Background
John Dyer was baptized on August 13, 1699, in Carmarthenshire, United Kingdom. John was the fourth of six children born to Robert and Catherine Cocks Dyer.
John Dyer was baptized on August 13, 1699, in Carmarthenshire, United Kingdom. John was the fourth of six children born to Robert and Catherine Cocks Dyer.
After attending Westminster School (c. 1713 - 1716) and studying law in his father's office, he went in 1720 to London to study painting and later in the 1720's made two visits to Italy for the same purpose, but he did his best work as a poet.
In London he met several literary figures and wrote his poem Grongar Hill (1726), important as the beginning of the revival of interest in the picturesque description of nature, in which his training as a painter was significant. After being an itinerant artist in western England and Wales, and a farmer in Herefordshire and Leicestershire, he published The Ruins of Rome (1740), a poem which helped to foster the 18th-century interest in ruins, seen at its height in the Gothic revival. In 1751 he moved, under the patronage of the family of Lord Hardwicke, to Coningsby in Lincolnshire. The Fleece, his mercantile epic on the sheep and wool trade, appeared in 1757.
Dyer married a 26-year-old widow, Sarah Ensor Hawkins, with whom he had several children.
