. In the meantime, in 1706, he had leased the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket from Sir John Vanbrugh, quarrelled with Rich and poached Colley Cibber from him. After initial success with plays and opera there, Collier's court intrigues against Swiny led to his bankruptcy by January 1713. He then went travelling in France, the Netherlands and Italy, settling in Venice by 1721 as an agent signing Italian opera talent and works for the London stage and commissioning works from Italian artists for collectors back in England - those artists included Antonio Canaletto (on whose arrival in England in 1746 he introduced to the duke of Richmond) and Rosalba Carriera.

With Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond as the project's main patron, Swiny got together a Venetian-Bolognese team of painters (including Piazzetta, Sebastiano and Marco Ricci, Canaletto, G. B. Pittoni, Giovanni Battista Cimaroli, Donato Creti and Francesco Monti) in the 1720s to produce a series of 24 tomb paintings with allegories of recent English history, especially the Glorious Revolution. He tried to have the paintings engraved in a single volume, publishing the prospectus To the Ladies and Gentlemen of Taste of Great Britain and Ireland in the 1730s to try to raise the funding for this by subscription. When the volume finally came out in 1741, as Tombeaux des princes, grands capitaines et autres hommes illustrés, qui ont fleuri dans la Grande-Bretagne vers la fin du XVII et le commencement du XVIII siècle, it included only 9 of the paintings, but Swiny still planned a second series of six such paintings on the duke of Marlborough's deeds that remained incomplete on his death.

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