Then and Now: Collecting and Classicism in Eighteenth-Century England 9780773582972

Citation preview

then and now

then and now Collecting and Classicism in Eighteenth-Century England joan coutu

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston | London | Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015

ISBN 978-0-7735-4543-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7735-8297-2 (ePDF ) Legal deposit third quarter 2015 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This publication has also been supported by the Henry Moore Foundation. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Coutu, Joan Michèle, 1964–, author Then and now : collecting and classicism in eighteenth-century England / Joan Coutu. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4543-4 (bound). – ISBN 978-0-7735-8297-2 (PDF ) 1. Sculpture, Classical – Collectors and collecting – England – History – 18th century. 2. Sculpture, Classical – Private collections – England – History – 18th century. 3. Sculpture, Classical – Appreciation – England – History – 18th century. 4. Sculpture, Classical – Political aspects – England – History – 18th century. I. Title.

NB87.G7C 68 2015

733.074’4209033

C2015-902098-0 C2015-902099-9

Set in 11/14 Minion Pro with Trajan Pro Book design & typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital

for carol, a wonderful scholar and friend

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contents

Figures | ix Acknowledgments | xvii Introduction | 3

1

Temporal Elision and Sculpture Collections in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century | 17

2

An “Old Whig”: The 2nd Marquis of Rockingham and His Collections | 49

3

The 3rd Duke of Richmond and His Sculpture Gallery in Whitehall: Munificence Worthy of a Prince | 93

4

The 10th Earl of Huntingdon and the Arcadian Plains of Leicestershire | 127

5

Thomas Hollis and His Life Plan | 155

6

Conclusion: The Nuances of the Classical Archetype | 193

Notes | 223 Bibliography | 269 Index | 299

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figures

1.1 1.2 1.3

1.4

1.5

1.6

1.7

1.8

1.9

1.10

The 3rd Earl of Burlington, Tribunal or Saloon, Chiswick House, London, 1726–29. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 22 The 3rd Earl of Burlington, Gallery, Chiswick House, London, 1726– 29. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 24 William Kent and Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester, Marble Hall, Holkham Hall, Norfolk, 1734–64. By kind permission of Viscount Coke and the Trustees of the Holkham Estate | 26 William Kent and Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester, Sculpture Gallery, Holkham Hall, Norfolk, 1734–64. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 27 James Gibbs, Colen Campbell, and William Kent, Stone Hall, Houghton Hall, Norfolk, from 1722. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 30 James Gibbs, Colen Campbell, and William Kent, Stone Hall, with François Girardon’s bronze copy of the Laocoön, c. 1690 (height 219 cm), Houghton Hall, Norfolk. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 31 William Kent, Great Staircase with Hubert Le Sueur’s bronze copy of the Borghese Gladiator, c. 1631 (height 183 cm), Houghton Hall, Norfolk. Photo courtesy of Houghton Hall | 33 William Kent, Temple of British Worthies, Stowe, 1734–35. By kind permission of the National Trust, Stowe Gardens, Buckinghamshire. Photo: Joan Coutu | 37 William Kent, Temple of Ancient Virtue, Stowe, designed c. 1734. By kind permission of the National Trust, Stowe Gardens, Buckinghamshire. Photo: Joan Coutu | 38 Temple of Modern Virtue (demolished). Engraving published in George Bickham, The Beauties of Stow, 1750. Huntington Library, San Marino, California | 39

1.11

1.12

1.13

1.14

2.1

2.2

2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6

2.7

2.8

Edward Rooker after William Chambers, Section of the Gallery of Antiquities from William Chambers, Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings at Kew, in Surry: The Seat of Her Royal Highness the Princess Dowager of Wales, 1763, engraving, 37.5 × 54 cm. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University | 44 Edward Rooker after William Chambers, Section of the Gallery of Antiquities from William Chambers, Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings at Kew, in Surry: The Seat of Her Royal Highness the Princess Dowager of Wales, 1763, engraving, 37.5 × 54 cm. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University | 45 Joseph Wilton, Muse for the Gallery of Antiques at Kew, c. 1757, marble. Present location unknown. Photo by courtesy of the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, reproduced with permission from Mallett Antiques | 46 Joseph Wilton, Muse for the Gallery of Antiques at Kew, c. 1757, marble. Present location unknown. Photo by courtesy of the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, reproduced with permission from Mallett Antiques | 46 John Carr, Mausoleum for the 2nd Marquis of Rockingham, Wentworth Woodhouse, commissioned in 1783 by the 4th Earl Fitzwilliam. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 50 John Carr, interior of Mausoleum for the 2nd Marquis of Rockingham, Wentworth Woodhouse, commissioned in 1783 by the 4th Earl Fitzwilliam. Photo: Patrick Eyres | 51 West Front, Wentworth Woodhouse, South Yorkshire, built 1725–34. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 55 Henry Flitcroft and others, East Front, Wentworth Woodhouse, South Yorkshire, 1733–37. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 56 Henry Flitcroft, Hoober Stand, Wentworth Woodhouse, South Yorkshire, 1748. Photo: Patrick Eyres | 57 Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford (2nd creation), the Gallery, Wentworth Castle, Stainborough, South Yorkshire, from 1709, completed by the 2nd Earl of Strafford. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 59 Henry Flitcroft, Marble Hall, Wentworth Woodhouse, South Yorkshire, 1733–37, with bas-reliefs added by James Stuart in 1755. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 61 Vincenzo Foggini, Samson and the Philistines, 1749, marble, height 233 cm. Originally sited in the Pillar’d Hall, Wentworth Woodhouse,

x | figures

2.9 2.10 2.11

2.12

2.13

2.14 2.15 2.16 2.17

2.18

2.19

2.20 2.21

2.22 3.1

now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London | 63 Henry Flitcroft, the Pillar’d Hall, Wentworth Woodhouse, South Yorkshire, 1733–37. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 64 Main stair, Wentworth Woodhouse, completed before 1782. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 69 Fitzwilliam Cabinet, Florentine pietra dura cabinet, probably early eighteenth century, adapted as a coin cabinet and supplied with a stand, c. 1770, height (excluding bronze figure of Venus) 193 cm. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford | 74 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lord Rockingham and Edmund Burke, c. 1766, oil on canvas, 145.4 × 159.1 cm. © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge / Art Resource, ny | 76 Charles Grignion after William Hogarth, frontispiece to A Catalogue of the Pictures … Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1761. HIP / Art Resource, ny | 77 John Carr, stable block, Wentworth Woodhouse, South Yorkshire, c. 1766. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 78 George Stubbs, Whistlejacket, c. 1762, oil on canvas, 292 × 246.4 cm. © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, ny | 79 Whistle Jacket room, Wentworth Woodhouse, South Yorkshire. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 80 Joseph Nollekens, Venus, 1773, marble, height 124 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program | 82 Joseph Nollekens, Minerva, 1775, marble, height 144 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program | 82 Joseph Nollekens, Juno, 1776, marble, height 139.1 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program | 83 Paris, probably 100–200 ce , restored before 1766, marble, height 133 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles | 83 Joseph Nollekens, Diana, 1778, marble, height 124 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. V&A Images, London / Art Resource, ny | 85 John Carr, Keppel’s Column, Wentworth Woodhouse, 1776–81, height 41 m. Photo: Patrick Eyres | 91 Joseph Wilton, marble copy of the Apollo Belvedere, c. 1754. Originally in the collection of the 2nd Duke of Richmond at Richmond House, now at Sledmere House, East Yorkshire | 96 figures | xi

3.2

Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), Giovanni Battista Cimaroli, and Giovanni Battista Pittoni, Allegorical Tomb of Archbishop Tillotson, c. 1722–26, commissioned by the 2nd Duke of Richmond for Goodwood House, Sussex, oil on canvas, 218 × 138.5 cm. Private collection. By kind permission of Simon C. Dickinson Ltd. | 99 3.3 View of the Fire-Workes and Illuminations at His Grace the Duke of Richmond’s at White-hall and on the River Thames, on Monday 15 May 1749, 1749, hand-coloured etching, 43.5 × 56 cm. Harry Beard Collection. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London | 101 3.4 Canaletto, (Giovanni Antonio Canal), Whitehall and the Privy Garden from Richmond House, 1746, oil on canvas, 101.5 × 117 cm. Trustees of the Goodwood Collection / Bridgeman Images | 103 3.5 Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), View of the Thames, from Richmond House, 1746, oil on canvas, 101.5 × 117 cm. Trustees of the Goodwood Collection / Bridgeman Images | 104 3.6 Charles Philips, Charles, 2nd Duke of Richmond, Lennox and Aubigny, c. 1730, oil on canvas, 76 × 63 cm. Society of Antiquaries of London, uk / Bridgeman Images | 105 3.7 Pompeo Batoni, Charles, 3rd Duke of Richmond, 1755, oil on canvas, 135.2 × 97.7 cm. Trustees of the Goodwood Collection / Bridgeman Images | 107 3.8 Anton Raphael Mengs, Charles Lennox (1735–1806), 3rd Duke of Richmond and Lennox, 1755, oil on canvas, 127 × 94 cm. Trustees of the Goodwood Collection / Bridgeman Images | 107 3.9 Joseph Wilton, drawing from his Franco-Italo sketchbook, early 1750s. Private collection, London | 110 3.10 William Parry, drawing after the copy of the Borghese Gladiator in the 3rd Duke of Richmond’s Gallery, 1758. rsa | 119 4.1 Humphry Repton, sketch of Donington Hall unimproved from the southeast, 1790, from John Nichols’s personal copy of the History and Antiquities of the county of Leicester, 1790, watercolour. Collection of the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland. Published by permission of the Leicestershire Museums, Arts and Records Services | 128 4.2 John Michael Rysbrack, monument to Theophilus, 9th Earl of Huntingdon (d. 1746), and his wife, Selena (designed by William Kent), 1749, Ashby-de-la-Zouche, Leicestershire. Photo: Joan Coutu | 130

xii | figures

4.3

Joshua Reynolds, Francis Hastings, 10th Earl of Huntingdon, 1754, oil on canvas, 125.7 × 100.3 cm. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, Bequest of Florence M. Quinn. © Courtesy of the Huntington Art Collections | 135 4.4 Louis François Roubiliac, bust of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, 1745, marble, height 57.8 cm. © National Portrait Gallery, London | 139 4.5 Joseph Wilton, bust of Dr Antonio Cocchi, 1755, marble, height 61.3 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London | 140 4.6 Bust of Pythagoras, copy of Greek original, mid-fifth century bce , marble, height 49.3 cm. Musei Capitolini, Rome. Photo: Album / Art Resource, ny | 140 4.7 Joseph Wilton, bust of Francis Hastings, 10th Earl of Huntingdon, 1750s, marble, height 63.5 cm. © UK Government Art Collection | 141 4.8 Bust of Epicurus, Roman copy of a Hellenistic portrait, c. 275–250 bce . Hall of the Philosophers, Palazzo Nuovo, Musei Capitolini. © Vanni Archive / Art Resource, ny | 141 4.9 James Gibbs, Lord Cobham’s Pillar (1742), seen from the Temple of Concord and Victory, Stowe. By kind permission of the National Trust, Stowe Gardens, Buckinghamshire. Photo: Joan Coutu | 146 4.10 Joseph Wilton, bust of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, 1757, marble, 65 cm. British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, ny | 148 4.11 Joseph Wilton, bust of Oliver Cromwell, c. 1762, marble, height 75 cm. © UK Government Art Collection | 148 4.12 William Chambers, Joseph Wilton, Giovanni Cipriani, and others, The Royal State Coach, 1762. Royal Mews, Buckingham Palace, London. Photo: HIP / Art Resource, ny | 152 5.1 Probably French, model of the Laocoön, late seventeenth or first half of the eighteenth century, red beeswax, length 30 cm. © Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved | 162 5.2 Richard Wilson, Thomas Hollis, 1752, oil on canvas, 56.5 × 44.4 cm. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Harvard University Portrait Collection, Gift of Mrs Donald F. Hyde to the Harvard College Library, hna 98. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College | 167 5.3 Andrea Pozzi, Thomas Hollis, 1752, ivory, 9.5 × 6.3 cm. ms Eng 1466. Houghton Library, Harvard University | 168

figures | xiii

Andrea Pozzi, Thomas Brand Hollis, 1752, ivory, 9.5 × 6.3 cm. ms Eng 1466. Houghton Library, Harvard University | 168 5.5 Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), View of Piazza del Campidoglio and Cordonata, Rome, 1754, oil on canvas, 52 × 64 cm. Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images | 170 5.6 Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), A Capriccio of Buildings in Whitehall, c. 1754, oil on canvas, 52.1 × 61.6 cm. Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images | 171 5.7 Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), St. Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1754, oil on canvas, 52.1 × 61.6 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection | 172 5.8 Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), A View of Walton Bridge, 1754, oil on canvas, 48.7 × 76.4 cm. dpg 600, by permission of the Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London | 172 5.9 Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), Interior of the Rotunda at Ranelagh, 1754, oil on canvas, 47 × 75.6 cm. Purchased 1894 (ng 1429) © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, ny | 173 5.10 Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), Westminster Bridge under Repair, from the North, 1754, oil on canvas, 49 × 76 cm. Private collection. By kind permission of Simon C. Dickinson Ltd. | 173 5.11 Joseph Wilton, bust of Thomas Hollis, c. 1762, marble, height 66 cm. © National Portrait Gallery, London | 176 5.12 Giovanni Battista Cipriani, after William Faithorne, John Milton, 1780, etching, 22.5 × 15.7 cm. © National Portrait Gallery, London | 178 5.13 Frontispiece and title page from Catharine Macaulay, The History of England: From the Accession of James I to the Elevation of the House of Hanover. Printed for the author and sold by I. Nourse, London, 1766–71. ec 75.h 7267.z z766m., Houghton Library, Harvard University | 178 5.14 Robert Adam, title page of Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia, 1763. Image courtesy of University of Wisconsin Digital Collections | 178 5.15 Thomas Pingo, obverse: bust of George II; reverse: Canada, 1760, silver medal, diameter 38 mm. © Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved | 181 5.16 Interior, Temple of Concord and Victory, Stowe, 1747–49. By kind permission of the National Trust, Stowe Gardens, Buckinghamshire. Photo: Joan Coutu | 183 5.4

xiv | figures

5.17

5.18 5.19

6.1 6.2

6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6

6.7

6.8

6.9

The Repeal, or the Funeral of Miss Ame-Stamp, c. 1766, etching, sheet 28.2 × 37.4 cm, published by Carington Bowles. Mabel Brady Garvan Collection. Photo credit: Yale University Art Gallery | 186 Thomas Pingo, obverse: William Pitt, 1766, copper, diameter 41 mm. Photo courtesy of John Sallay | 187 Giovanni Battista Cipriani, monument to Thomas Hollis, 1767, etching. Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Gift of Mrs Frederic T. Lewis, in memory of Dr Frederic T. Lewis, m 13864. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College | 189 Entrance hall, Syon House, Middlesex, 1761. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 194 William Adam, Section of the New Design for Sir Nathaniel Curson Baronet at Kedleston / Now Lord Scarsdale, Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, 1760, pen, wash, and yellow wash on laid paper, 128.6 × 59.6 cm. Courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum | 195 Robert Adam, Marble Hall at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, 1760s. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 195 Robert Adam, Sculpture Gallery, Newby Hall, North Yorkshire, c. 1767. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 196 The Pantheon Gallery, Ince Blundell Hall, Lancashire, 1802–10. Photo: Country Life Picture Library | 196 Francesco Panini, design for the Gallery, Lansdowne House (later Shelburne House), London, 1771–72. Courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum | 197 William Chambers, The Townley Collection in the Dining Room at 7 Park Street, 1794–95, pen and grey ink and watercolour, with some bodycolour, 39 × 54 cm. British Museum, London. © Trustees of the British Museum / Art Resource, ny | 202 William Chambers, The Townley Marbles in the Entrance Hall at 7 Park Street, Westminster, 1794, pen and grey ink and watercolour, with some bodycolour, on original washline mount and possibly original frame, 39 × 54 cm. © Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved | 203 Johann Zoffany, Charles Townley and His Friends in the Townley Gallery, 33 Park Street, Westminster, 1781–83, oil on canvas, 127 × 99.1 cm. © Townley Hall Art Gallery and Museum, Burnley, Lancashire / Bridgeman Images | 204

figures | xv

6.10 Richard Cosway, Charles Townley with a Group of Connoisseurs, 1771–75, oil on canvas, 86.1 × 81 cm. © Townley Hall Art Gallery and Museum, Burnley, Lancashire / Bridgeman Images | 205 6.11 Joseph Wilton, monument to James Wolfe, unveiled 1773, marble, Westminster Abbey, London. © Dean and Chapter of Westminster | 208 6.12 Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1770, oil on canvas, 152.6 × 214.5 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Transfer from the Canadian War Memorials, 1921 (gift of the 2nd Duke of Westminster, Eaton Hall, Cheshire, 1918). Photo © NGC | 209 6.13 Francis Hayman, The Humanity of General Amherst, 1760, oil on canvas, 90.4 × 111.5 cm. Gift of the Beaverbrook Foundation, Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, nb , Canada | 210 6.14 Francis Hayman, Robert Clive and Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey, 1757, c. 1760, oil on canvas, 100.3 × 127 cm. Purchased with help from the Art Fund, 1979 © National Portrait Gallery, London | 211 6.15 James Stuart and Peter Scheemakers, monument to Vice-Admiral Charles Watson, 1759–63, marble, Westminster Abbey, London. © Dean and Chapter of Westminster | 212 6.16 Joseph Wilton, monument to Rear-Admiral Charles Holmes, c. 1764, marble, Westminster Abbey, London. © Dean and Chapter of Westminster | 213 6.17 Joshua Reynolds, Captain the Honourable Augustus Keppel, 1753, oil on canvas, 239 × 147.5 cm. © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London | 214 6.18 Joshua Reynolds, Captain Robert Orme, 1756, oil on canvas, 239 × 147 cm. Bought 1862 (ng 681). National Gallery, London. © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, ny | 214 6.19 Edward Penny, The Death of General Wolfe, 1764, oil on canvas, 102 × 127 cm. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford | 215 6.20 Simon Gribelin after Charles Le Brun, Alexander before the Tent of Darius, 1693, engraving. GRI Digital Collections. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program | 216

xvi | figures

acknowledgments

Many people and organizations have assisted in bringing this project to fruition. I am particularly indebted to Carol Gibson, Jennifer Phillips, Jean Stevenson, and Kyla Madden and the editorial staff at McGill-Queen’s University Press. For generous fellowships in the early stages of research, I would like to thank two institutions at Yale University, the Yale Center for British Art and the Lewis Walpole Library; the Houghton Library at Harvard University; and the Henry E. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens at San Marino, California. Financial support was also provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University of Waterloo (the Faculty of Arts, the Bob Harding and Lois Claxton Humanities and Social Sciences Endowment Fund, and the Office of Research), the Henry Moore Foundation, and the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program (Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences). Sheila Ager, Emily Berg, David Bindman, Sarah Burnage, Dennine Dudley, Patrick Eyres, Andrea Gáldy, Craig Hardiman, Gabriel Niccoli, George Robertson, Margot Siebel-Achenbach, and Am Zimmerman also contributed much needed assistance. Several aspects of the research were presented at numerous conferences over the years; I am grateful to the conference organizers and chairs for the opportunities. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the University of Victoria and the University of Waterloo. Finally, I owe much to my family, Sebastian, Ellen, and Michèle, who continue to enrich every project I take on.

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then and now

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introduction

In 1749 the 1st Marquis of Rockingham wrote to his son, Lord Malton, who had recently arrived in Florence, asking him to acquire eight statues, each six feet high, for the Great Hall at Wentworth Woodhouse, the family’s country seat in what was then West Yorkshire. The marquis did not specify the subjects of the statues but insisted that, although “some specks on the back parts” of the statues could be allowed, the fronts should be unblemished since the statues were to stand in niches.1 The marquis’s request lies at the heart of this book. The request seems initially mundane; anyone who has visited any number of English country houses might imagine that such requests were commonplace, given the ubiquity of classical or all’antica (made in an antique mode) sculpture that populate entrance halls, state rooms, libraries, or dedicated sculpture galleries. Yet preoccupation with the preponderance of such sculpture or with the phenomenon of collecting in the eighteenth century can often smooth over the idiosyncrasies and specificities of individual motivations and collections. Are the statues and busts simply so much furniture that embellish Palladian and neo-classical interiors or gardens? Are they sincere, or disingenuous, displays of erudition? Or is the explanation more complex? Could they be self-conscious expressions of refinement on the part of the owners, consistent with the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury’s idea of civic humanism: that to be truly virtuous one must display such refinement to spur like-minded individuals to honourable action? The answers to these and other questions are contingent upon whom the collectors were. Proceeding from the premise that each collection is as much about the collector as it is about the objects within it, some rationales for acquiring classical and all’antica sculpture in eighteenth-century England are explored in this book. Specifically, four significant collections of classical sculpture that were begun in the middle of the eighteenth century are the primary focus. Of these, three were formed by aristocrats: Charles Lord Malton, who would succeed

his father as the 2nd Marquis of Rockingham in 1750; Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond; and Francis Hastings, the 10th Earl of Huntingdon. The fourth was amassed by Thomas Hollis, a member of the untitled and dissenting landed gentry who had inherited a fortune from his merchant father and whose family name had long been connected with distinguished acts of philanthropy. The collections were begun in Italy when the young men were each on their grand tour but, notably, none of their itineraries overlapped nor were they particularly well known to each other. The men travelled between 1748 and 1756, a period when a tidal wave of British tourists – Robert Adam described them as “shoals of Englishmen” – descended on Italy.2 This immediately followed the end of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740– 48) during which access to Italy had been substantially curtailed for the British. Contemporaneous or nearly contemporaneous collections amassed by other patricians and landed gentry, such as Lord Charlemont and William Lock of Norbury Park, and by the young George III are also discussed, as a means to orientate and contextualize the other four. A central premise of this book is that the renewed point of contact at midcentury with the material culture of antiquity, as opposed to exposure through reproductions or written or oral accounts, was critical to the evolving relationship that the English patriciate had with the classical past over the course of the eighteenth century. Four chapters of the book, each devoted to the four men’s collections, are preceded by a chapter that characterizes collecting preferences among the patriciate in the early part of the century. These collections, assembled by men such as the earls of Pembroke, Burlington, and Leicester, Viscount Cobham, and Robert Walpole, were, for the most part, driven by philology and identity; the pieces were chosen for the figure each portrayed. Consequently, busts of statesmen, emperors, and empresses embellished numerous entrance halls and populated staterooms and private libraries and often constituted elaborate, arcane narratives. Aesthetics were a secondary concern. Other collections of sculpture were also amassed in the early part of the century by men who were not of the patriciate yet here too the choice of sculpture was also not governed by aesthetics. Of these, Dr Richard Mead’s collection was by far the most substantial; although aesthetically pleasing at first blush, his choice was governed by his preoccupation with the study of the human body, medicine, and physics.3 By mid-century, the taste among the patriciate had swung toward collecting reproductions for aesthetic reasons: copies and casts of the Apollo Belvedere, the Antinous, the Venus de’Medici, the Dancing Faun, and the like. These were at the heart of Rockingham’s, Richmond’s, Huntingdon’s, and Hollis’s collections. The four case studies explore this fascination with the aesthetic.

4 | then and now

Shortly thereafter, by the mid-1760s, the preference for collecting authentic antiques – both fragments and reassembled or whole originals (or purported originals) – would entirely displace the interest in copies and casts, although the aesthetic canon reified at mid-century would become the measuring stick of worth for these newly discovered pieces. Significantly, the accumulation of originals corresponds with the earnest beginnings of professional archaeology. The collections of Charles Townley, Henry Blundell, and the Earl of Shelburne are the quintessential examples (see Figs. 6.5, 6.6, and 6.9). The four mid-century collections can also be tied together because the collectors were all Whigs. This was not necessarily coincidental – after the Whig rout of the Tories in the 1740s, openly declaring Tory allegiance would expose one to the charge of being a Jacobite or Jacobite sympathizer – but it must be kept in mind that the idea of what, or who, constituted a Whig at mid-century was hardly cohesive. Rockingham and Richmond were sons of Court Whigs, first in Walpole’s government and then with the PelhamNewcastle Broad Bottom coalition. Rockingham would go on to lead the eponymous Rockingham Whigs in the 1760s, also known as the Old Whigs, who would invoke vestiges of the old Court Whigs while also giving birth to the modern political party: a group of men bound by “honourable connections,” to use John Brewer’s phrase, who were committed to an ideology that professed the legitimate right of the natural (old landed) aristocracy to rule.4 Richmond, always the maverick, aligned himself at times with the Rockinghamites but, for the most part, could not toe a party line and would speak with his own voice. Huntingdon was a soft Whig; his father had been a Tory tarred with the Jacobite brush, which may have precipitated his early demise. The younger Huntingdon then came under the influence of Philip Stanhope, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield, who was a stalwart Old Whig, yet, ultimately, his political convictions remained nebulous. Hollis, by contrast, in his adherence to a very particular brand of Whiggery which he himself had defined, was flagrant in his exposition of this political creed while at the same time trying to maintain a gentlemanly demeanour. By organizing the text as a series of case studies I hope to elucidate the range of Whiggery evident across the patriciate and landed gentry during an era of political realignment, between the sharp Tory-Whig divide of the first half of the century and the multiple manifestations of Whiggery that would come to the fore in the 1760s. In so doing I am also wary of assessing the sculpture collections as politically determinative; that is, the collectors did not choose to collect sculpture because they were Whigs. Such determinist thinking would be inappropriate since men of all political turns as well as those who were apolitical engaged

Introduction | 5

in collecting sculpture: the various shades of Whiggery as exemplified by Rockingham, Richmond, Huntingdon, and Hollis; stalwart Tories such as the Earl of Bathurst earlier in the century and Nathaniel Curzon later in the century; and men of no political persuasion, such as the nominally apolitical and unenfranchised Roman Catholics Charles Townley and Henry Blundell. Rather, the act of collecting – of gathering objects and placing them on display – is examined as a component that made up the erudite, landed gentleman. Nonetheless, sculpture collections could be used politically more forcefully at times, as in the case of Rockingham in the 1760s when Edmund Burke, his private secretary, characterized the country house mansion, and by extension everything inside it, as a defining feature of the natural aristocracy.5 These were episodes of conscious political intent, when the existing collection could be co-opted for political gain. Likewise, the choice of the contents of the collection was rarely politically driven. Indeed, the same canonical works and busts appeared in many collections whatever the owner’s political persuasion. Of the four collections that are the primary focus, the contents of Hollis’s collection would be the most politically determinative; he often selected particular works to give to particular individuals as a Whiggish sign of gratitude. However, he too would also collect sculptures for apolitical reasons, installing an exemplary display in the country house of his friend, Thomas Brand. In each of the four case studies, the moments when each collection, or its contents, were activated politically will be discussed as distinct from the genesis and the overarching rationale for the accumulation of each collection. As evocations of the owners’ perception of their place in the world, the motivation for initiating a sculpture collection aligns with the 3rd Earl of Shaftsbury’s idea of civic humanism. As the best works of classical antiquity, the sculptures formed part of a complete package that also included the country house, the surrounding landscape, the town house, and other objects that were collected such as coins, gems, and telescopes, as well as the owner’s sense of fashion, command of languages, and overall deportment. Indeed, empirical study, often grounded in the virtù of one’s own collection, was a key ingredient of Shaftesburian philosophy, as Craig Hanson’s recent revisionist study of Shaftesbury makes clear.6 Taken as a whole, all parts functioned as exemplum, at once a visible anchor of the classical erudition of the English patriciate and a prompt to encourage men toward acts of public virtue.7 While Shaftesbury’s concept had initially been taken up by Whigs in the early eighteenth century to differentiate themselves from the Tories as honourable, civic-minded gentlemen, by the second decade of the century the political import had dissipated as the notion of exemplum became intertwined with a standard of taste, a certain measure to which all 6 | then and now

should aspire. Indeed, the existence of a standard of taste was a fundamental conviction among the eighteenth-century cognoscenti, rubbing up against Newton’s immutable laws that govern human nature and Locke’s emphasis on experience. Such theorists as James Addison, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Edmund Burke in Britain, and Voltaire, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, and Montesquieu in France, all weighed in on the subject. Shortly thereafter, in the 1760s, exemplum would become politically charged, in Burke’s assertion of the primacy of the natural aristocracy in the Rockinghamite party ideology and as Rockingham, Richmond, Huntingdon, and Hollis each used his collection to answer the challenge of George III, who himself had amassed even greater collections, to present himself as the natural leader sine qua non. Henceforth, an unravelling would occur with the rise of career politicians as a breed apart from men of erudition, intellectuals, and connoisseurs. The temporal relationship with the classical past is an important component of the evolving trope of exemplum. In the first part of the century when identity-driven and philologically based collections predominated, often presented in an iconographic or narrative program, temporal distance with the classical world was essentially elided. Patrons and collectors such as Pembroke, Burlington, Leicester, Cobham, and Walpole would interweave themselves among busts and statues of distinguished men and women of antiquity, creating a congruent, timeless whole. This atemporality also extended to Romano and Celtic Britain, as is evident at Wilton House and elsewhere. However, by the mid-1760s, temporal elisions had dissipated as the distance between the ancient past and the present was firmly evident and vigorously acknowledged: in 1767 Baron d’Harcanville proclaimed, “Antiquity is a vast country separated from our own by a long interval of time”;8 and in 1786 Reynolds stated that Claude’s Arcadian “landskips … sends the imagination back into antiquity.”9 Indeed, Chloe Chard, in her analysis of grand tour writing, indicates that by the end of the eighteenth century, authors often portrayed the ancient past as “distressingly remote,” that the comfort of myth and history that had enveloped famous places of antiquity in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had been stripped away.10 The latter-eighteenth-century collections amassed by Townley, Blundell, Shelburne, and others, with the emphasis on the authentic original, and the gathering together of these originals into dedicated sculpture galleries where the objects were to be admired as samples of another time and another place, accentuated the distinction between the two worlds. The focus in this book on the collections of casts and copies that were formed at the middle of the century examines the point at which the temporal elision begins to unravel, when the classical world became consciously regarded as a time and place Introduction | 7

distinct from the here and now. Rockingham’s, Richmond’s, Huntingdon’s, and Hollis’s collections sit at the cusp of a recognition of classical antiquity as a discrete entity that fundamentally informed the present, a true palimpsest of classicism. Collecting casts and copies for aesthetic reasons and gathering them together in a room without any preconceived iconographic program based upon the identity of the sculptures marks the division. Yet atemporality would linger as collectors continued to insinuate themselves into their collections, either by intermingling busts of themselves and their contemporaries with particular antique favourites in the library or simply by placing their aesthetic canonical pieces in entrance halls, drawing rooms, dining rooms, and other rooms that they inhabited daily and used for purposes other than the dedicated museum-like gallery spaces that would become the norm for the display of antiquities in the last third of the eighteenth century. In this regard, some scholars have taken great issue with the apparent incongruity of the placement of a copy of the Dying Gaul across from that of the Apollo Belvedere, or the inappropriateness of such sculptures in a “place where … visitors handed their overcoats to the footman,” as the entrance hall of Syon House has been described.11 However, I would argue that these scholars have missed the point. The issue is not about the incongruity based upon whom the sculptures represent but rather about the appreciation of the best of Greece and Rome. The situation of these pieces in entrance halls and other functional rooms was meant to prompt the visitor to loftier aims. The collections of Rockingham, Richmond, Huntingdon, and Hollis are thus positioned as exempla of timeless classical virtue that also involve a recognition and, at times, a coherent ordering of the past. The evolving temporal relationship with the classical past and the shifting preferences for particular types of classical sculpture were also modulated by the shifting encounters with the material culture of antiquity. Prior to the middle of the century, the classical world, including its architecture and sculpture, was accessed primarily through texts, either the writings of the great classical authors or compendia of prints such as Domenico de Rossi’s Raccolta di statue antiche e moderne, published in 1704. There were comparatively few antique originals or three-dimensional copies in Britain, although reproductions in print form were readily available. Although the grand tour had started in earnest at the turn of the century, until the middle of the century it was still limited to a fairly narrow group of English, Scottish, and Irish nobility. During the War of the Austrian Succession, only the most enterprising of Britons travelled to Italy. After hostilities ceased, however, there was a veritable explosion in the numbers of grand tourists to Italy, and the more intrepid, such as Viscount Charlemont – whose own collection serves

8 | then and now

to contextualize Rockingham’s in the subsequent discussion – and James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, went on to Greece and Asia Minor. Indeed, the sheer number of tourists, including the natural aristocracy, the parvenu, artists, and architects, brought unprecedented attention to the material culture of antiquity. An inevitable result was the advance of archaeology. The discovery first of Herculaneum in 1738 and then Pompeii in 1748, combined with the relatively modest trade in antiquities in the first half of the century, gave the fledgling discipline a strong foothold by mid-century. The travels of Charlemont, Stuart, Revett, Robert Adam (to Spalatro), and others, the loosening up of export controls on antiquities in Rome and elsewhere in Italy, and the activities of such archaeologist-dealers as Gavin Hamilton and Thomas Jenkins ushered in the vigorous era of digging and dealing in the 1760s. Thus, architecture, sculpture, and other material remains, as well as simply the experience of the lay of the land in the Mediterranean itself, now significantly augmented the texts from the early part of the century.12 As a result, the mid-century generation’s experience of classical civilizations would be that much richer and multi-dimensional, further informing them of their place in the world. The increasing experiential contact with the material remains of Italy contributed to the evolving – one might say maturing – appreciation of the aesthetic over the course of the century. In the post-Restoration era and into the early years of the eighteenth century, some sculptures were acquired by the patriciate for the appreciation of their aesthetics, but, as with Dr Mead’s collection, almost without exception there were ulterior motives for collecting: the Duke of Marlborough’s bronze copies by Massimiliano Soldani of the Venus de’Medici, the Wrestlers, the Faun, and the Slave at Blenheim (1710–11) formed part of a riposte to Versailles; the gilded Venus in John Vanbrugh’s Rotunda at Stowe (1721) excited many a male visitor; and Peter Scheemakers’s marble copies of the Dying Gaul and the Lion and the Horse at Rousham (from 1737) contributed to a very specific iconographic program about death.13 Like the busts of statesmen, emperors, and empresses inside the houses, the iconic aesthetic works were acquired in this era primarily for reasons other than their aesthetic value.14 Following de Rossi’s Raccolta, the first significant treatise of the eighteenth century to emphasize the aesthetics of antique sculpture was An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas Reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy &c with Remarks, written by Jonathan Richardson and his son, also Jonathan Richardson, and published in 1722. The Account would serve essentially as a handbook for young grand tourists from both Britain and the Continent for several generations.15 The Richardsons’ book, coupled with greater exposure

Introduction | 9

to antiquities in Italy and complemented by such publications as Anton Francesco Gori’s Museum Florentinum – a twelve-volume compendium of plates illustrating the best objects in Florentine private collections, including and most especially the Uffizi (1731–66) – spurred on more confident assessment of the aesthetic qualities of individual sculptures.16 Of note are the musings of William Lock, latterly of Norbury Park, who was the natural son of a wealthy merchant and who took his grand tour in the early 1750s. Nearly unknown today because he did not publish anything, he was regarded in his lifetime as one of the three “true Connoisseurs of the arts in England” and was considered to be “in the first class of Amateurs of the fine arts, possessing superior taste and information.”17 His thoughts on classical art, noted by several subsequent tourists and examined here in detail in chapter 3, profoundly informed his contemporaries, both patrician and artist alike. For example, Lock’s thoughts would resonate in Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on Art, the first of which was delivered in 1769. Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (“Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture”), first published in 1755 and much more widely known today than Lock’s musings, is similarly indicative of this more refined aesthetic sensibility. It is no coincidence that this intellectual discussion of the aesthetic quality of the works of the ancients and emergent archaeology is exactly contemporaneous with the installation of copies and casts of ancient statues chosen for aesthetic reasons in entrance halls and elsewhere in the houses, where previously busts might have been expected. Ultimately, the taste for the copy and cast of the aesthetic would culminate in Northumberland’s Syon House and Curzon’s Kedleston Hall in the early 1760s (see Figs. 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3), where the sculptures are integrated into a holistic whole designed by Robert Adam and modelled on iconic Roman architectural prototypes. Yet the collections of Rockingham, Richmond, Huntingdon, and Hollis that have their genesis a decade earlier and are less cohesive – the architectural spaces are not so pure in their pedigree – sit on the momentous cusp when the preference for the cast and copy of statues admired for their aesthetic qualities was firmly taking hold.18 Such overt expressions of taste would ultimately combine with the intellectual treatises, musings, and reveries of the connoisseurs to entrench an aesthetic canon for the succeeding generation – Townley, Blundell, and Shelburne – that continues to resonate into our own time. Within the wider social context, the more refined aesthetic sensibility and more analytical relationship with the classical past was symptomatic of the heightened sense of nationalism that was current in the middle of the cen-

10 | then and now

tury and that would take on a strident bellicosity when Britain emerged as an imperial world power during the Seven Years’ War. The erudite and antiquarian societies formed around the turn of the eighteenth century, namely the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, and the socially exclusive clubs and societies, such as the clubs in St James’s and the Society of Dilettanti, would continue but they would be joined by societies and groups of much broader appeal, often with a philanthropic bent.19 Of these, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (hereafter Society of Arts), established in 1754, was the most unequivocal in striving to improve the nation from the ground up. Its membership cut across artisanal and patriciate lines and swelled phenomenally in the first few years of its existence.20 Drawing was considered a central skill, a remnant from Henry Peacham’s polite society but also recognized for its practical use in all manner of art and trade.21 Classical sculpture was at the core of the curriculum; in the most rigorous academic environment yet to appear in Britain, young students competed for medals by drawing after iconic aesthetic classical works, and in this respect the Duke of Richmond’s collection played a crucial role. In terms of the arts, with the coming of the war and the successes of the annus mirabilis in 1759–60, a new style emerged for a new empire, a style in which the connection with classicism was made explicit but in which the temporal distance with the classical past was not erased. This Grand Manner was inspired by the classical past but was also wholly of its time, just like the new empire. Joseph Wilton’s monument to Major-General James Wolfe (see Fig. 6.11) and James Stuart’s monument to Admiral Charles Watson (see Fig. 6.15), both erected in Westminster Abbey, exemplify the Grand Manner in the integration of classical and contemporary, albeit somewhat jarring to modern eyes.22 A similar integration of the classical and the contemporary exists in the country or town house, where the classical environs inspires one to greater thoughts and deeds. Such overt displays of erudition – material culture as well as deportment and civic-mindedness – functioned to lend legitimacy to emerging and evolving imperialist ambitions, evoking a lengthy and deep relationship with ancient Greece and Rome. That relationship implied memory, and politicians, intellectuals, and pundits alike were quick to construct a state and cultural memory that legitimatized further Britain’s new world dominance. Freemasonry is another point of social contact that cut across class lines and deserves singling out for further discussion because of its inherent connections with both classicism and sculpture. After the consolidation of four London lodges in 1717, Freemasonry became “Official” and would follow a trajectory that paralleled the rise of nationalistic and imperial sensibilities

Introduction | 11

and that was interwoven with the political machinations that evolved over the course of the century.23 In its early years, Official Freemasonry was heavily politicized, experiencing a Tory/Jacobite purge in the 1720s, but by the late 1740s, with the supremacy of Whiggery and the consequent somewhat flattening of political strife, the Craft was relatively politically deflated. Similarly, in terms of peaking as the bon ton of society in the 1720s, it settled down at mid-century to become a fairly ubiquitous undercurrent that underpinned much of middle- and upper-class society. The situation of the four men who are the focus of this book is typical. It is unlikely that Rockingham, Richmond, and Huntingdon were Freemasons; besides the fact that no official membership lists survive for the middle of the century, none of the men was cited in any contemporary publications about Freemasonry. Hollis, for his part, emphatically said he was not a Freemason. However, Freemasonry was part of their immediate milieu. In the case of the aristocrats, many of their mentors were ardent brothers in the Craft. Of particular note is Antonio Cocchi, physician, professor of anatomy, natural historian, Greek scholar, author, translator, and numismatist as well as keeper of the Grand Duke of Tuscany’s collection.24 He had spent two years in London in the 1720s initially at the invitation of the 9th Earl of Huntingdon (the father of the 10th earl), and this is presumably when he came into contact with Freemasonry.25 He returned to Florence a committed Freemason, weathered the banning of Freemasonry by Pope Clement XII in 1738 on the basis of it being a heretical threat, and continued to be a person of great influence upon the shoals of Englishmen that arrived at his door.26 Freemasonry also continued to permeate and resonate in English society, in clubs, societies – brothers were a significant component of the membership of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries – and taverns, all venues frequented by Rockingham, Richmond, Huntingdon, Hollis, and other men of social standing. Symbol and iconography are central to the practice of Freemasonry and much of the complex and arcane structure that defines modern Freemasonry – the significance of pyramids, obelisks, columns, squares, compasses, and certain gods, goddesses, philosophers, and statesmen – came into being and evolved over the course of the eighteenth century.27 While much scholarship has been devoted to teasing out Masonic allusions in architecture, little similar work has been done on sculpture and sculpture collections. Hence the attention devoted to Freemasonry in the following pages. There were connections, at a very basic level, between the contemporary interest in classical sculpture and the Pygmalion myth of hewing the rough stone to reveal the divine ideal, a central component of the Masonic creed for societal reform. Similarly, many Freemasons were drawn to numis-

12 | then and now

matics, and the appeal of assembling complete sets of emblems and effigies of their ancient forebears was not unlike the satisfaction found in gathering classical busts and statues. In fact, many people who collected sculpture in the eighteenth century also collected coins and medals, Pembroke, Rockingham, and Hollis being cases in point. Finally, the temporal elision with the classical realm that was evoked in the country and town houses early in the century, and that resonated, in part, into the middle of the century, was also entirely consistent with Freemasonry, for the lodge is the pre-eminent liminal space where time is transcended. As we shall see, evolving iconographic and aesthetic preferences for sculpture (as well as architecture and architectural embellishment) can also be seen to parallel, and sometimes intersect, protean Freemasonry symbolism over the course of the century.

I

n 1962 James Lees-Milne published Earls of Creation: Five Great Patrons of Eighteenth-Century Art. A product of a bygone era, this slim volume, aimed at an educated popular audience, is now overlooked amidst the plethora of sumptuous studies on the country house and pushed aside by revisionist art history. Nonetheless, it is a seminal work in terms of the breadth of material culture explored – architecture, landscape, sculpture, painting, print, medals, gems, and so on – and in the case-study approach employed. Then and Now is indebted to Earls of Creation. The case-study approach used here, like that in Earls of Creation, captures the nuance of character of each collector, which in turn corresponds to the diversity of rationales for collecting. Further, although primarily focused on sculpture collections, my work, like Earls of Creation, situates these collections within the wider contexts of material culture as a whole and the networks of clubs and societies and social and political philosophies. To this end, I have also drawn upon a wide range of sources, underpinned by the rich scholarship on political nuance in the post-Namerite era.28 In particular, I have proceeded from David Solkin’s reading of Shaftesbury in Painting for Money, tempered and nuanced by Craig Hanson in The English Virtuoso and Solkin’s own astute yet not fully developed temporal reading of Richard Wilson’s views of arcadia vis-à-vis the classical past in Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction. The latter, in turn, has been amplified by recent work on the social experience of the grand tour, particularly scholarship on travel writing such as Chloe Chard’s Pleasure and Guilt and Rosemary Sweet’s Cities and the Grand Tour, both of which articulate the evolving relationship with antiquity and the social milieu in Italy at the middle of the century. Peter de Bolla’s provocative exploration of the look, the gaze, and the glance in his exegesis of the space of the country house in The Education of the Eye also offers a point of departure

Introduction | 13

to examine the landed gentry’s temporal relationship with antiquity over the course of the century. What exactly did it mean to be surrounded by classical statuary at any given point in the century? Chronologically, Then and Now sits between Hanson’s The English Virtuoso (2009) and Viccy Coltman’s Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760 (also 2009). Although not about sculpture per se, The English Virtuoso examines virtù – in particular the relationship of art and medicine – in a broader discussion of empiricism and civic humanism throughout the seventeenth and into the early eighteenth centuries. My study tracks the threads of antiquarianism and virtuosity as they penetrate into and oscillate in the middle of the eighteenth century. Coltman’s book is groundbreaking in its articulation of the emerging distinction between connoisseur and politician in the 1760s. Then and Now concentrates on the immediately preceding moment when the connoisseur and the politician are integral and co-dependent, the apotheosis, as it were, of the true natural aristocrat. Coltman’s slightly earlier book, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760–1800 (2006), lays the foundation for her later study and, in itself, is crucial in reminding us of the depth of the classical education of the eighteenth-century patriciate and how that education informed their view of their world. Philip Ayres’s Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England, Jonathan Scott’s The Pleasures of Antiquity, Sam Smiles’s The Image of Antiquity, Jason Kelly’s The Society of Dilettanti, and Nicholas Penny’s and Eike Schmidt’s Collecting Sculpture in Early Modern Europe reinforce the focus on the material culture of classicism, while Howard Weinbrot’s Augustus Caesar in Augustan England, Reed Browning’s Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs, and Lawrence Klein’s Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness enhance the philosophical dimensions of my study. Then and Now also joins the growing genre of recent scholarship that explores the relationship between politics and aesthetic expression, through patronage, collecting, or stylistic preferences. John Brewer’s The Pleasures of the Imagination and Linda Colley’s Britons are seminal in their broad sweep of cultural expressions. In terms of the country house specifically, Brewer characterizes Chatsworth and Houghton as “the spoils of politics.”29 Matthew Craske focuses on the “higher” arts in this light in Art in Europe 1700– 1830, while a range of other scholars analyze particular media: John Barrell in The Political Theory of Painting from Hazlitt to Reynolds, David Solkin in Painting for Money, Paul Monod in “Painters and Party Politics in England, 1714–1760,” and Nigel Everett in The Tory View of Landscape concentrate on painting; Craske examines monuments in The Silent Rhetoric of the Body; and Mark Hallett in The Spectacle of Difference and Diana Donald in The 14 | then and now

Age of Caricature explore print culture. Matthew Hargraves in Candidates for Fame and Holger Hoock in The King’s Artists have taken a close look at the political circumstances surrounding the Society of Artists of Great Britain and the Royal Academy of Arts, respectively. Then and Now owes much to these and other authors; their work provides context and expands the understanding of the significance of the collections under discussion. Coltman, Ayres, and other recent scholarship on collecting the classical in Britain stands at the forward end of a long continuum that began with Adolf Michaelis’s Ancient Marbles in Great Britain (1882) and Frederik Poulsen’s Greek and Roman Portraits in English Country Houses (1923). Both Michaelis and Poulsen were archaeologists who, in their enthusiasm for detecting authentic antique works in English country house collections, ignored casts and copies. They also were active in an era when the aura of the original, to invoke Walter Benjamin, was paramount, casts and copies being dismissed as little more than worthless imitations.30 (Coltman’s opening chapter of Collecting Sculpture is an exegesis on the impact of Michaelis on the historiography of classical sculpture in Britain.31) In reference to Rockingham’s collection – the only one of the four mid-century collections that survived in situ into the late nineteenth century32 – Michaelis could only offer that Rockingham “possessed here … several statues and busts, of which I only consider worthy of mention the bust of Antinous from the Mead collection.”33 He was far more impressed with the marquis’s collection of authentic Roman coins. Poulsen said nothing about Wentworth Woodhouse. Similarly, the Disney Collection in the Fitzwilliam Museum, which contained parts of the Hollis collection, was written off by Michaelis as “trash rather than treasure.”34 It was not until 1981, with the publication of Francis Haskell’s and Nicholas Penny’s Taste and the Antique, that the cast and copy was reinscribed into art-historical literature. This text was also seminal in drawing attention to the collector and to rationales for collecting.35 Subsequently, increasing attention has been paid to copies and casts, much of it insisting on the value of the reproduction, for which the theoretical premise often springs from Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproduction.”36 In Fabricating the Antique, Coltman tracks the aesthetic assessment and value of the plaster cast and marble or bronze copy vis-à-vis the original in the eighteenth-century British context.37 My study proceeds from the acknowledgment that the meaning, and consequent value, of the reproduction is contingent upon when it was produced and for whom. A corollary of this is an examination of the supply and demand for copies and casts of antique statuary in the middle of the eighteenth century. If a collector wanted a copy or a cast, this usually required hiring an artist who would either make the cast or copy to order or procure it from another Introduction | 15

artist; the market was not yet sophisticated enough for automatic supply on demand. For many sculptors and some architects, making casts and copies represented a major component of their careers. In the case of British sculptors such as Joseph Wilton, Simon Vierpyl, Francis Harwood, Prince Hoare, and Richard Hayward, and architects including Matthew Brettingham the younger, William Chambers, and Robert Adam, such commissions jumpstarted or otherwise significantly aided their careers in Italy at mid-century and secured much desired connections among the British gentry of whom many would continue their patronage once they and the artists had returned home. For several of these artists, casts and copies continued to represent a substantial component of their business even after they were established in their professions. As for Italian sculptors, they rarely had an opportunity to make an original sculpture since the demand for casts and copies and later for “restored” original antiques was so high.38 Vincenzo Foggini’s Samson and the Philistines, acquired by Rockingham and installed at Wentworth Woodhouse, is a rare example of such an original. Of course, the artists were also more than simply hacks who carried out orders; they genuinely contributed to the shaping of taste. They fundamentally believed in the primacy of classical art and, like their patrons, saw the classical world as the only model for a cultivated and improved nation. Indeed, several of the artists who were on the ground in Italy at mid-century with the shoals of patricians and other Englishmen – Wilton, Chambers, Brettingham, Giovanni Battista Cipriani, Reynolds, and others – would become deeply involved in the Duke of Richmond’s academy, the Society of Arts, the Society of Artists of Great Britain, and ultimately the Royal Academy. The concluding chapter of the book steps back from the individual case studies and offers a broader discussion of aesthetic taste in Britain at the beginning of the second half of the eighteenth century. The preference for the aesthetic has deep ramifications for a nation on the cusp of becoming an empire. In this regard I will focus on what constituted the ideal at the time and position the sculpture collections and their contents in relation to the emergence of a Grand Manner, a specific style for the new empire that I rather tentatively postulated in my earlier study of monuments and the eighteenth-century British empire and that Martin Myrone and Douglas Fordham have much more fully investigated.39 The emergence of a cohesive style is significant because it speaks to the nascent voice of nationalism and the beginnings of the modern British state, and because it lends legitimacy, in the mode of universal classicism, to what had become more than an embryonic empire.

16 | then and now

1

temporal elision and sculpture collections in the first half of the eighteenth century

I

t is a well-known fact that there was a proliferation of building across the English countryside in the first half of the eighteenth century. Much scholarship has been dedicated to the study of the architecture, particularly the rise of Palladianism, and the emergence of the landscape garden. These many houses and gardens were embellished with sculpture yet the sculpture has usually been discussed as so much decoration that simply enhances the classical aura of the country seats. This chapter delves more deeply in its examination of several of the larger collections of sculpture amassed by the patriciate at the end of the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century. The sculpture was distributed around the house and garden, often interspersed with paintings and contemporary sculpture that were usually done in an all’antica mode. When the physical context is taken into account and, as important, when the subjects of the sculptures are acknowledged, strong iconographic programs emerge, often more than one in the same house and among the same sculptures. In their complexities, these multifarious narratives are entirely in keeping with the depth of classical knowledge that patrons also exhibited in their understanding of classical literature and classical architecture.

A

t the end of the seventeenth century, the Earl of Arundel’s magnificent collection of marbles was broken up into three lots and dispersed. The Greek and Latin inscriptions were donated to Oxford University in 1667 by Thomas Howard, Arundel’s descendant, at John Evelyn’s suggestion.1 The larger of the other two lots, consisting of mostly busts

and some statues, was acquired in the 1680s by Thomas Herbert, 8th Earl of Pembroke, for Wilton House.2 The third lot, also consisting of busts and statues, along with some reliefs and other fragments, was acquired by the 1st Baron Leominster, who used them to embellish his house at Easton Neston in Northamptonshire. At Wilton, the Arundel marbles, along with several more busts and statues from the Mazarin and Giustiniani collections, were arrayed around the rooms of the great Palladian house that had been built in the middle of the seventeenth century by Isaac de Caus and John Webb, after designs by Inigo Jones.3 The house was not, by any means, a museum where the objects demanded viewing as discrete entities. The sculptures (the busts alone numbered 131) were intermingled with sculpted and painted portraits of family members and friends, thereby inhibiting discrete observation, disrupting aesthetic appreciation, and breaking down temporal barriers. Entering a room meant becoming involved in a pre-existing conversation among characters of different times and places. For example, Apollo greeted the visitor in the vestibule, and in the Elizabethan Great Hall the terracotta bust of Pembroke himself sat comfortably on the chimney piece in the company of the colossal Hercules and other antique statues and sarcophagi. In the Double Cube Room, which was the magnificent centrepiece of the house, the visitor entered a space where the family members in the immense Van Dyck portrait were in dialogue with busts of emperors and other family and friends. While aesthetics did play a part in where the art was situated – thus the Van Dyck and bronze, porphyry, and coloured marbles busts in the Double Cube Room – the overriding concern was whom the busts, statues, and paintings portrayed.4 The earl preferred whole identified busts as opposed to fragments, and when they were not identified, as was often the case, he took it upon himself to do so by chiselling the name on the base of the bust.5 He also avoided duplicates, a factor that would disrupt the idea of a gathering of great men and women and gods and goddesses of times past and present. Indeed, the notion that the rooms of the house were populated with the personalities portrayed in the sculptures and paintings is borne out by Horace Walpole’s perhaps apocryphal tale that the earl had “one day took it into his grave head to give eyeballs with charcoal to all his statues at Wilton, and then called his wife and daughters to see how much livelier the gods, goddesses, and emperors were grown.”6 The temporal elisions between the early eighteenth century and classical antiquity were not confined to Wilton’s interior. The experience began with Roman milestones marking the route to the house. Visitors then passed by the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius and the Venus column before being

18 | then and now

greeted by two black marble statues “from the ruins of the palace in Egypt, in which the Viceroys of Persia lived many Years” at the entrance to the house in the manner of great antique buildings.7 The style of the house itself was also atemporal in its classical civility. In the park, the authenticity of Wilton as a seat that transcended time was proven by a flat-topped, round “King-barrow” that Pembroke was convinced was the burial place of an ancient Celtic king. To this end, he consulted William Stukeley, whom he had met at the Royal Society and whose fame as a noted antiquarian was on the rise. Stukeley proclaimed the site the grave of the Belgic king Carvilius, Julius Caesar’s enemy, whom Caesar had immortalized in the Gallic Wars. Stukeley then promptly recast Wilton as the “Villa Carviliana” and Pembroke as “Carvilius Magnus.”8 Thus began a life-long friendship, especially fruitful for Stukeley, who, along with fellow antiquarians Dr Martin Folkes and Sir Andrew Fountaine, would regularly engage in antiquarian and archaeological revelries at Wilton. In the 1720s, after Pembroke had Stukeley survey Stonehenge for him, he had Stukeley build a smaller version in the garden at Wilton, as it would have looked “in its first glory.”9 This was at the same time that Stukeley reascribed Stonehenge to the Druids, countering the claim by Inigo Jones and John Webb that the stone circle was a Roman temple.10 The liminal space of Wilton House, where time was suspended and where Carvilius, the Druids, Inigo Jones, Pembroke’s ancestors, and Pembroke and his friends could happily co-exist, was, in many ways, a grandiloquent pendant to a Masonic lodge. The Pembrokes had a long-standing relationship with Freemasonry. William Herbert, the 3rd earl, served as grand master from 1618 to 1630, according to James Anderson’s 1738 authoritative account of the early years of Freemasonry.11 It was also through the 3rd earl that the Augustan style was brought to England since the earl had financed Inigo Jones’s Italian tour. For the Masons, Augustus was considered the grandest of the grand masters of antiquity. According to Anderson, Jones himself also served as grand master twice, with the approbation of kings James I and Charles I, who were royal grand masters by prerogative.12 In the first flush of Official Freemasonry following the consolidation of the four London lodges in 1717, of the 8th earl’s intimate contemporaries, Folkes became a prominent member of the London lodge in the 1720s and would go on to play a critical role in its early reorganization after the Jacobite purge, rising to deputy grand master in 1725. Stukeley would also be initiated in 1721. Folkes’s rational deism would be typical of the tempered tone of Official Freemasonry while Stukeley, for his part, had embraced Freemasonry in the hopes of finding a link back to the Druids in his quest for ancient antecedents of the Church of England.13 Fountaine’s comparable connoisseurial interests, displayed at

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Narford Hall in Norfolk, suggest that he too was a Freemason.14 Notably, Stukeley, Folkes, Fountaine, and Pembroke were all members of the Royal Society as well as the Society of Antiquaries, the membership of both boasting a disproportionate number of Freemasons.15 All also shared a passion for numismatics, another preoccupation of many Freemasons. Wilton, as embellished by the 8th earl and his friends, functioned as a venue where time might be elided and the men might commune with their Masonic forebears. Wilton is distinctive in its complexity but it was not the only place where temporal elision occurred. The Duke of Devonshire’s Chatsworth in Derbyshire and Lord Carlisle’s Castle Howard in Yorkshire were similar to Wilton, as was the Duke of Marlborough’s Blenheim in the south. In each, classical and contemporary busts and paintings were arrayed around the staterooms and along corridors while statuary, mostly copies and casts of antique works, embellished the gardens and were integral characters in narrative programs that involved carefully sited temples, columns, pyramids, and obelisks. At the same time, less prominent or new members of the landed gentry were also engaged in ambitious and sometimes grandiose undertakings, including Cobham’s tranquil yet military inspired layout of the early (western) gardens at Stowe or Leominster’s at Easton Neston.16 Significantly, as Craig Hanson has pointed out, while the more antiquarian turn-of-mind of some members of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries – Stukeley and the like – was ridiculed for drifting too far in pursuit of the rare and esoteric, the ownership and display of virtù by the patriciate was a critical defining feature of the balanced nature of true English civility. As the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury made clear, virtuosity became a problem only when “the inferior virtuosi … fall in love with rarity for rareness sake.”17 Shaftesbury harks back to Baldessare Castiglione’s emphasis on balance in the notion of virtue, transmitted into early-seventeenth-century England through Henry Peacham’s The Compleat Gentleman (1634) and manifest in the likes of George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, and the Earl of Arundel.18 Indeed, in the case of Leominster at Easton Neston, the sheer volume of the collection he had acquired from the Arundel sale may have been his undoing. Installed in the gardens and his newly built house, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, the excessive display, coupled with the lack of a cohesive iconographic program, may have smacked of the parvenu. Proximity to London was not an issue. As English virtue and civility were grounded in the ownership of land, the country seats were the natural expression of that virtue and civility. Extended visits to seats owned by family and friends were commonplace, and, during the London Season, discussion of building projects would have flourished in the clubs and societies

20 | then and now

where the social worlds of the aristocracy overlapped, at venues such as the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries, the Kit-Kat Club, Masonic lodges, or Stukeley’s Society of Roman Knights.19 Proclamation of these country seats as natural expressions of English social order soon followed. One of the earliest was Stukeley’s Itinerarium Curiosum, published in 1725. It was conceived very much in the spirit of the age. As Stukeley wandered through various seats, he highlighted classical and British remains and offered informed speculation as to the identity of each sculpture, thereby enhancing Britain’s natural Romano-British lineage.20 Two of the earliest guides dedicated to a single house were Etchings by Cary Creed with Accompanying Captions, of the Antique Marbles in the Collection of the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton House, published in 1730, and Carlo Gamberini’s Description of the Earl of Pembroke’s Pictures, published a year later. Both were intended for a highly circumscribed erudite elite who were already convinced of Britain’s place in the Romano-British continuum.21 Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House, a comparatively petite suburban villa, situated on the outskirts of London on the precipitous edge between agrarian manorial estates and the gritty urban sphere, was a far more brash display of the owner’s noble pretensions. Burlington, from an established peerage but a generation younger than the 8th Earl of Pembroke, Marlborough, and Devonshire, conceived Chiswick primarily as a villa suburbiana, a social venue where he could show off his youthful virtuosity and erudition, much of it newly acquired on his recent grand tour. As at the earlier great houses, the time between ancient past and present was sharply attenuated or indeed even suspended at Chiswick. Andrea Palladio and Inigo Jones greet visitors at the base of the portico stairs while Augustus hovers above the recessed doors. The visitor then enters the tribunal, which is populated with painted portraits of Louis XIII, Charles I, Apollo, and Burlington and his sisters, accompanied by sculpted busts of ancient personalities paired off against one another: Marcus Aurelius Antoninous, the good emperor, versus Domitian, the bad emperor; Faustina the profligate empress versus the virtuous Plautilla; Hadrian and his lover Antinous; and Socrates and a bacchanalian figure (Fig. 1.1). Britannicus and Apollo were also present. The ensemble created an air of profundity and earnestness which was undercut by the inclusion of the bacchanalian figure, in short achieving an environment consistent with the patrician erudition of the owner and the role of Chiswick as a place of entertainment and refined refuge.22 The trope continues into the garden, where the genteel landscape is enhanced with vistas, temples, an obelisk, a column, and sculpture. The gallery running along the north side of the house marks the transition from interior to exterior with its large Palladian window and

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statues of Venus, Diana, a muse, and Mercury, all of whom are associated with a rural world (Fig. 1.2).23 As at Wilton, the idea of Chiswick as a sanctuary where time is suspended parallels the liminal space of a Masonic lodge. Although Burlington’s name is not mentioned directly in Anderson’s Constitutions or in any surviving lists of Craft members, the decorative embellishments at Chiswick strongly articulate Burlington’s Masonic interests. Ricky Pound has, for example, thoroughly detailed the portrayal of the Hiramic legend in the Red Velvet Room, a legend central to Masonic practice.24 On the strength of the content of that room, Masonic inference can be detected in other aspects of Chiswick as well although, as would be appropriate of the secretive nature of Freemasonry, the Masonic allusion is obfuscated beneath other layers of meaning. The animated full-length statues of Inigo Jones and Andrea Palladio could function both as representations of Burlington’s architectural muses and as greeters at a Masonic conclave. Jones, as noted above, was acknowledged to be a grand master and Palladio could be, by extension, naturally embraced into the Masonic fold. The bust of Augustus above the door honours the emperor whom the Masons respected as the grandest of grand masters, but also sets the overall tone of Roman imperial civility. The tribunal, although modelled on the Tribuna in the Uffizi, is also derived in its octagonal shape from the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and the Casina in the garden recalls the Temple of Solomon in design while serving as an idyllic garden feature. Likewise, the obelisk and column were universal symbols of cultural triumph, civility, and death both within and outside Freemasonry.25 The sculptural program at Chiswick, along with the embellishment of the Red Velvet Room, might well have been an attempt on Burlington’s part to establish a code of Masonic visuality in the early years of the Official Craft. Indeed, it would have been odd for the youthful societal and cultural maverick not to have at least flirted with Freemasonry in the 1720s when the Craft was becoming so fashionable among the patriciate. Burlington, like Pembroke and the other great builders of a generation earlier, also did not act entirely alone. A member of his intimate circle was Henry Herbert, the son of the 8th Earl of Pembroke. His Masonic interests are implied by the appearance of his name, after he became the 9th earl in 1732, in the list of subscribers to Batty Langley’s Ancient Masonry.26 At Wilton, the 9th earl would continue to transcend time by installing a full-length statue of Shakespeare

figure 1.1 (opposite) | The 3rd Earl of Burlington, Tribune or Saloon, Chiswick

House, 1726–29.

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(by Scheemakers) in the entrance hall and by inserting busts of Fountaine and Folkes (both by Roubiliac) in the Double Cube Room.27 The evidence that points to Masonic content at Chiswick also counters Jane Clark’s highly controversial argument that Chiswick functioned as an expression of Burlington’s Jacobite sympathies, given the anti-Jacobite tenor within Official Freemasonry at the time.28 Ultimately, at the very least, Chiswick does denote Burlington’s standing as a member of England’s aristocratic and thus cultural elite. Like the great late-seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century estates, whether they were Whig, Tory, or even Jacobite, Chiswick stands as one exemplum in the civilizing Risorgimento of post-Restoration English society. As we know, Chiswick, Wilton, and the other great houses would have inestimable influence. The banker Henry Hoare, for one, who counted Burlington among his clients, had Colen Campbell build a substantial Palladian manor house at Stourhead in the early 1720s on his newly acquired estate in Wiltshire. Twenty years later, his son, Henry Hoare II, created the landscape which invokes in its classical and Gothic garden features a rich amalgam of classical texts infused with Anglo-Saxon references and Masonic allusions.29 Thomas Coke created an even more complex iconographic narrative at Holkham Hall beginning in the mid-1730s. Of minor gentry stock before being raised to the baronetcy in 1728 (as Lord Lovell) and then to the earldom (as Lord Leicester) in 1744 by Robert Walpole, Coke transformed the northern plains of Norfolk into a rural classical idyll, a reflection of his profound appreciation and knowledge of classical literature. A committed Freemason – he became a grand master in 173130 – he could well have been aided by his fellow Mason connoisseurs, including his Norfolk neighbours Andrew Fountaine and Martin Folkes, as well as the 8th and 9th earls of Pembroke and Burlington and the other members of Burlington’s Palladian circle. Elizabeth Angelicoussis has published an exhaustive investigation of Coke’s use of authentic classical sculptures, marble copies, and plaster casts to create highly erudite iconographic programs throughout the Palladian house and gardens.31 Notably, much of the sculpture is located in transitional rooms between interior and exterior, in the manner of a Roman villa. In the elaborate Marble Hall, full-length statues placed between the variegated alabaster columns engage each other across the grand stair, thereby pulling the visitor into the conversation (Fig. 1.3). The Venus des Belles Fesses is half-dressed and stands in a suggestive pose across the hall from the

figure 1.2 (opposite) | The 3rd Earl of Burlington, Gallery, Chiswick House,

1726–29.

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figure 1.3 | William Kent and Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester, Marble Hall,

Holkham Hall, 1734–64.

heavily clad Isis, while Bacchus is placed opposite a sobre Mercury. Likewise Flora, the fertility goddess of spring and flowers who gave the Romans the bacchanalian festival of Floralia, is paired with Santa Susanna, the virtuous yet barren saint who chose martyrdom over marriage. Susanna, in turn, is placed between the elegant pagan male nudes of Antinous and Apollo, the

26 | then and now

figure 1.4 | William Kent and Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester, Sculpture

Gallery, Holkham Hall, 1734–64.

representatives of mortal and immortal beauty respectively. The statues are also aesthetically pleasing in their positioning: male statues alternate with female statues; clothed with unclothed; those to the left of the entrance have the left knee bent; those to the right have the right knee bent.32 The statue gallery on the west side of Holkham, which incidentally bears a remarkable similarity to the one at Chiswick, is perhaps less multilayered in meaning than the Marble Hall but nonetheless plays to an erudite audience well steeped in the classics (Fig. 1.4). As Angelicoussis has demonstrated, the statues of mythological deities and two fauns are sophisticated

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quotations from Ovid, Pliny, and Virgil about pastoral nature and humanity’s role within it, thereby moderating the transition from indoors to out.33 On the other side of the house, in the vestibule that serves as the secondary entrance, statues of the Dancing Faun, the Apollo Belvedere, Ganymede, Ptolemy, Meleager, and the Venus des Belles Fesses are ranged in niches in the form of a garden exedra.34 Beyond them are busts of Cicero, Plato, Lysias, and Seneca, a medallion of Carneades (who questioned the primacy of religious belief in the governing of the world), and the large statue of Jupiter that Coke had acquired in 1717 and that he had originally situated at the top of the stairs in the Marble Hall. Coke’s primary interest in selecting sculpture for the figure portrayed – thus his willingness to accept marble copies and even plaster casts – results in a liminal experience where time is suspended. Indeed, even when Leicester included a representation of himself, he cast himself in the guise of the ancient Celtiberian chieftain Allucius in a painting in the Saloon, in witty esoteric allusion to his eventful acquisition of a well-known bronze statue of Diana from the Consiglieri collection while on his grand tour.35 Similarly, in the steward’s lodge at the tertiary entrance to the house, a bust of Leicester in classical guise is placed beside Maecenas and Titus, thus forming a triumvirate of great patrons of the arts. In effect, Holkham Hall is the physical embodiment of Polymetis or an Enquiry concerning the Agreement between the Works of the Roman Poets, and the Remains of the Antient Artists, written by fellow Freemason Joseph Spence and first published in 1747.36 While not specifically linked to Holkham, the premise of Polymetis, in which classical text and antique sculpture are intertwined and interdependent, coincides remarkably with Leicester’s dialogic format at Holkham.37 Polymetis, like the rich depth of the iconographic program at Holkham, presents a challenge to the reader/viewer. Spence, and no doubt Leicester, lamented a lack of “profound reading” in comparison to half a century before that had led to a “sullenness and severity, that has generally been thrown over the studies of Criticism, and Antiquities.”38 Another publication, Holkham. A Poem to the Right Honourable Earl of Leicester (1757), by Robert Potter, a Norfolk poet and clergyman, is a thirteen-page panegyric that follows the same line as Polymetis, although it is considerably less complex. Potter praised Holkham as a pastoral retreat populated by mythical figures, comparable to the most bucolic as described by the ancient authors.39 As Angelicoussis has noted, the dedicatory inscription is from Virgil’s Eclogue (IV 3): Si canimus sylvas, sylvæ sint consule dignæ (“If our song is of the woodland, let the woodland be worthy of a consul”).40 The consul is, of course, Leicester. In the porter’s lodge at Holkham, across

28 | then and now

from the steward’s lodge, another bust of Leicester sits between two busts of Roman consuls and alongside a bust of the Empress Salonina who was known for her virtuousness and for being a supportive wife, a fitting allusion to Leicester’s wife.41 Ultimately, to be able to enter fully the liminal experience at Holkham depends upon the depth of the visitor’s knowledge of pagan and Christian thought filtered through post-Restoration English and Official Freemasonic thought. As at Wilton or Chiswick, there is no place for the crass exhibition of overt political involvement or self-promotion, entirely consistent with the gentlemanly disinterested behaviour of the natural aristocracy. At nearby Houghton, the seat of Robert Walpole, a similar temporal elision occurs, although the experience is less a liminal one than an assertion of Walpole’s political position in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. Walpole was of minor gentry stock, and his rapid acquisition of a massive collection of Old Master paintings, along with the construction of Houghton and its decorative embellishments in the latest fashionable styles (both the established Baroque of the early part of the century and the au courant Palladianism of the 1720s and 1730s), suggests an acute awareness of his parvenu status.42 In terms of Freemasonry, it is inconclusive as to whether Walpole was a Freemason or not, although the fact that Houghton was used as an occasional lodge seems to suggest Walpole’s involvement with the Craft, or at least his approbation.43 Perhaps Freemasonry was something of a political tool for Walpole, to be taken up when, and if, it suited his ambitions. If one were of a Masonic turn-of-mind, several of the sculptures and the style and decoration of Houghton might suggest early protean Masonic content. While much attention has been paid to Walpole’s painting collection since its inception, little scholarly notice has been given to the sculpture that Walpole acquired. Far fewer in number than the paintings, the sculpture is less a collection per se than a group of portraits of particular individuals and representations of classical narratives that authenticate Walpole’s claim on political leadership. There are about thirty pieces in total; most of them are busts and are concentrated in the Stone Hall which serves as the formal entrance (Figs. 1.5 and 1.6), consistent with the entrance atrium in a Roman house, where busts of the owners’ forebears would be displayed as a way to distinguish and bring honour on themselves. The Stone Hall is the culmination of an iconographic program that begins outside, where statues of Neptune and Britannia, both by Rysbrack, stand on the pediment, indicating the magnitude of the puff. These are matched on the garden facade, which is topped with statues of Demosthenes, the defender of liberty, Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, and Justice with her scales, all also by Rysbrack.

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figure 1.5 | James Gibbs, Colen Campbell, and William Kent, Stone Hall,

Houghton Hall, from 1722.

Immediately inside the entrance to the Stone Hall, personifications of Peace and Plenty, again by Rysbrack, refer to the healthy state of Britain under Walpole’s leadership. Once inside, the visitor is drawn by the effervescent swags of laurel and buoyant putti to look to the top of the room, at the centre of which is an immense star, in reference to the Star of the Order of the Garter which Walpole had been given by George I in 1726. From there, one looks to the cove of the ceiling where Walpole’s preoccupation with his family lineage is expressed with stucco medallion portraits of Walpole, his first wife, Catherine Shorter (who may never have been to Houghton), his eldest son, Robert, who would inherit the estate, and his second wife, Margaret Rolle. Finally, just above eye level are the antique and all’antica

30 | then and now

figure 1.6 | James Gibbs, Colen Campbell, and William Kent, Stone Hall with

François Girardon’s bronze copy of the Laocoön, c. 1690, Houghton Hall.

busts, ranged around the room on enormous corbelled consoles. Two of the busts depict Marcus Aurelius and Trajan, both held in high esteem in the post-Restoration era.44 A bust of Faustina, the wife of Antonius Pius who was respected for her wisdom and moral character, corresponds with the emperors and provided an antique precedent for Walpole’s own wife. Septimus Severus may initially seem an odd choice given that he was considered to be a ruthless tyrant, but he had strong connections with England since he died at York fending off barbarian invaders. Two more busts depict Commodus, one as a young man and the other as an older man. Although usually condemned for his autocratic behaviour later in life, Commodus also fits Walpole’s iconographic scheme, for it was during Commodus’s early reign that rebellion in northern Britain was put down and Commodus declared himself Britannicus.45 The reason for two busts of Commodus might be explained by the fact that the one of the older Commodus along with the bust of Septimus Severus were gifts from Charles Churchill, who, in turn, had acquired them from Cardinal Alessandro Albani in Rome.46 Another console is occupied by a large bust of the young Hercules who chose the path of selfless virtue. Meanwhile, two all’antica busts of Homer and Hesiod represent aristocratic and labouring farming respectively, reminding the visitor that

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Houghton is a great demesne.47 Smaller antique busts of Hadrian, Jupiter, Pollux, and an unidentified philosopher also reside in the hall and articulate further the themes of virtue and leadership. Finally, on the chimney piece, pointedly a little higher than the antique busts and set off by Rysbrack’s relief of a sacrifice to Diana (see below), sits a bust of Walpole himself. Executed by Rysbrack in the mid-1720s, it shows Walpole as the new Roman, without a wig and wearing a toga that is emblazoned with the Star of the Garter. The Romanizing quality of the bust, combined with the contemporary star, was idiosyncratic for its time, reinforcing the conceit that the bust was meant to fit with the others in the room, adumbrating distance between past and present.48 The largest sculpture in the Stone Hall might initially seem out of place in this tale of self-promotion. This is François Girardon’s full-size bronze cast of the Laocoön, described beautifully by Viccy Colton as “writh[ing] like a bronze punctuation mark in the midst of this monochromatic marble cube.”49 The Laocoön, bought by Walpole’s eldest son, Robert, in Paris in 1722–23 for the enormous sum of 1,000 guineas, is the aesthetic and moral centrepiece of the room.50 The fame of the original Laocoön had resonated into the early eighteenth century, reinvigorated by Jonathan Richardson Sr and Jr in An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas Reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy &c with Remarks, published in 1722 on the eve of the younger Robert Walpole’s departure for the Continent. The sculptural group is admired by the Richardsons and other commentators not only for its beauty – the Richardsons called it an “inestimable groupe”51 – but also as an expression of selfless loyalty, leading ultimately to sacrifice on the part of the Trojan priest. The significance of the latter was not lost on Walpole. In 1732 a sixteen-line poem by Edward Whaley, On the Statue of the Laocoön, at the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole’s Seat, at Houghton, in Norfolk, tells of the priest’s action to save his country, Pallas’s resulting fury, her decision to take pity and hasten his death, and the sculptor’s decision to immortalize forever the pain and sacrifice.52 Beyond the Laocoön, the theme of sacrifice resonates throughout the Stone Hall in four relief panels by Rysbrack above each door derived from scenes of sacrifice on the Arch of Constantine in Rome and in the relief behind Walpole’s bust that illustrates a sacrifice to Diana.53 The reference to Diana alludes to the hunt and so is appropriate for a manor house while the broader emphasis on sacrifice reinforces the idea of Walpole’s selfless devotion to his country. The themes of sacrifice and public duty continues in the great stair hall at Houghton (Fig. 1.7), which provides a secondary, yet nonetheless very grand, access route to the Stone Hall. The painted decoration, executed by

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figure 1.7 | William Kent, Great Staircase with Hubert Le Sueur’s bronze copy

of the Borghese Gladiator, c. 1631, Houghton Hall.

William Kent, consists of quotations from Homer’s Illiad, specifically the story of the Calydonian boar hunt. Two grisaille paintings set within gilded trompe l’oeil frames depict The Killing of the Calydonian Boar and Meleager Presenting the Boar’s Head to Atalanta. Trophies with the heads of foxes and boars and trompe l’oeil busts of Diana complete the story. Once again the hunt and the idea of selfless civic virtue in Meleager’s selfless actions for the sake of his country – Homer used the Meleager story as a paradigm for Achilles – reflect well on Walpole.54 The physical link between the narrative of the stair hall and that of the Stone Hall is provided by another copy after an antique work famed for its aesthetic beauty as well as its subject matter: the bronze cast of the Borghese

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Gladiator (seen in Fig. 1.7). The statue was presented to Walpole by his unwavering political ally, the 8th Earl of Pembroke, sometime before 1731. The cast was made from a cast of the original for Charles I by Herbert Le Sueur about 1631 and originally graced the oval circus in the gardens of Wilton House. The 8th earl and Andrew Fountaine believed the cast to be by Giambologna, further enhancing its aesthetic appeal.55 The Richardsons had praised the original Borghese Gladiator, found in Rome in 1611, for its lightness and elasticity: “All his Muscles seem to tremble with Eagerness.”56 At Houghton, the statue sits on an immense pedestal in the centre of the stair hall that extends from the basement level to the piano nobile. Visitors wind their way up the mahogany staircase, surrounded by Kent’s grisaille paintings, before being directed by the gladiator’s outstretched arm into the Stone Hall. Although the Gladiator does not figure in the story of the Calydonian Boar Hunt, it, like Meleager, embodies selfless persistence. He then points the way to the Laocoön in the Stone Hall who is locked in the eternal pain of sacrifice. Houghton is, of course, a great distance from London. While all knew about Walpole’s Old Master painting collection, the complex narratives in the embellishments of the house would be known only to those who frequented it, namely those who were close to Walpole. In order to promote his political objectives, Walpole and his administration became increasingly adept at using print to enhance his family lineage and cultural refinement, thereby reaching a much larger audience. In addition to the publication of Whaley’s short poem about the Laocoön in 1732, William Musgrave published, also in 1732, an exegesis on Walpole’s noble lineage, entitled Genuine Memoirs of the Life and the Character of the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole, and of the Family of the Walpoles, from Their First Settling in England, before the Conquest, to the Present Times: Containing Several Curious Facts, and Pieces of History Hitherto Unknown. Extracted from Original Papers, and Manuscripts, Never Yet Printed. This was followed by Isaac Ware’s The Plans, Elevations and Sections, Chimney Pieces and Ceilings of Houghton in Norfolk, which was published in 1735 and was something of a coming-out announcement, presenting the recently completed house to the architectural aesthetes of England and beyond.57 Ædes Walpolianæ, compiled in the early 1740s by Walpole’s second son, Horace, but not published until 1748, might well have initially been conceived as a companion to Ware’s publication, although in the end it far surpassed it. Modelled on the Ædes Giustinanæ as well as the Ædes Barberinæ, each a guide to the respective collection published in the seventeenth century, and building upon Creed’s and Gamberini’s publications about Wilton,

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Ædes Walpolianæ focused primarily on the painting collection at Houghton. The work offers a rich pedigree for the paintings and, with its lengthy introduction on the primacy of the Italian schools in the history of art, demonstrates the cultivation and learning of Horace’s father.58 Horace was also careful to frame the collection within the context of Houghton. Although he does not go on at length about the architecture of the house, he does provide views and lists the works of art according to the rooms in which they are situated. Each room is introduced with a short descriptive paragraph on the space, and in the dedication to the Ædes he praises the house and the Walpole family by saying that he is convinced that Robert’s father and grandfather would be “amazed to see this noble edifice” upon arising from their graves in “yonder church” and that they would be “satisfy’d to find only the Mansion-house, not the Morals of the Family altered!”59 As with the elaborate program in the Stone Hall at Houghton, the succession of self-aggrandizing publications may have succeeded in only further stressing Walpole’s parvenu status, a social disadvantage that was not lost on many. Several scholars have posited that the tasteless Timon’s villa in Alexander Pope’s An Epistle to the Earl of Burlington (1731) is, in fact, Houghton Hall, and, more than once, works from the collection were used by the opposition press to lambaste Walpole.60 Seen in this light, by the time Horace Walpole’s Ædes Walpolianæ was finally published several years after Robert Walpole’s death, it served as a way to restore the elder Walpole’s reputation. In sum, Houghton is a rich amalgam of interrelated threads that presents Walpole and his family as equal members in Britain’s true natural aristocracy, thus legitimizing Walpole’s political leadership. The conceit draws upon both the sophisticated and nuanced understanding of classical mythology and classical personages shared by Walpole’s many friends – the earls of Pembroke and Leicester and Andrew Fountaine, for example – and Walpole’s own masterful understanding of the need to articulate his legitimacy through the construction and embellishment of Houghton and the dissemination, largely through print, of that legitimacy. In this respect, Houghton had a far more salient contemporary political import than the Arcadian Elysium of Holkham. Some of those in opposition to Walpole and George II would use sculpture, usually in conjunction with landscape, to make stinging commentaries on the state of contemporary politics. In 1733, after Lord Burlington was refused the lord privy seal despite promises from the king, he resigned all of his posts and retired in self-imposed exile to Chiswick, an action entirely consistent with his aristocratic demeanour. He expressed his dissatisfaction and alienation in one part of the garden where he created a narrative that offers

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a commentary on corruption and tyranny.61 In an exedra, statues of Caesar and Pompey were joined by one of Cicero, who futilely defended virtue. These statues were interspersed with busts of Lycurgus, who established a tripartite system of government in Sparta; Socrates, who defended liberty to his death; Lucius Verus, who, along with Marcus Aurelius, were the first joint emperors of Rome; and Homer and Virgil, who, like Cicero, upheld the integrity of contemplative thought and virtue. The latter is consistent with the motto on Burlington’s coat-of-arms: Vivit Post Funera Virtus.62 In contrast to Walpole at Houghton, Burlington stopped there; he did not insert busts of Walpole, the king, or himself, thereby overstating his case. Rather, he more subtly revelled in classical analogy as befitted a man of his standing. The end result was powerful, intended as it was for a comparably erudite audience who happened also to constitute the contemporary political realm. Burlington’s pointed commentary was a product of the disenchantment with Walpole’s government and his perceived manipulation of the monarchy that was shared by many in the 1730s. Another, arguably more emphatic, example is Richard Viscount Cobham’s work at Stowe, created following his opposition to Walpole’s Excise Act of 1733, which he saw as an infringement upon mercantile trade. For his disobedience, Walpole stripped Cobham of his colonelcy of the King’s Own Horses. Cobham, for his part, retreated to Stowe, which then became the de facto seat of the new so-called Whig Opposition that included several other disaffected Whigs, including the earls of Westmorland and Chesterfield, along with Cobham’s nephews, the Grenvilles, the Lytteltons, and William Pitt.63 This splintering within the Whig ranks would have repercussions for decades to come, signalling both the emergence of strident faction and the concomitant sharpening of factional ideology within the Whig realm. As has been exhaustively documented, Cobham focused his attentions on the landscape to the southeast of the house after 1733.64 The earlier western garden (laid out with the involvement of John Vanbrugh and Charles Bridgeman) constituted a classical Arcadia suffused with a celebration of Whig supremacy. The new southeast garden is, on the surface, even more bucolic, but the political current is far more overt, articulating Cobham’s new oppositional Whig ideology, tinged, as most oppositional ideologies are, with the vitriol of the disenchanted. To one side of the River Styx, fifteen British men and one woman (Queen Elizabeth), whose actions, either active or contemplative, collectively defined Cobham’s perfect Britain, are represented by busts in the Temple of British Worthies. As the narrative plays out, their souls would be escorted across the river to the Elysian Fields by Mercury to join the active and contemplative heroes of ancient Greece, namely

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figure 1.8 | William Kent, Temple of British Worthies, Stowe, 1734–35.

Epaminondas, Lycurgus, Socrates, and Homer, who reside in the Temple of Ancient Virtue (Figs. 1.8 and 1.9).65 In turn, the perfect little circular Temple of Ancient Virtue, sitting on a carefully groomed knoll, contrasts with the nearby Temple of Modern Virtue, which was built as a ruin and stood on a piece of unkempt land among some scrubby trees (Fig. 1.10). A headless full-length statue in modern dress stands beside Modern Virtue. Although never referred to as Walpole forthrightly, the resemblance is unmistakeable. In what is an extraordinary example of character assassination, Cobham succeeded in staying on just the right side of acceptable behaviour. His gentlemanly demeanour was further indicated by a self-deprecating sense of humour; the Temple of British Worthies is ultimately dedicated to Cobham’s favourite Italian greyhound, Fido.66 With the added wit, the overall effect would be that much more devastating. The overall concept of the Elysian Fields is, of course, Greek and this too could have been in purposeful opposition to Walpole, who was casting himself as the new Romanus Britannicus. Cobham would come to see

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figure 1.9 | William Kent, Temple of Ancient Virtue, Stowe, designed c. 1734.

the ancient Greeks as the “first assertors of Publick Liberty” and the natural forebears to the true Whigs. His cousin, Temple Stanyan, emphasized the link in the preface to The Grecian History, published in 1739.67 Indeed, in the introduction, Stanyan elides a thousand years of history by citing the Greeks as the models for “those, who have so gloriously exerted themselves in securing the liberties of Europe.”68 Conversely, Cobham recognized that Rome suffered from the pitfall of decline into autocracy and corruption. The Temple of Modern Virtue at Stowe had two Roman arches. Less subtly,

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figure 1.10 | Temple of Modern Virtue (demolished). Engraving published in

George Bickham, The Beauties of Stow, 1750.

the Temple of Liberty, built in 1739 and overlooking the Temple of British Worthies and the Elysian Fields, was designed in a Gothic style. Three-sided in reference to Britain’s ideal tripartite balanced government, the large park building had a plaque over the door that read, Je rends graces aux Dieux de nester pas Romain (“I thank the gods that I am not a Roman”).69 Cobham continued his witty sophisticated dialogue about the tragedy that was England under Walpole’s governance when he constructed the Temple of Friendship in the distant southeast corner of his garden at the end of the 1730s. Built to commemorate a much flaunted visit to Stowe by Frederick, Prince of Wales, in 1737 and his subsequent collusion with the Whig Opposition against his father and Walpole, the temple was lined with ten busts of Cobham and his political allies, many of whom had also been dismissed in 1733: the Prince of Wales, the earls Chesterfield, Westmorland, Marchmount, Gower, and Bathurst, and the young nephews, Richard Grenville, William Pitt, and George Lyttelton. The ceiling painting, by Francis Sleter, praised the reign of Edward III and Queen Elizabeth to the detriment

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of those of the Hanoverian kings.70 The convivial atmosphere of a gathering of like-minded friends was no doubt enhanced by the contents of the wine cellar in the basement. The primary path to the Temple of Friendship was from the Elysian Fields and necessitated walking over the Palladian Bridge. The bridge originally had a solid east wall since Cobham did not own the land beyond. The wall was embellished with a relief sculpture of Britannia receiving the riches of the four quarters of the world, bounded by portraits of Sir Walter Raleigh and William Penn.71 The imagery illustrated the wealth that Britain could receive if commerce and trade were allowed to flourish freely, unencumbered by the Excise Act, as well as the utopian ideal represented by Pennsylvania and Virginia, two societies supposedly free of persecution and corruption; not coincidentally, the first settlement of the latter had been organized by Richard Grenville, an ancestor of Cobham’s nephews. In its overall design, the Palladian Bridge at Stowe was a witty riposte to Walpole since, sans the relief of Britannia and paintings of Raleigh and Penn, the bridge is nearly identical to the Palladian bridge that Walpole’s friend and political ally the 9th Earl of Pembroke had built at Wilton House in 1737.72 Finally, a few yards east of the Temple of Friendship was the Imperial Closet, designed in a perfect cube and embellished with three full-length portraits of the emperors Titus, Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius, famous for their respect of the Senate.73 The success of Cobham’s gardens and pointed political barbs depended upon people knowing about them. Like Walpole and his administration, Cobham and his Whig Opposition became extremely adept at using the popular press to disseminate the ideas and commentaries that were embedded in the landscaping projects at Stowe. Throughout the 1730s and early 1740s, announcements about plans to erect certain structures, or notices of the completion of others, appeared regularly. Poems, letters, and elegies (by Alexander Pope and George Lyttelton most notably) were also published in honour of Stowe.74 Just as Walpole evidently did not pen any of the tributes to his family or about Houghton, Cobham was never cited as the author; to enter such a public forum as the press was beneath his standing. In 1744, perhaps aware that Horace Walpole was completing the catalogue of his father’s painting collection (not ultimately published until 1748), Cobham had published A Description of the Gardens of the Lord Viscount Cobham, at Stow in Buckinghamshire, the first guide published in England that was dedicated to a single garden.75 Written by Benton Seeley, a local Buckingham writing master, the work contains no reference to Cobham at all, thus absolving him of any evident involvement. Yet, as the perfunctory preface indicates, inference is everything. Seeley claims the guide to be a “plain ac-

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count” of the gardens, a “simple, regular Relation of every Thing in Order as it lies disposed in the Gardens: There is not need of Art or Embellishment, they want not such mean Artifices to set them off; the exactest Description must be the greatest Encomium upon them.”76 The guide then proceeds to describe in great detail the layout of the gardens, the design of the buildings, the disposition of sculptures, and the relationship of buildings and sculptures to one another. All the inscriptions on the buildings and on the pedestals of the sculptures were also included both in their original Latin and in English translation. Thus, anyone visiting the gardens, or simply having access to the guidebook, was given all the tools to prompt particular inferences. The “plain” account of the Stowe gardens stands in stark contrast to the elaborate pedigrees of the paintings in the Ædes Walpolianæ. Furthermore, Seeley’s guide is strictly about the garden, although Cobham did have an extensive painting and sculpture collection in a very grand new house. In that sense, Seeley’s guide is not about a collection but rather about a site, and, like Horace Walpole’s work, it tells the visitor/reader much about the owner. New editions of Seeley’s guide were published promptly, in 1745 (this time with a fulsome dedication to Cobham), 1747, and for many years subsequently.77 Cobham’s exhortations at Stowe evidently spurred Frederick, Prince of Wales, to express his indignation toward his father, George II, and Robert Walpole in the gardens at Carlton House in London. Having arrived from Hanover in 1728 and politically at odds with his parents, Frederick soon allowed himself to become the figurehead of the Whig Opposition. He was also a Freemason, having been initiated into the order in 1737.78 Throughout the 1730s he remodelled Carlton House in a thoroughly Palladian manner, with the assistance of Burlington, Cobham, and the other lords in opposition.79 In the garden he erected busts of King Alfred and Edward the Black Prince. Cobham had recently included busts of Alfred and Edward in the Temple of British Worthies at Stowe and their appearance again at Carlton House was not only an appropriate choice for the young royal but a reminder for the king and queen of past regal upholders of English liberty. In the Latin inscriptions appended to the busts, Alfred was commemorated for his just leadership as well as his patronage of the arts and Edward was touted as the perfect son: pious, victorious, modest, compassionate, honest, and so on. In case the visitor missed the obvious, Frederick strengthened the link with these noble ancestors by including his own name in each inscription.80 Although Frederick would amass a spectacular collection of Old Master paintings, as well as patronize contemporary artists to a considerable degree, he was less interested in collecting sculpture solely for the sake of collecting.

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Indeed, he acquired few pieces of sculpture until 1750 when he turned his attention more fully to designing the landscape at Kew. Frederick had leased Kew as early as 1730 and William Kent immediately recast the old timber house in a Palladian shell.81 Little else was done at Kew after 1735, perhaps because relations between Frederick and his parents, who resided just a mile away at Richmond Lodge, had deteriorated so greatly. By the end of the 1740s, with his mother dead for over a decade and Walpole’s resignation long in the past, relations between father and son, although strained, had improved. Furthermore, the prince, now in his early forties, was actively planning for the succession. Consistent with current practice, Frederick’s commissions and acquisitions of sculpture were determined by an iconographic program that he had conceived for the gardens at Kew and that was indebted to his old political ally Lord Cobham, who had died in 1748. However, Frederick’s program lacked the intense political vitriol that had characterized Cobham’s schemes. This was indicative of waning political tumult, a more stable relationship between the king and the prince, and a maturing on the part of Frederick, who was now intent on presenting himself as a monarchical heir apparent. In 1751 Frederick asked George Vertue to assemble drawings and prints of ancient and modern philosophers to be used as models for statues and busts that would adorn his version of Mount Parnassus.82 Joseph Goupy was charged with preparing designs for “A Temple & the nine Muses & a Waterfall” for the mount.83 Although the scheme was never carried out owing to Frederick’s sudden and unexpected death in March of that year, Vertue had got as far as assembling a list of potential candidates.84 The scheme recalled earlier conceptions, by the Frenchman Titon du Tillet, as well as the Elysian Fields at Stowe.85 As with these precedents, Frederick established a direct link with the classical past by linking moderns with the ancients. Vertue placed some pairs inside the temple: King Alfred and Lycurgus; Edward III and Arminius, the champion of liberty in German history who had defended his homeland (Hanover and Brunswick) from the Romans; the playwrights Shakespeare and Æschylus; the historians Raleigh and Thucydides; Alexander Pope and Horace; Milton and Homer; Vanbrugh – honoured here as a playwright – and Menander; and Newton and Archimedes. Another group, listed by Vertue and identified as “scenes,” may have been intended as wall paintings for the interior of the temple. These were derived from the works of French and English playwrights, paired once again with ancient precedent.86 A second group of sculpture listed as “outside” in Vertue’s list was presumably meant to line the path to the temple. These included Raphael paired with Apelles; Inigo Jones with Vitruvius; Handel with Timotheus, the

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composer; and Cobham with Lucullus, the Roman Epicurean general who retired to a contemplative life in his magnificent gardens.87 Thus, the greats of the fine arts – painting, architecture, music, and gardening – located outside the temple would introduce the arts of leadership, philosophy, poetry, history, science, and playwriting inside. Mount Parnassus was part of a much larger landscaping program that Frederick had envisioned for Kew. He had already built a House of Confucius, a two-storey octagonal garden building that was consistent with the chinoiserie taste in the middle decades of the century. Among the many precedents, there was the exquisite delicate wooden example at Stowe. By calling it the House of Confucius and ornamenting it inside with “little historical subjects relating to Confucius, with several transactions of the Christian Missions in China,” Frederick’s structure suggested more than a convivial teahouse since Confucius was recognized in the middle of the eighteenth century for his political morality.88 Frederick also intended to build an Alhambra. Although Giles Worsley has referred to Frederick’s interest in the exotic as a “postage-stamp collecting attitude towards garden buildings,”89 by the late 1740s, the Chinese, and the exotic in general, had become firmly associated with nature, which, for some, meant liberty. As with his projects in the 1730s, Frederick evidently did not conceive of the scheme entirely on his own. In addition to Vertue and the other artists involved, George Bubb Dodington latterly came within the prince’s circle. Dodington, likely a Freemason, definitely a libertine, and almost certainly a member of the raucous Medmenham Friars, had spent a vast fortune (£140,000) on his estate at Eastbury, and his riverside villa in Hammersmith, “La Trappe,” was without precedent in terms of lavish embellishment. The last lines of the description of La Trappe in Vitruvius Britannicus sum it up: “No expense has been spared that would render it either superb or magnificent.”90 The jewel of La Trappe was the eighty-five-foot gallery, decorated with two monolithic Sicilian jasper columns, inlaid polychromed marble floor, lapis lazuli door cases, and several antique statues and busts, most of which Dodington had acquired from Cardinal Albani in Rome.91 Basil Williams describes Dodington as a “flaccid” Whig who “raised toadyism to almost sublime proportions,” no doubt forced into that role by his profligate spending.92 In what seems to have been an effort to win over the Prince of Wales, Dodington, without the prince’s knowledge, asked Albani to find several antique sculptures for Kew.93 Albani promptly acquired thirteen statues by the Franco-Italian sculptor Pietro Francavilla, a student of Giambologna, from the collection of the Villa Bracci at Rovezzano. Indeed, Horace Mann, who oversaw the purchase and transportation of the sculptures from Italy,

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figure 1.11 | Edward Rooker after William Chambers, Section of the Gallery

of Antiques from William Chambers, Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings at Kew, in Surry: The Seat of Her Royal Highness the Princess Dowager of Wales, 1763.

believed the statues to be after models by Giambologna himself.94 The statues included a large Venus and Attendants, as well as ones of Apollo, Diana, Ceres, Bacchus, Flora, Zephyr, Pomona, Vertumnus, Pan, Syrinx, Nature, and Proteus.95 The identities of the sculptures were appropriate for a landscape garden but it is unclear where these statues would have been located at Kew; the prince’s premature death, which rendered Dodington distraught, meant that building at Kew stopped and the statues languished in their packing cases.96 Had the Francavilla statues been erected at Kew, the tenor of the gardens as an idyllic Arcadian retreat would have been accentuated and, by extension, would have further dissipated the factional political undertone. Frederick’s son, George, as Prince of Wales, picked up on the themes his father had initiated, with the help of the Dowager Princess Augusta and

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figure 1.12 | Edward Rooker after William Chambers, Section of the Gallery of Antiques from William Chambers, Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings at Kew, in Surry: The Seat of Her Royal Highness the Princess Dowager of Wales, 1763.

Lord Bute. Of the same generation as Rockingham, Richmond, Huntingdon, and Hollis, and actively collecting at the same time, the young prince hired William Chambers in the late 1750s to design and build numerous garden features at Kew, including the Temple of Bellona, the Theatre of Augusta, the Temple of the Sun, the greenhouse, a ruin, a gallery of antiques, a mosque, the Alhambra, and a pagoda.97 In contrast to some of Frederick’s ill-fated schemes, all of these structures were built although only the massive brick pagoda, the greenhouse, the Temple of the Sun, and the Temple of Bellona are extant. The Gallery of Antiques, a rectangular structure open to the sky and containing ten statues, invokes Mount Helicon, where Minerva was visited by the muses (Figs. 1.11 and 1.12).98 All of the sculptures were commissioned specifically for the gallery and were executed by Joseph Wilton.

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figures 1.13 and 1.14 | Joseph Wilton, Muses for the Gallery of Antiques at

Kew, c. 1757.

Minerva was centrally placed and the muses were conflated into four other statues (Figs. 1.13 and 1.14). Urania, or science more generally, with her globe, callipers, and crown of stars, stood in a niche in one of the short ends of the gallery. The pendant figure, shown holding a flute and a lyre and posing with one foot raised, suggests the muses of music, lyric poetry, and dance.

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Two bas-relief panels above the niches depict dancing figures holding various attributes of the muses. These two figures were presumably balanced by two more at the opposite end of the gallery and this is probably where the one surviving statue that is not illustrated in Chambers’s elevations was situated. The figure has attributes – the scroll and her leaning posture against a pedestal – common to both Clio and Calliope, the muses of history and epic poetry.99 It is tempting to speculate that her now-lost companion was a muse representing comedy and tragedy, holding the appropriate masks. The other sculptures in the gallery declaim Minerva’s role as goddess of wisdom and of war. A bas-relief shown in the engraving between the two muses and below an urn and sphinxes illustrates two men in togas lecturing three bound barbarian captives, thus appearing to be a narrative of the triumph of wisdom. The object at the base of the chair and at the foot of one of the captives may be a copy of Caesar’s War Commentaries, which Minerva often held to indicate her wisdom in military matters. Minerva also stands between the figures of Ceres and Proserpine, two goddesses who are frequently associated with Minerva. Ceres is identified by her attribute of corn. Proserpine is less firmly attributed by her floral wreath, bare feet, and dancing pose. If statues were included in the fourth wall (there are no extant views of it), perhaps they were Juno, Venus, and Diana. Such a narrative is entirely appropriate for Britain in the late 1750s as the nation moved toward imperial dominance. Minerva was, of course, strongly aligned with Britannia. Thus, Kew, especially the Gallery of Antiques with the evocation of the arts, history, wisdom, and war, positions the prince, soon to be King George III, as the pansophical leader of the new empire.

T

he foregoing survey of several sculpture collections amassed in the first half of the eighteenth century illustrates the depth and diversity of motivation behind the acquisition of sculpture. There is rarely one fixed interpretation of a single iconographic program; the sculptures could be and were meant to be read at many levels, some of which were particularly arcane. This fundamentally distinguishes the acquisition of sculpture from the purely aesthetic-driven act of collecting. Although prized by antiquarians and connoisseurs alike for their caché as genuine classical antiques, sculptures were rarely considered simply as objets d’art to be viewed for aesthetic enjoyment. The collections of sculpture were greater than the sum of their parts. The pieces were key ingredients in often complex and fluid narratives that regularly also incorporated contemporary sculpture, Old Master paintings, commissioned paintings, family portraits, and the architecture of the houses and gardens.

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The multilayered and seemingly diverse tropes – bucolic Arcadian retreats, displays of profound understanding of classical literature, exercises in self-aggrandizement, stinging political invectives, intimations of Masonic sanctuaries – are unified in that time has been elided. The classical, and less often, medieval, past were mined for precedent and legitimacy and the temporal distance between the present and the past collapsed. In some cases, the experience was a liminal one as the visitor became immersed in a Masonic and/or Arcadian netherworld. Alternatively, the sense of liminality could be more fluid, as at Stowe; there, the visitor could feel a sense of refuge and retreat while wandering through the gardens, but a closer reading of the narrative programs embedded in the landscaping, temples, and sculpture would bring the present gritty political realm starkly back into focus. Whatever the case, the resulting quilt of country houses and great estates that spread across the country and that were populated by any number of statues and busts was, for the English, a natural evocation, rather than a manufactured artifice, of England’s Risorgimento brought on by the Glorious Restoration. At the heart of the Risorgimento was the affirmation of the role of England’s natural aristocracy, regardless of its political stripe. However, as we shall see in the subsequent case studies, the “natural” right of the natural aristocracy to be the “natural” leaders of the nation would be immediately challenged with the rise of the career politician, a young king “British born and bred,” and a nation poised to become an empire.

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2

An “old whig”: The 2nd marquis of rockingham and his collections By his prudence and patience he brought together a party which it was the great object of his labours to render permanent, not as an instrument of ambition, but as a living depository of principle.1

T

his excerpt from Edmund Burke’s eulogy to Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquis of Rockingham, inscribed in his mausoleum at Wentworth Woodhouse, characterizes Rockingham’s, and Burke’s, political ideology (Fig. 2.1). For them, the existence of party based on principles and one not subject to monarchical control or intervention was indispensable to the successful workings of a British government intent on the preservation of liberty. Accordingly, theirs was a constant struggle with George III, who, they believed, had intentionally sought to destroy party from the beginning of his reign, with the assistance of his favourite, Lord Bute. Viewed in this light, the mausoleum, built by Rockingham’s nephew and heir, the 4th Earl Fitzwilliam, was an updated conflation of the Temple of British Worthies and Temple of Friendship at Stowe. Within the mausoleum, Joseph Nollekens’s very white life-size marble statue of the marquis in oratorical pose can be seen through a door on the ground floor (Fig. 2.2). The statue is surrounded by all’antica busts of the marquis’s political allies and friends: Viscount Admiral Augustus Keppel, Charles James Fox, John Lee, Lord John Cavendish, the Duke of Portland, Fredrick Montagu, Sir George Savile, and Edmund Burke.2 Situated on a rise a fair distance from the house, the mausoleum is ninety feet tall and consists of two severe rectangular storeys surmounted by a classical rotunda. Four obelisks mark the corners of the site. This ponderous mass dominates the surrounding countryside; it is an emphatic manifestation

figure 2.1 | John Carr, Mausoleum for the 2nd Marquis of Rockingham, Wentworth Woodhouse, commissioned 1783.

of the natural aristocracy and the role of the natural aristocracy in English society, a role that George III had attempted, as far as Rockingham and his friends were concerned, to undermine. The mausoleum was the last in a series of assertive visual expressions of the aristocratic prerogatives of the Rockinghamite marquisate that began with Rockingham’s father, the 1st marquis, in the heyday of the Whig ascendancy in the first half of the eighteenth century. This chapter traces the 2nd marquis’s participation in these initiatives in the last years of his father’s life and

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figure 2.2 |

John Carr, interior of Mausoleum for the 2nd Marquis of Rockingham, Wentworth Woodhouse, commissioned 1783.

into the 1760s as he rose to political prominence at the head of a new Whig party. Before focusing on the visual and material culture that contributed to defining Rockingham as a natural aristocrat, according to his perception of his place in society, it is useful to summarize and characterize the political maelstrom that would evolve in the early 1760s. By this time, old-style Whiggery had broadened out after the routing of the Tories at mid-century and later owing to the death of many of the older generation of Whig grandees. Any glue that had held the disparate threads of Whiggism together had dissolved and the pretence of a single cohesive Whig party shattered as new factions arose in response to the king’s and Bute’s aggressive measures. The young king, anxious to exercise his stake in the

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tripartite British government, was unwilling to come under the influence of anyone except Bute and, as a result, contributed to the volatile state of British government for the next two decades, during which time there was a succession of administrations, some lasting only a matter of weeks. In October 1761 Pitt the elder and Lord Temple resigned their offices, having found few supporters to perpetuate the war that had begun in 1756 by bringing Spain into the conflict (later called the Seven Years’ War). Meanwhile, the king and Bute had convinced some of Pitt’s and Temple’s supporters to remain in office. Thus, the king and Bute had succeeded in breaking the back of the Grenville Cousinhood, the phalanx of young relations – Pitt and Temple included – who had been acolytes of the disaffected Whig Lord Cobham in the 1730s and 1740s and who had risen to positions of power in the 1750s to pursue a program of imperial expansion. After the king and Bute politically destabilized the Cousinhood, various factions then proceeded to square off against whoever was in power and against each other. Grenvillites, Pittites (later the Chathamites), and Rockinghamites claimed a legitimate right to rule and all espoused some version of Whig ideology. The eponymous Rockingham Whigs presented themselves as a party, in contrast to Pitt’s “measures-not-men.” Pitt had also shockingly allowed Tories to resume positions of political power, a concession the Rockingham Whigs found unforgivable. Wary of the new brand of career politician, the Rockinghamites were quick to condemn the sacrifice of principle in favour of personal gain. Though mostly young men, the Rockinghamites proudly called themselves the “Old Whigs” and harked back to the ideals and principles of the Whig grandees of the first half of the century. Although the image of a unified party was largely a fiction in the contentious political arena of the 1730s and 1740s, for Rockingham and his adherents the concept provided an effective ideological tool in what would be the even more turbulent 1760s and 1770s. The Duke of Newcastle, whom Rockingham regarded somewhat as a political in loco parentis, was one of the few links between the generations who remained active in politics.3 The other was William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, uncle of the young king. It was Cumberland, suspicious of and often at odds with Lord Bute, who advised George III to ask Rockingham to form a government in 1765. However, when Cumberland died on 31 October 1765, the royal ties between the Rockingham Whigs and the king were severed and there was no possibility for reconciliation. The Rockinghamites were soon out of office. What followed were seventeen years of opposition during which time Rockingham emerged from under the mantle of Newcastle – he had died in 1768 – to refine his conception of party.4

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Central to the Rockinghamite ideology was the belief in the natural aristocracy’s right to lead. This does not mean that they were republicans; the landed peerage was the necessary intermediary between a king who tended toward autocratic control and the common people who were not naturally fit to rule. However, the Rockinghamites believed that George III had overstepped the bounds and threatened the delicate balance that the Whigs had orchestrated with the Hanoverian Succession back in 1715. The perceived assault on the natural aristocracy’s inalienable role was exacerbated by the emergence of the career politician and the influence of the City magnates. Edmund Burke, who became Rockingham’s private secretary in 1765, nailed this concept down to contemporary political realities in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, published in 1770: he blamed the “king’s men” for the disruption in the natural flow of government in the 1760s and offered a warning about the self-serving tendencies of the political aristocracy and of men of business.5 Beyond the influence of Newcastle, much of Rockingham’s conception of Whiggery was shaped by his father. The 1st marquis was a loyal Court Whig under George I and George II amidst the turbulence of the 1730s and 1740s. Because of his loyalty he was made a Knight of the Bath in the first round of appointments after George I had created the order in 1725.6 He was then duly awarded the earldom of Malton in the Irish peerage in 1734 and his inherited baronetcy of Rockingham was elevated to marquisate in 1746. However, the 1st marquis was sensitive to monarchical overrreach. He would spend much time and money rehabilitating his ancestor Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, who had been beheaded in 1641 by order of Charles I in a desperate act of appeasement.7 The earl’s reputation remained clouded in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries but was uncontrovertibly “proven” by the 1st marquis with his publication in 1739 of a skewed selection of the earl’s correspondence that ran to over one thousand pages.8 The earl was portrayed as a true Whig, an upholder of English liberties in the face of an absolute monarch and the overindulgences of the Commons.9 The 1st marquis died in 1750 and his son, then twenty, acceded to the titles and to the family’s vast estates in Yorkshire, Northamptonshire, and Ireland, and inherited a substantial town house in Grosvenor Square, London. The young marquis consummately fulfilled the role of the natural Whig aristocrat. He had already proven his patriotism and staunch Whiggery at an early age. When just fifteen years old his father had secured for him the largely honorary rank of colonel (a more experienced officer advised him) in one of the three regiments of the West Riding of Yorkshire at the height of the Jacobite uprising in 1745. In December of the same year, when it was clear that

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the danger was bypassing Yorkshire, the young colonel faked an official pass for himself and rode off to join the Duke of Cumberland’s army, which was then near Carlisle. The duke promptly took him in, wrote to his parents, and then sent him home with commendations for his bravery and patriotism. When he came into his inheritance, the 2nd marquis’s involvement in politics was initially limited to country affairs, appropriate to the country squire. Yet, as he accepted appointments consistent with his peerage, he was inexorably drawn into parliamentary and court circles, accepting his involvement as a civic duty in the Shaftesburian sense, rather than as a career choice.10 For him, his place at the head of great estates which demanded profound knowledge of agriculture and husbandry as well as significant managerial skills was entirely consistent with leadership in the wider political realm. However, like his father, he harboured a distaste for undue monarchical intervention. This is evident early in his career when he exhibited his loyalty to the Duke of Newcastle in the political crises of 1756 and 1757 by refusing the offer of master of the horse to the Prince of Wales and threatening to resign as a lord of the bedchamber of George II. The latter proved unnecessary as George II was forced to appoint a ministry led by Newcastle and Pitt the elder. The distaste was transformed into disgust in the early years of George III’s reign with the forced resignations first of Newcastle from the ministry and then of the Duke of Devonshire, another friend and fellow northern peer, from the lord chamberlain’s office in 1762.11 Rockingham promptly resigned from the bedchamber and, in retaliation, the king (and Bute) stripped him of his lord lieutenancies of Yorkshire.12 Befitting Rockingham’s prosecution of the natural aristocracy’s right to rule, Wentworth Woodhouse in the West Riding of Yorkshire became his political powerbase; he spent minimal time in London and most of the political strategizing went on at his country seat. His father had already done much to enhance the profile of Wentworth Woodhouse. In the 1720s and the 1730s, he had rebuilt first the west then the east front. The two projects were designed according to the reigning taste of the times. The west front was built in 1725, begun not coincidentally immediately after the 1st marquis’s investiture into the Order of the Bath. It is an extraordinary essay in the Baroque, with heavily rusticated quoins and basements, fronted with Venetian windows (Fig. 2.3). The middle three bays of the centre portion are articulated with vigorously fluted Corinthian pilasters, topped with a pointed pediment and cornice broken by the deeply carved family crest, toting the insignia of the Order of the Bath.13 The east front, built a decade later, is thoroughly Palladian (Fig. 2.4). Although modelled on Wanstead in elevation, it is far wider. Indeed, it is the widest facade in England, measuring an

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figure 2.3 | West Front, Wentworth Woodhouse, built 1725–34.

astonishing 660 feet. Like his voluminous published defence of his ancestor, the enormity of the facade evidently indicates that the 1st marquis believed in legitimization through magnitude. The central portion of the east front is nineteen bays long, saved from tedious repetition by the raised middle nine bays, projecting portico, and double staircase turned in on itself.14 Along with Holkham Hall, the east front of Wentworth Woodhouse marked the translation of the Palladian style from the suburban or small-scale house design (Chiswick and Wanstead) to the grand country house.15 Holkham, Wentworth Woodhouse, and Houghton were the three biggest private building projects of the 1730s. The end result at Wentworth Woodhouse is a house of two halves with little interconnection, either stylistically or physically.16 Beyond evoking the taste of the times, the discrepancy and disconnect between the two halves may also be explained by the function of each facade. Michael Charlesworth, who has spent much time analyzing the architecture and landscaping of Wentworth Woodhouse, has posited that the stylistic incongruities accords with Jonathan Swift’s division between private and public morality.17 The more buoyant and effervescent decoration of the Baroque west front faces

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figure 2.4 | Henry Flitcroft and others, East Front, Wentworth Woodhouse,

1733–37.

the garden, which was, in effect, an enclosed giardino secreto, an intimate space reserved primarily for the family. The far more severe Palladian east front, by contrast, is the public face of the house. It looks out over a large swath of land that Rockingham and then his son would go on to populate with several monuments commemorating the family’s achievements. The imposing ponderous mass of the house and attendant towers, obelisks, and columns dispersed across the vast landscape indicate none too clearly that the 1st, and later the 2nd, marquis saw the country seat as the physical manifestation of the primacy of the landed peerage in English society and its claim on public virtue. For the 1st marquis, the building schemes at Wentworth Woodhouse were also a riposte to his cousin, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, 2nd creation, who had spent much of his life attempting to blur the line as to who was the real heir to the Wentworth name, estates, and fortune.18 Strafford had inherited only the title of Baron Raby in 1695 while the 1st marquis’s

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figure 2.5 | Henry Flitcroft, Hoober Stand, Wentworth Woodhouse, 1748.

father had received the bulk of the Wentworth inheritance. However, Strafford had built a lavish Baroque mansion on property he had purchased a stone’s throw from Wentworth Woodhouse, calling it first Strafford Hall – even before he had secured the second creation of the earldom from Queen Anne – and then renaming it Wentworth Castle after Rockingham had built his Baroque house. In the park at Wentworth Castle, Strafford also built a sham medieval castle, actually on the ruins of a real medieval site, further strengthening the illusion of his legitimacy. Politics was also bound up in the rivalry since Strafford had been a Jacobite sympathizer. Strafford’s son, who succeeded to the earldom in 1739, populated the park with statues of his father and his father-in-law, the Duke of Argyll, both of whom claimed no allegiance to “either wig [sic] or Tory” and fell into opposition against Walpole.19 In contrast, in 1747 the 1st marquis blatantly celebrated his Whiggery when he erected Hoober Stand, a massive three-sided tapered seventy-foot-high tower topped with a hexagonal lantern (Fig. 2.5). Designed by Henry Flitcroft, it is called after the nearest village and is situated on one of the highest points of the estate. It is a curious cross between an obelisk and an ancient lighthouse.20 The inscription over the door reads:

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1748 This Pyramidal Building was Erected by his Majestys most Dutyfull Subject thomas Marquis of Rockingham Etc In Grateful Respect to the Preserver of our Religion Laws and Libertys king george The Second Who by the blessing of God having Subdued a most Unnatural Rebellion in Britain Anno 1746 Maintains the Ballance of Power and Settles A Just and Honourable Peace in Europe 1748 Only a Court Whig such as the 1st marquis could have cast the less than satisfactory end of the War of the Austrian Succession in an honourable light.21 Stylistically, the design of Hoober Stand is too idiosyncratic not to tie it to some potent symbolic content. Michael Charlesworth has suggested that the three sides of the tower represent England, Wales, and Scotland under one British crown, reinforcing the unified state in the face of the Jacobite uprising. George Sheeran, alternatively, has offered a Masonic interpretation that concentrates on the triangular plan as a symbol of God, the Great Master, and the hexagonal lantern as the divine all-seeing eye.22 Although the marquis cannot be categorically declared a Freemason since his name does not appear on any surviving list, it is likely that Flitcroft, who had trained with Lord Burlington, was a brother in the Craft.23 The young Lord Malton, son of the 1st marquis, was thus nurtured on the bitter family rivalry between Strafford and his father amidst the WhigTory/Jacobite antipathies of the 1740s. Indeed, Malton’s first significant act as a collector of sculpture came as a result of the Strafford-Rockingham rivalry. In the late 1740s, the 2nd Earl of Strafford had installed four marble statues of Apollo, Antinous, Ceres, and Isis at Wentworth Castle. These were positioned in the interstices between column and wall, forming a screen at each end of the breathtaking 180-foot gallery which Nikolaus Pevsner described as a “showpiece of almost megalomaniac magnificence” (Fig. 2.6).24 Terminated by Venetian windows, the gallery was also filled with numerous paintings and Roman medals that the 1st earl had acquired on a buying spree in Italy in 1709.25 Four bronze casts of sculpture had been originally commissioned from Massimiliano Soldani by the 1st earl on that trip, perhaps in emulation of Marlborough at Blenheim, but five years later he changed his mind – much to Soldani’s anger – and hired Gianbattista Foggini to carve

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figure 2.6 | Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford (2nd creation), the Gallery, Wentworth Castle, Stainborough, from 1709, completed by the 2nd Earl of Strafford.

four marble statues.26 The statues were not finished until the early 1740s, completed by Foggini’s son Vincenzo (Gianbattista had died in 1725) quite possibly only at the insistence of the 2nd Earl of Strafford who had made his grand tour in 1741 and likely visited the Foggini workshop in Florence.27 The statues were installed in the gallery shortly thereafter. The 1st Marquis of Rockingham had seen the statues and was not impressed; he thought they were “of very coarse and spotted marble” and, because of their position, “anyone sees every part” and so make “but an insufficient show.”28 Shortly thereafter, the 1st marquis wrote to his son, who was then on his grand tour, entrusting him to purchase marble tables and eight statues for the magnificent Great Hall that was the entrance hall and centrepiece of the new Palladian block at Wentworth Woodhouse.29 Like the Stone Hall at Houghton, it was modelled on Inigo Jones’s Cube Room at the Queen’s House in Greenwich. But in contrast to Houghton the decoration is considerably more spare (Fig. 2.7). The white ceiling is divided into compartments with a circular motif at the centre, mirrored in the black and white marble tile floor.30 Ionic columns of yellow scagliola line the walls on the ground floor and the interstices are filled with doors, chimney pieces, niches for the statues, and windows. Above, breccia scagliola pilasters correspond to the columns below. Malton soon realized that he could not find the tables and the statues for the money his father was willing to pay. He bought two tables in Siena made out of the eponymous yellow marble, writing that the expense of these were “a trifle” of what veneered versions would be in Rome, and in Rome he intended to get some more reasonably priced slabs of green and yellow marble cut from the centre of antique columns.31 As for the statues, he recognized that originals were virtually impossible to procure and plaster casts “have a mean look, and will never be proper for so fine a Room as the Great Hall.” Consequently, he settled on marble copies.32 Initially he purchased four copies in Florence, the cheapest at £100, and hoped to find an additional four statues in Rome.33 In the end, he acquired another eight in Rome.34 He played upon the rivalry with Strafford to convince his father to pay the extra money that was required. Malton knew, presumably from Foggini, that the 2nd Earl of Strafford had paid £500 for the marble copies for Wentworth Castle. He mused, in a letter to his father, that since Strafford’s statues were larger than what was required for Wentworth Woodhouse, perhaps he might succeed in spending less money per statue.35 His father, as conscious of the visual effect as he was of the money spent, pointed out that the statues for Wentworth Woodhouse would stand in niches and therefore Malton might “allow some specks on the back parts,” thus perhaps procuring more for less

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figure 2.7 | Henry Flitcroft, Marble Hall, Wentworth Woodhouse, 1733–37, with bas-reliefs added by James Stuart in 1755.

money, but he insisted that the front of the statues be unblemished.36 He ultimately consented to the additional costs. The eight statues that Malton purchased in Rome consist of a copy of the Antinous in the Capitoline – the only one of the eight that is a duplicate of the sculptures at Wentworth Castle – the Callipygian Venus from the Farnese collection, the Capitoline Flora and the Germanicus from Versailles, the Apollino and the Dancing Faun from the Uffizi, and the Queen of Sweden’s Faun from the Prado and the Venus de’Medici from the Uffizi. The first four statues that he had bought in Florence were copies of the Venus de’Medici, Mercury (actually the Apollino), the Dancing Faun, and the Idol (Idolino), all from the Tribuna in the Uffizi. In order for the commissions to be completed in a timely manner, and to spread the wealth around, Malton hired five sculptors, Italian and English, to execute the marble copies in Rome: Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, Giovanni Battista Maini, Filippo della Valle, Simon Vierpyl, and Joseph Wilton.37 He gave advances to the sculptors since everyone, as he said to his father, was so poor even “the Greatest sculptor would have starved before [the sculpture] was finished” because of the size of the works.38 His patronage of Wilton and Vierpyl also suggests a patriotic gesture since these were among the first large commissions that either sculptor had received. Many artists and dealers identified Malton soon after his arrival in Italy as one of the more prolific potential patrons. Perhaps as another barb aimed at Strafford, Malton also bought Vincenzo Foggini’s life-size bronze Samson and the Philistines, a conflation of works of the same subject by Giambologna and Michelangelo (Fig. 2.8).39 It would turn out to be one of the most accomplished original sculptural groups – as opposed to a copy of a pre-existing work – produced by an Italian sculptor in the eighteenth century. Malton had expressed a keen appreciation for both Michelangelo and Giambologna in his Italian notebooks40 and, as a schoolboy, he may also have seen Giambologna’s original marble of the Samson and the Philistines which was on display at Buckingham House in London from 1714 to 1762.41 Foggini’s sculpture was perfectly suited for the Pillar’d Hall that is situated below the Great Hall at Wentworth Woodhouse and is the first room visitors enter before they make their way up the grand stair (not finished until the 1770s) to the Great Hall. The dark heroic writhing figure of Samson was a marvellously witty conceit, situated in the fractured light among the many pillars (Fig. 2.9). Some other purchases by the young Malton that demonstrate his erudition and refinement include Donatello’s Chellini Madonna, a painting by Andrea del Sarto, two bronzes by Giambologna, a painting by Vasari of the

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figure 2.8 |

Vincenzo Foggini, Samson and the Philistines, 1749.

heads of “all the famous Italian poets,” numerous other “little Pictures,” “antique stones” (presumably gems), many medals, and a unique harpsichord designed by a “most surprising genius.”42 Malton also recorded in his diaries his impressions of the architecture, paintings, and sculpture of Venice, Florence, Pisa, Livorno, Siena, Rome, Lucca, and Naples, and he acquired many books.43 His father continued to fret about his son’s expenses; when Malton proposed to stay abroad another year, the marquis would not support it.44 Perhaps to assuage his anxieties, Malton’s “bear-leader,” Major James Forrester, waxed eloquently to the marquis about his son’s reception in Italy:

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figure 2.9 | Henry Flitcroft, the Pillar’d Hall, Wentworth Woodhouse, 1733–37.

“Every body of distinguished rank or taste are [sic] pleased with him, it is with equall truth & satisfaction that I assure your Lordship, my Lord Malton’s private character claims in justice, all the respect which his rank can claim in ceremony.”45 Forrester then flattered the marquis, claiming that the “plan of Wentworth House [was proof enough that Malton] needed not have travelled to see fine palaces and his behaviour to everybody shows then he need not travell for personall improvements so they justly look on his stay [in Italy] as a particular mark of his good will.”46 In tune with the Shaftesburian aesthetic, the marquis responded by saying that “the training up of youth” should be done by one’s “own virtue, experience and example.”47

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Virtue here could mean the material culture of virtù, a necessary ingredient, balanced with empiricism and display, of the natural aristocrat. In Italy, the 1st marquis’s exemplum was reinforced by that of Antonio Cocchi, who served as a mentor to the young Malton. In particular, they shared a passion for medals, often an indicator of profound classical knowledge and an antiquarian predisposition. Malton had begun to collect medals as early as 1745 when he was just fifteen and his grand tour whetted his appetite for more; he admitted to his father that he had “not been able to resist the temptation of purchasing medals.”48 In Florence he and Cocchi examined together the Grand Duke’s collection in the Uffizi and Malton’s notebooks contain excerpts from Antonio Agustín’s Dialogos de medallas, inscriciones, y otras antiquedades as well as several other numismatic treatises.49 He most likely also saw Baron Phillip von Stosch’s inestimable collection. The witty narrative of the Samson and the Philistines in the Pillar’d Hall bares shades of Antonio Cocchi, whose arcane intelligence is so pronounced in the contemporaneous sculptural program at the Earl of Huntingdon’s Donington Park (see chapter 4). Keeping in mind that Cocchi was an inveterate Freemason, perhaps it is significant that Samson is an anagram of Masons. Another telling indicator of Malton’s erudition was his interest in archaeology. He financed James “Athenian” Stuart’s first publication, De Obelisco Caesari Augusti (1750), about the excavated obelisk in the Campus Martius, and he also thought it appropriate to sponsor much of Stuart’s and Nicholas Revett’s expedition to Athens.50 Lord Charlemont, that other inveterate explorer of the Levant who was also a Freemason, seems likely to have guided Malton toward an interest in archaeology. Shortly before Malton had met Charlemont in Rome in the spring of 1750, Charlemont had returned from several months studying the ancient sites of the Levant and had settled in Rome with a reputation among the British and Anglo-Irish population for unrivalled classical erudition.51 The two men would become life-long friends and share comparable Whig proclivities. A year after Malton returned to England, Charlemont and his Anglo-Irish compatriots, brimming with youthful brio, schemed to parade through the streets of Rome during Carnival in an ancient Roman-style chariot, celebrating the triumph of British liberty.52 This was a brilliant riposte to the French, for the students of the French academy in Rome had regularly created elaborate and patriotic floats for Carnival. Probably for the better, such a preposterous display of British patriotic and Protestant zeal following the collapse of the Jacobite threat and the end of the War of the Austrian Succession never came to fruition. Charlemont’s subsequent displays of erudition – Charlemont House in Dublin and Marino, his villa suburbiana – were infinitely more reserved. In

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1782, after Rockingham’s untimely death, Charlemont dedicated his private library at Charlemont House to Rockingham as a sign of his esteem.53 Malton’s and Charlemont’s interest in archaeology seems not to have been governed by the science of the young discipline or by the anticipation of what they might find, the latter being one of the driving forces for the explosive popularity of archaeological excavations from the mid-1760s onward. Rather, their archaeological endeavours were a natural progression from Burlington’s obsession with Palladio; they constituted careful antiquarian study of the great works, almost entirely architectural, of the classical world. Seen in this light, these early forays into archaeology by men of such distinguished rank were entirely appropriate, a natural component of Shaftesbury’s man of virtù.54 However, Malton’s interest in archaeology would have little bearing on the embellishment of Wentworth Woodhouse. For that building’s Great Hall, Malton wanted complete copies of well-known statues. These were works appreciated for their aesthetic beauty, representing the best of antiquity. Likewise, Charlemont also commissioned casts and copies for Charlemont House and Marino rather than seeking out original statues and busts. He ordered a copy of the Fighting Gladiator from Vierpyl; bronze busts of Brutus, Pompey, and Caesar, and a sculpted frame for a relief of Venus by Guglielmo della Porta; a copy of the Venus de’Medici from Wilton; and other marble busts after the antique from Maini.55 As with Wentworth Woodhouse, several of the statues were installed in the entrance hall. By incorporating examples of statues appreciated for their aesthetic quality in the primary state room of their houses, the sculptures functioned as part of a whole that constituted exemplum, the display of the owner’s role in society. As the best of classical antiquity, the statues offered inspiration to those who visited, prompting aspirations to self-improvement. In this sense, they accord with the Enlightenment idea of emulation. Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s 1755 publication Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (“Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture”) is a nearly contemporaneous analogy. Aimed at artists, Winckelmann’s expressive treatise excites painters and sculptors to be inspired by these great works of antiquity.56 The success of the entrance hall at Wentworth Woodhouse, and at Charlemont House and Marino, is entirely based on first impressions; erudition and exemplum are evoked by instant recognition of great classical statues, set within the context of the whole room.57 The emphasis in the works selected was on the elegant and lithe ideal beauty, not on the exaggerated emotion and actions of the Laocoön or the

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similarly exaggerated proportions of the Farnese Hercules. Those works had no place at Wentworth Woodhouse or Charlemont House or Marino, or for that matter in most country-house collections conceived by the patriciate in the middle of the century. The more reserved elegance and grace of the Venuses, the Apollino, the Antonious, the Dancing Faun, and the like are entirely more in keeping with exemplum and virtù, in tune with the Platonic ideal of outward control and interior imagination. Such proclivities are also manifest in the architecture. Although bombastic in scale, the restrained Palladian decoration is significantly less emotive than the Baroque exuberance more favoured earlier in the century. The refined elegance also resonates in Malton’s other acquisitions – in his Donatello, the del Sartos, the Guercino – and most of all in his preference for the lithe bodies of Giambologna, whether in the small bronzes or in Foggini’s variant in the Samson. The nudity of the sculptures is also a critical component; the suppleness of the smooth marble bodies plays into the elegance of sophisticated refinement and, on a more physical note, must have gone some way toward satisfying a young man’s sexual yearnings. The young Duke of Richmond’s exclamation that “I am in love with the Venus and take great pleasure to stroke her bum and thighs” likely rang true for most of his generation.58 Along with Charlemont House and Marino, another nearly contemporaneous example of this preference for the display of cast and copies of the graceful and the beautiful can be found at Hagley Hall in Worcestershire, the home of Sir George Lyttelton, who was a generation older and who had been a firm Opposition Whig in the Walpole era. In 1755, when Lyttelton was chancellor of the exchequer, Horace Walpole, on Lyttelton’s behalf, wrote to Horace Mann asking him to supply plaster casts of “the Venus, the dancing faun, the Apollo Medicis [sic], (I think there is a cast of it) the Mercury, and some other female statue at your choice” as well as three Volterra vases with different patterns.59 These were destined for the entrance hall at Hagley. Mann replied that a cast of the Apollo Medici did not exist nor was there a suitable cast of a female to accompany the Venus.60 Ultimately, Lyttelton settled for casts of the Dancing Faun, Sansovino’s Bacchus, the Venus, and Mercury.61 Lyttelton’s final selection was also conditioned by what could easily be acquired without too much expense, as indeed, was Lord Malton’s and likely Lord Charlemont’s. The exchange of communication between Walpole and Mann indicates that the pre-existence of a mould or another cast or copy of the original was a determining factor in the selection. Indeed, it was extraordinarily rare for artists, dealers, or patrons to secure permission to make a mould from an original statue, especially for those that were so highly

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praised. Popes Clement XII and Benedict XIV were especially protective of the prized pieces – sculptures and paintings alike – in the Vatican, fearing damage to the originals.62 Furthermore, even if permission was secured to make a mould of an original, the complex and lengthy process would drive the price up exorbitantly. For example, Matthew Brettingham the younger employed two workmen for six weeks to take a mould of the Capitoline Flora while a mould for a single bust could take one man as many as five days.63 The copies and casts that were easily obtainable and that consequently populate many collections in Britain and elsewhere tend to consist of several pieces from the Medici collection in Florence and from the collection of the French academy in Rome. As for the latter, the French Academy in Rome was in the Palazzo Mancini in the Corso and the finest casts were judiciously placed in niches in the stairwell, along corridors, and in rooms, rather than sequestered in dusty, dirty studios. Artists and tourists alike could see the Farnese Hercules, the Farnese Flora, the Lion and Boar, Paetus and Arria, Niobe and Her Daughter, the Dancing Faun, the Commodus as Hercules, the Antinous, the Germanicus, the Cincinnatus, the Children of Niobe, the Laocoön, the Dying Gladiator, the Spinario, and the Hermaphrodite.64 The collection also contained casts of many noted works of art that were no longer in Italy, among them pieces from the queen of Sweden’s collection in Madrid or the Germanicus at Versailles. Indeed, as Haskell and Penny have pointed out, the popularity of the Germanicus was maintained largely because of the presence of the plaster cast in the French Academy in Rome.65 Ironically, many collectors may never have seen the original of some of the works for which they requested copies; this includes Malton, who had not been to Madrid and would thus not have seen the queen of Sweden’s Faun in the Prado. In addition to the Roman sculptors who capitalized on the taste for copies and casts, the English and Anglo-Irish hired Brettingham the younger, Vierpyl, and Harwood, who were in Rome while Wilton controlled much of the English and Anglo-Irish market in Florence after he moved there in 1751. Along with the emphasis on the lithe, elegant, and graceful, the design of the room in which the sculptures were to be installed and the overall decorative effect that was to be achieved were also factors in the choice of works. In the Great Hall at Wentworth Woodhouse, for example, the sculptures were to be set in niches. Therefore, works such as the Leda and the Swan or the Venus Pulling a Thorn from Her Foot were inappropriate.66 Height was an issue too. Mann emphasized this point when laying out the choices for Lyttelton, and Malton set aside the first four copies he had bought in Florence in favour of eight that were uniform in size.67 The size of the copies could also be adjusted to fit the decorative scheme, as was done in the case of the

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figure 2.10 | Main stair, Wentworth Woodhouse, completed before 1782.

Apollino for Lord Northumberland at Syon House.68 In this sense, as part of the visual program, no one sculpture functioned independently of the others; each was a constituent part of the whole. As obvious copies, it also did not matter that there might be more than one copy of the same sculpture. Thus, the visitor was not put off by encountering the Venus de’Medici and the Dancing Faun in both the Pillar’d Hall and the Great Hall at Wentworth Woodhouse or, more obvious yet, two copies of the Dying Gaul facing each other at the base of the grand stair in the Pillar’d Hall (Fig. 2.10).69 This latter configuration contributed to the visual progression from the low-ceilinged hall past the Foggini Samson to the stairwell flushed with light from above. The quality of the cast or copy was of concern and this is why Malton and Lord Leicester, for example, were reticent to acquire plaster casts. Lord Lyttelton, however, did not have a problem with plaster casts, as long as they were well done. Malton also almost did not accept Cavaceppi’s marble copy of the Capitoline Antinous because he heard, after he had returned to England and before it had been shipped, that it was not well done and the marble

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was poor. There was a significant black stain on the front of one of its thighs, precisely what the 1st marquis had specifically wanted to avoid. Cavaceppi, no doubt anxious about the prospect of losing such a promising patron, persuaded Cardinal Albani and Horace Mann to write to Malton to assure him that no one could have made a more beautiful statue, that it was nearly impossible to get perfect unblemished marble from Carrara, and that his work was being maligned by his rivals.70

M

alton returned to England in the autumn of 1750 and in December of that year acceded to the title of 2nd marquis and to his estates. He would continue to act according to his social station and accepted the positions and patronage that came with the title. He was quickly elected to the Royal Society (1751), the Society of Antiquaries (1752), the Society of Dilettani (1755), and White’s, the premier gentleman’s club (sometime in the 1750s).71 He was also an early member (1757) of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, which he referred to as that “Virtuoso Tribe of Arts and Sciences.”72 He continued to buy, now with impunity, as rich coal seams on the Wentworth Woodhouse estate augmented his fortunes.73 He acquired another Guercino, the Hagar, Ishmael and the Angel, in early 1751, presumably the conclusion of a purchase he had started while on his grand tour, perhaps with the assistance of Cocchi.74 The subject of the piece is redolent of Cocchi’s Masonic interests once again, in the recognition of Ishmael’s issue being the true first-born sons of Abraham, rather than those of Isaac.75 The inventory of Wentworth Woodhouse and Rockingham’s house in Grosvenor Square, compiled shortly after his death in 1782, lists many more copies and casts after antique sculpture as well as contemporary all’antica busts and sculptures, Renaissance bronzes, and original antiques. Rockingham’s predilection for Giambologna was further satisfied with bronze statuettes of Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabines and Hercules and Antaeus and he ended up with several Ganymedes, Apollos, Floras, more than one Silenus, as well as numerous Venuses, Centaurs, Ariadnes, Psyches, nymphs, cupids, and satyrs.76 The emphasis continued to be on the elegantly beautiful. Rockingham acquired the sculpture in his collections from a range of individuals. He continued to buy from Joseph Wilton after Wilton had returned to London in 1755, including a marble copy of the bust of the Dying Alexander and another of one of the sons of the Laocoön, notably not the head of the father, the expression on which was a matter of contemporary aesthetic and moral discussion (see chapter 3).77 He procured a bronze statuette of Venus from Richard Hayward and the painter John Shackleton

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supplied him with two marble copies of antique busts made by the Flemish sculptor Pieter Anton von Verschaffelt, whom Rockingham may have met in Rome or in London where the artist settled briefly before being appointed court sculptor to Charles Theodore, Elector Palatine in Mannheim.78 James “Athenian” Stuart, who acted as a decorative consultant for the marquis in the 1760s, designed several all’antica chimney pieces and supplied him with four candlesticks, a terracotta vase, and a much restored antique marble of Silenus upon a Goat.79 Occasionally, Rockingham also bought from other English collectors. He purchased an original Antinous from Dr Richard Mead’s sale in 1755 for 230 guineas – Walpole caustically referred to it as “the dearest bust that, I believe, was ever sold, yet the nose and chin were repaired, and very ill”80 – and he acquired several pieces from the antiquarian Lyde Browne, some of them through Wilton.81 Rockingham seems not to have dealt with either Thomas Jenkins or Gavin Hamilton to any extent, even after they became dealers par excellence in the 1760s. By then he seems to have somewhat slowed down his acquisition of sculpture, with much of the collection still in packing cases awaiting the completion of the house. He may also have been put off by Jenkins’s opportunistic swindling of Rockingham’s fellow Yorkshireman and acolyte, William Weddell of Newby Hall, to whom Jenkins had passed off as a complete original the pastiche he called the Barberini Venus, charging Weddell the exorbitant amount of 1,000 guineas.82 Furthermore, unlike many collectors who would buy en bloc from Hamilton and Jenkins, Rockingham was, like other collectors of his generation, far more discerning and deeply involved in his acquisitions.83 Several of the pieces that Rockingham acquired were made of a “stone composition,”84 an artificial stone developed by George Davy and Daniel Pincot, the forerunners of Mrs Coade’s manufactory.85 One bill alone lists sixty-two statues, busts, vases, and reliefs in artificial stone, and another bill survives, with an accompanying plea for payment by the financially ruined Davy, for an oval medallion of part of a Grecian wedding and four other medallions of Alexander and Hercules.86 Rockingham’s interest in artificial stone is consistent with his interests in other base materials; he also owned, in addition to his collection of medals and gems, “transparent marble vases” (probably Volterra alabaster), flowers made from Bristol glass, and vases and obelisks of Derbyshire fluorspar.87 This, in turn, parallels his keen interest in geology generally, including methods of coal extraction and soil study, all of which were intrinsically connected to the continued financial success of his estates.88 Besides the Great Hall, several of the sculptures were arrayed around drawing rooms, dressing rooms, and bedchambers. In this regard, the display

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was consistent with that of the sculpture placed in mansions earlier in the century. However, in the emphasis on the aesthetic and the reification of a particular canon, there was a temporal rupture with the classical past, in contrast to the earlier collections. For, in order to arrive at a canon – the “best of ” – there must be at least an implicit recognition of a civilization discrete from one’s own. Rather than communing with the great personalities of Greece and Rome, embodied as they were in the busts arrayed around the houses of the early-eighteenth-century collectors, the mid-century collectors presented themselves amidst and against the backdrop of a classical aesthetic ideal in their classical Palladian mansions. The recognition and articulation of an aesthetic canon professed the intertwined notions of inspiration and emulation, both of which depend upon an acknowledgment of the source as from a time and place distinct from the here and now, a true palimpsest of classicism. The majority of the remaining sculptures at Wentworth Woodhouse – nearly ninety – were intended by Rockingham to be installed in a museum within the house. The museum had yet to be built at the time of Rockingham’s death in 1782 – many of the pieces were still in packing cases89 – yet it seems he had the idea for a museum sometime before 1774. In that year Sir James Wright, who had just completed his term as British resident in Venice, gave Rockingham several casts, a bronze Fortune by Sansovino, and a marble head of Pallas, asking him to “place these little marks of gratitude in your museum.”90 The idea of a museum is fundamentally different from incorporating sculpture into a pre-existing decorative program. Gathered together in a dedicated room and not meant to function as embellishment, each object would have been the subject of intense study in its own right. Such a concept is a development on earlier antiquarian passions and consistent with the ethos of the contemporaneous Society of Dilettanti, which had matured from a gathering of libertines to one of serious erudite study.91 Thus, in planning to create a museum, Rockingham was keeping up with the latest development in aesthetic connoisseurship, which was, in turn, consistent with the natural evolution of the appreciation of the aesthetic. His museum coincides exactly with the collections of original antique sculpture amassed by Charles Townley, Henry Blundell, William Weddell, and the Earl of Shelburne. While several pieces, particularly those in Blundell’s, Weddell’s and Shelburne’s collections, continued to form part of the decorative program, the emphasis in these collections, and in Townley’s most particularly, was less on a holistic display than on drawing attention to the object itself. In other words, visitors were invited to marvel at these material remnants of

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antiquity in a museum-like setting. Displaying them in such a fashion made the temporal divide between the present and classical past even more emphatic. Moreover, the novelty of the newly discovered further intensified the temporal divide. In terms of refracting back on the owners, these later collections of authentic originals articulated the owners’ sophisticated erudition but did not necessarily effect for the visitor a drive toward emulation. As Viccy Coltman’s study suggests, the later collections were not as tightly bound up with exemplum, a factor of the growing split between connoisseurship and pursuit of civic or political office.92 In contrast, Rockingham’s museum of primarily copies and casts, with some originals, sits on the tipping point between these two eras of collecting. Rockingham’s plan for a museum and attitude toward collecting sculpture was consistent with his collecting philosophy vis-à-vis medals, coins, gems, and pastes.93 His numismatic collection derived primarily from two sources. He acquired the Museo dei Cortosini collection in 1748, one of his earliest purchases on his grand tour. The other he acquired much later, in 1774. This was the collection of Giovanni Battista Visconti, superintendent of the Museo Pio-Clementium at the Vatican and member of the Commissarii della Antichità in Rome.94 For this Rockingham used James Byres as his agent. Roman Catholic and the son of confirmed Jacobites, Byres was based in Rome and was widely acknowledged for his antiquarian knowledge; evidently Rockingham’s lust for collecting transcended his religious and political ideologies.95 Other coins and medals were acquired through trade with other numismatists or as they came to the attention of Rockingham or Byres.96 Much of the correspondence about the Visconti medals survives and gives a fair idea of Rockingham’s very personal involvement in the acquisitions.97 The marquis was confident in his antiquarian knowledge and proud of his collection. He was anxious to have excellent examples and was concerned with the authenticity of the coin, reserving the option of returning any coins to Visconti that he thought fraudulent. He was also concerned with the coin’s state of preservation.98 Byres, recognizing Rockingham’s discernment and the difficulties in describing the state of coins in writing, had plaster casts taken of 320 of Visconti’s best medals and sent them to Rockingham for his inspection.99 When Rockingham received the casts several months later, he was so taken with their likeness to the original – they were coloured with sulphur and oil to imitate the patina of the old coins – that he requested Byres to tell him the process by which they were made and asked him to investigate the possibility of having casts made in the same manner of some of the coins in “the Pope’s collection in the Vatican or in any other collections

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figure 2.11 |

Fitzwilliam Cabinet, Florentine pietra dura cabinet, probably early eighteenth century, adapted as a coin cabinet and supplied with a stand, c. 1770.

in Rome, from whence there is no probability of ever getting any of the real medals.”100 He told Byres to use the copy he had sent him of John Vaillant’s Numismata Imperatorum Romanorum praestentiora a Julio Caesare ad Postumum et Tyrannos (published in Paris in 1692) as his guide for the rare heads and rare reverses for which he wanted casts made.101 Rockingham was anxious to have complete sets and that would include canonical examples, even if it meant acquiring casts and copies. Byres, by contrast, who like many collectors began their collections in the 1760s or later, clearly disparaged the cast or copy, warning Rockingham that no reproduction would ever be as

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good.102 Byres obviously collected for different reasons. Rockingham’s interest in medals also extended to contemporary examples. He acquired several medals from “Athenian” Stuart that celebrated British victories in the Seven Years’ War.103 Here again the classical past informed the present. The medals, gems, and pastes were stored in two Florentine pietra dura cabinets that Rockingham had specially converted and suitably located in the intimate and studious realm of the library (Fig. 2.11).104 Medal and gem collecting is a very personal act and the viewing of them is a privileged honour, reserved usually for only fellow enthusiasts. Engaging in such activities was usually a measure of that person’s erudition.105 The study of medals, as Addison had stated early in the century, “recommends” a man “to the world [as] a person of various reading and profound erudition.”106 Rockingham proudly claimed that his “collection of Great Brass [medallions] is indeed acknowledged to be the finest in Europe.”107 In this light, he could also place himself in line with some of the most erudite Whig grandees of the previous generations, namely such famous numismatists as the 8th and 9th earls of Pembroke and fellow northern peers, the 3rd Earl of Carlisle and the 4th Duke of Devonshire.108 Set within the architecture and landscape of Wentworth Woodhouse, the medals, coins, gems, pastes, sculptures, paintings, telescopes, and other objects that constituted Rockingham’s virtù function as exemplum, and, as such, are also intertwined with his Whiggish perception of his place in the world. Like his father before him, he would not demure from unabashedly proclaiming his Whiggery. In 1755, when his active political involvement was still limited to regional country affairs and before he became disenchanted with the Hanoverian court, he installed paintings of William III and George II, both by “Athenian” Stuart, at Wentworth Woodhouse.109 A decade later, within two months of becoming prime minister, he commissioned Joshua Reynolds to paint a double portrait of himself and his private secretary, Edmund Burke (Fig. 2.12). The portrait was modelled on Van Dyck’s portrait of the 1st Earl of Strafford (1st creation) and his secretary, Sir Philip Mainwaring, considered to be the finest painting in the Wentworth Woodhouse collection. Reynolds’s portrait was to be a pendant. However, it was never finished, perhaps because Rockingham’s first ministry was so short-lived.110 Nevertheless, Rockingham was asserting himself visually and legitimizing his position through his family’s legacy. As the relationship between George III and Rockingham became increasingly acrimonious over the course of the 1760s and into the 1770s, and as Rockingham firmed up the creed of his Old Whig party, Wentworth Woodhouse became more and more invested with political resonance. George III,

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figure 2.12 | Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lord Rockingham and Edmund Burke, c. 1766.

for his part, had been nurtured on his father’s schemes at Carlton House and Kew, and was further groomed by the Dowager Princess of Wales and Lord Bute. Thus, he too was acutely aware of what was now becoming the indissoluble nature of politics and aesthetic preferences. Accordingly, for Rockingham, the young king presented a challenge. He had come to the throne as an eager patron of the arts and intent on making his mark. His extraordinary new state coach, designed by William Chambers, one of the new young breed of British classicists, brashly brought the new king into the public eye. The king was also keenly interested in building. In 1762 he bought Buckingham House to serve as a private retreat for his family away from St James’s Palace, and he entertained the idea of building a new palace at Richmond Park, with designs by Chambers.111 British artists and architects, meanwhile, from the aging Hogarth to the up-and-coming classicists, were ecstatic at the prospect of potential significant royal patronage, as Hogarth’s famous

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figure 2.13 |

Charles Grignion after William Hogarth, frontispiece to A Catalogue of the Pictures … Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1761.

frontispiece for the catalogue of the 1761 Society of Artists of Great Britain exhibition recounts (Fig. 2.13). The king also collected on a vast and varied scale. He soon outstripped any contemporaneous British collector in terms of paintings, sculpture, drawings, books, furniture, clocks, barometers, ceramics, gilt, silver, snuffboxes, cameos, intaglios, jewels, medals, textiles, and fans.112 Furthermore, the king expressed great interest in agriculture, earning the sobriquet “Farmer George.” In short, the king was out-Whigging a Whig grandee. When Rockingham resigned in July 1766, a result of internal strife in his embryonic party that would ultimately benefit the king, he regrouped at Wentworth Woodhouse, the natural lair of the landed aristocracy. At that

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figure 2.14 | John Carr, stable block, Wentworth Woodhouse, c. 1766.

point he built the stables, designed by the Yorkshire architect John Carr (Fig. 2.14). They emulate the east front of the house in scale and massive profile.113 Horses and horsemanship were a natural defining characteristic of the landed aristocracy which Rockingham and, as we shall see in the next chapter, the Duke of Richmond wholeheartedly embraced. They entwined equestrianism with the idea of exemplum that would, in the factious strife and political rivalry between the landed aristocracy and George III in the 1760s, take on political import.114 Passionate about his stud, Rockingham was an illustrious member of the Jockey Club, joining soon after he returned from his grand tour.115 Beginning in 1759, he hired George Stubbs to execute a number of portraits of his favourite horses, presumably introduced to Stubbs by Richmond. Of the many paintings that Stubbs made for the marquis, his portrait of Whistlejacket was the most impressive. The near life-size painting of the rearing horse has the force, as Judy Egerton has observed, of one of Rockingham’s great sculptures (Fig. 2.15).116 Rockingham had re-

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figure 2.15 |

George Stubbs, Whistlejacket, c. 1762.

quested that Stubbs leave the background unfinished, which has the curious effect of enhancing the three-dimensional illusion of the horse. (This was also done in a much smaller canvas in which Whistlejacket and two of Rockingham’s other Arabian stallions are posed more conventionally with John Cobb, the marquis’s head groom.)117 The large portrait of Whistlejacket is further analogous to many of Rockingham’s sculptures in that the stallion was acknowledged as a perfect example of the Arabian breed; lacking reins, saddle and bridle, the horse could be admired for his ideal colour and proportion. The portrait hung in one of the formal dining rooms that also contained an equestrian portrait of George II that the 1st Marquis of Rockingham had commissioned from John Shackleton. This pairing may have given rise to Horace Walpole’s apocryphal tale that Whistlejacket is unfinished and the horse was to have carried George III but when Rockingham was relegated to opposition he cancelled the portrait of the king.118 But the portrait of George II by Shackleton is comparatively smaller and lacks the presence of Stubbs’s Whistlejacket, which, in contrast, dominates the white and gilded

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figure 2.16 | Whistle Jacket room, Wentworth Woodhouse.

room (Fig. 2.16). The painting was ultimately inserted into a white plasterwork frame after Rockingham’s death, according to his wishes.119 The portrayal of Whistlejacket, rearing up in controlled restraint while also exhibiting ideal proportions, is, like Rockingham’s taste in sculpture, informed by classical precedence. Whistlejacket rears in a manner very similar to that of Bernini’s horse, with Constantine as the rider, at the Vatican. Indeed, just as the Venus de’Medici or the Apollo Belvedere were admired as ideal examples of the human race, Bernini’s horse, like Whistlejacket, is a magnificent example of equine anatomy, something that would have ap-

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pealed to the horsey young peer on his grand tour. The lack of tack (reins, bridle, and saddle) is another similarity the two horses share. It is worth investigating at this point the resonance between Rockingham’s aesthetic sensibility and Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which was published in 1757, eight years before Burke became Rockingham’s private secretary. Stubbs’s Whistlejacket is sublime in a Burkean sense in its magnitude and rearing pose. Similarly, the stables, notably the first significant project at Wentworth Woodhouse that Rockingham built independently of his father, fulfilled many of Burke’s precepts for the sublime: vastness, infinity, uniformity, and magnitude in building, evoked in their severe classicism in the Tuscan portico, shallow blind arcade, heavy quoining, and emphatic attic blocks. With respect to Rockingham’s sculpture collection and the portrait of Whistlejacket, they both evoke awe as examples of the ideal sublime, not the sublime of muscular swaggering manliness but rather one, as Chloe Chard has characterized, of “smooth-limbed grace” and “god-like majesty.”120 Collectively, Rockingham’s activities give form to the notion of the “landed sublime,” the visual evocation of the power of exemplum that was at the root of the natural aristocracy’s right to lead. Stridently expressed in Burke’s later writings – Observations on the Late State of the Nation (1769), Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), and Reflections on the French Revolution (1790) – it is latently articulated in the Philosophical Inquiry.121 How much Burke’s ideas were informed by Rockingham will necessarily remain a matter of speculation, but, as Douglas Fordham has indicated, it is a question that has been hitherto ignored.122 In 2010 Fordham published a penetrating analysis of George Stubbs’s Lion Attacking a Horse and Lion Attacking a Stag that Rockingham had commissioned and that originally hung in the Green Room, the primary large public room of Rockingham’s London house in Grosvenor Square. Obviously violent and evoking terror, the paintings sit much further along the continuum of the Burkean sublime than the ideal. Fordham effectively inscribes the paintings within Rockingham’s politicization of the natural aristocracy in the 1760s, demonstrating the significant role of animals in the natural ordering of society.123 In terms of my discussion, what must be underscored is that these two violent and gritty paintings resided in the London house rather than at Wentworth Woodhouse, thereby enunciating the two discrete yet corollary spheres which Rockingham inhabited and the similarly two discrete yet corollary dimensions of Rockinghamite politics. Wentworth Woodhouse, with its ideal perfection, was the embodiment of the natural aristocracy while the house in Grosvenor Square was the site of gritty

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figure 2.17 | Joseph Nollekens, Venus, 1773. figure 2.18 | Joseph Nollekens, Minerva, 1775.

political action and strategy. Furthermore, Wentworth Woodhouse was a repository of timelessness, reaching back to antiquity, informing the present and resonating bodily forth into the future. Grosvenor House, meanwhile, was more emphatically of the moment, the here and now. However, just to remind his London visitors that he was the sum of all his parts – of which Wentworth Woodhouse was paramount – the house in Grosvenor Square also contained a large number of drawing-room paintings of impressive quality and at least seventy-five classical statues and busts.124 The temporally discrete could also be found in some of the sculptures in Grosvenor House. In the early 1770s Rockingham commissioned Joseph Nollekens to execute three nearly life-size statues of Venus, Minerva, and Juno (Figs. 2.17, 2.18, and 2.19). These were meant to complement an antique

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figure 2.19 | Joseph Nollekens, Juno, 1776. figure 2.20 | Paris, probably 100–200 ce , restored before 1766.

statue, of the same size, of Paris that Rockingham had acquired from Lyde Browne sometime before 1768 (Fig. 2.20).125 Although the Paris was rather famous – Winckelmann in his Monumenti antichi inediti (1767) suggested it was a young priest rather than Paris – it was heavily restored with some obvious eighteenth-century additions, which may explain why Browne, whose palate was more archeologically pure than Rockingham’s, was willing to part with it.126 Rockingham accepted it as Paris, and Nollekens’s three statues were rendered in narrative dialogue with the figure at the pregnant point just prior to Paris judging which of the three goddesses is the most beautiful. As Nicholas Penny has pointed out, if Venus were positioned to the right of Paris and Minerva to his left, they would gaze directly at Paris while Juno would look away, consistent with her aloof attitude to the whole process.127

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At the time of Rockingham’s death, the four statues were displayed together, each on a mahogany pedestal, in a small formal rectangular room at the front of the house in Grosvenor Square.128 Seen in the context of his other sculptures, such a narrative dialogue was unusual for Rockingham. Perhaps the story of the Judgment of Paris can be interpreted as a sophisticated and obtuse commentary on what Rockingham and his allies saw as George III’s disruptive interference in the governing process and the king’s consistent relegation of the Rockinghamites to opposition. Paris/George III, the shepherd prince, falters in his judgment; he ignores Hera/Juno, the protectress of the state, and Athena/Minerva, goddess of wisdom and war, and is driven by lust to choose the beautiful Aphrodite/Venus, thereby triggering the Trojan War and the eventual decline of Greece/Rome. In the early 1770s, the fate of the new British empire teetered on the edge of similar destruction. Rockingham was not the only member of the opposition to tell the story of the Judgment of Paris. When Nollekens was carving his three statues for Rockingham, Gavin Hamilton proposed to decorate one of the rotundas of Lansdowne House (called Shelburne House until 1785), the London home of the 2nd Earl of Shelburne, with the story of Paris and Helen. Shelburne had been a part of the Rockinghamite fold in the 1760s and the lion that he kept at his suburban estate on Hounslow Heath – an extension of a much larger menagerie at his Bowood estate – likely provided Stubbs with an immediate source for the Grosvenor House paintings.129 Hamilton’s work at Lansdowne House was part of the transformation of Robert Adam’s original plans for the library, turning it into a gallery that would contain sixteen antique statues, twelve antique busts, and twelve antique bas-reliefs that Shelburne had commissioned Hamilton to buy.130 Shelburne, whose father acceded to the peerage only in 1760, was anxious to present himself as a landed aristocrat. Initially he employed Robert Adam at Lansdowne House but that relationship collapsed in 1771 when Shelburne vehemently opposed the Adam brothers’ pursuit of an act of Parliament to allow them to purchase a small bay off of the Thames to facilitate the construction of their Adelphi scheme. In that same year Shelburne’s wife died and Shelburne set off on a five-month Continental tour to assuage his grief. It was at this point that he met Hamilton and was caught up in the frenzy for archaeology. Although it would be decades before Hamilton’s acquisitions for Shelburne would be installed in a gallery – Shelburne vacillated between a library and a gallery, with a gallery ultimately being designed by Robert Smirke in 1815–19 for Shelburne’s heir – the aesthetic value of the collection was quickly acknowledged.131 Assembled at a time when his political interests ran parallel to those of the Rockinghamites, Shelburne’s collection was very much a com-

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figure 2.21 |

Joseph Nollekens, Diana, 1778.

ponent of his articulation of his place in English aristocratic society. He was only too happy to have Gavin Hamilton gather for him “a collection that will make Shelburne House famous not only in England but all over Europe.”132 However, not a man to entertain party, he soon diverged from Rockingham and forged his own rather more radical political path. Coltman has posited that Shelburne’s delay in building the gallery and installing the collection was also caused by his political ambitions.133 Nevertheless, at that brief moment in the early 1770s, there was a convergence between Rockingham and Shelburne of mutual political and aesthetic interests. By 1775 Rockingham had again hired Nollekens, this time to execute a statue of Diana (Fig. 2.21). The figure owes much to the running figures of

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the compagnes de Diane that were made for the gardens of Marly in the early years of the century, which, in turn, accompanied a bronze copy of the Diane chasseresse that was then at Versailles.134 The animated pose of Nollekens’s Diana, running forward while turning to pull at her bow, suggests that Rockingham had a very specific location in mind for the statue. In its twisting pose it also recalls Giambologna’s spiralling figures which Nollekens admired as much as Rockingham.135 At the time of Rockingham’s death in 1782, the statue still had a brace between its right forearm and left shoulder, implying that it had not reached its intended resting place. The statue may have been intended to join the Venus, Minerva, Juno, and Paris group, since Diana had also initially vied for Paris’s golden apple. In any case, the subject is entirely in keeping with a country house. Perhaps the Diana was meant for one of the many temples Rockingham was building at Wentworth Woodhouse or for the centre of a room dedicated to a rural theme, in the manner of the so-called Whistlejacket Room.136 When not engaged in political strategizing, Rockingham continued to plan, build, and landscape at Wentworth Woodhouse throughout the 1770s, at enormous expense. Sometime in the mid-1770s the Great Hall was finally finished, with the exception of the marble floor, which would not be installed until the mid-nineteenth century, according to the designs of the 2nd marquis. By 1770, the columns were in place, as were “Athenian” Stuart’s bas-relief panels of griffins and cornucopia above the niches that would soon receive the eight marble copies that Rockingham had commissioned so many years ago in Rome.137 The grand stair was also built in the 1770s. Flooded with light from above, the stair opened up at the end of the low ceilinged and comparatively dark Pillar’d Hall that contained Foggini’s Samson. The four white marble copies from Florence filled the peripheral views while two copies of the Dying Gaul bounded the base of the stair. In the centre of the landing of the stair, a seven-foot antique statue of Ariadne stood in a niche and beckoned visitors out of the labyrinth of the Pillar’d Hall below up into the light-filled Great Hall. Outside, the stables were still being built into the 1770s and Rockingham also laid out the main approach from Rotherham. On the secondary lower approach from Rotherham, he endeavoured to reduce part of a hill in order to improve the view of the house; as of 1770, this was not yet complete although by then 140,000 square yards of earth had been moved.138 Elsewhere on the estate he finished or built classical temples, a Chinese House, and several lodges for taking tea or supper. He also judiciously planted, moved hills, and filled valleys with water to improve the view.

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Many of Rockingham’s improvements were recounted by Arthur Young, inveterate traveller, keen observer of agricultural practice, and gatherer of statistics. He devoted seventy-one pages of his popular Six Months’ Tour through the North of England, published in 1770, to Wentworth Woodhouse.139 He was enthralled with the estate, describing the house and the park for twenty-six pages and dedicating the remainder to Rockingham’s advancements in husbandry and agriculture.140 He cited the fine architecture of the east front and declared the Great Hall “the finest room in England,”141 this even before the statues and the floor had been installed. In summing up his description of the house and park, he wrote: Upon the whole, Wentworth is in every respect one of the finest places in the kingdom: In some, the house is the object of curiosity; in others, a park is admired: The ornamental buildings give a reputation to one, and a general beauty of prospect to another – but all are united here: The house is one of the grandest in England, and the largest I have any where seen; the park is as noble a range of natural and artificial beauty as is any where to be beheld; the magnificence of the woods exceed all description; the temples, &c. are elegant pieces of architecture, and so admirably situated as to throw an uncommon lustre over every spot; and add to all this, the beauty of the surrounding country, which consists chiefly of cultivated hills, cut into inclosures, and well scattered with towns and villages, and you certainly will allow, that such circumstances cannot unite without forming a place at once great and beautiful. To this slight account, I cannot but add one remark, in praise of what I must be allowed to call true taste: Nature has certainly done much at Wentworth, but art has heightened, decorated, and improved all her touches; in such attempts, no slight genius is requisite: Valleys may be floated with water, hills crowned with woods, and temples appear in every scene; –– riches will do all these; the money of one man may purchase the taste of another: But all that Lord Rockingham has yet done at Wentworth, as well as the noble plans he has sketched, and begun to execute, are totally his own designs: An instance certainly of his taste, though not of his compliance with fashion.142 In the second edition of A Six Months’ Tour, Young concluded this description with a rebuttal to a critic who had challenged his description in the first edition, claiming that the house is “vilely and absurdly situated in a bleak

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clayey country, with a hill before the principal front, that cuts off every prospect.”143 Young countered by asserting that the soil was stony rather than “clayey,” that the countryside was a thick woodland rather than bleak, and that Rockingham was in the process of cutting away the hill that impeded the view of the house.144 Horace Walpole, who visited Wentworth Woodhouse at least twice, was not nearly so impressed. In 1756 he complained that the great front was almost blocked up with hills and that the young 2nd marquis was not intent on moving them since he “loves nothing but horses, and the enclosures for them take place of everything.” He found the park with its obelisks disagreeable; he told Richard Bentley that the “bowling-green behind the house contains no less than four obelisks, and looks like a Brobdignag ninepin-alley,” and, as for Hoober Stand, “on a hill near, you would think you saw the York Buildings waterworks invited into the country.” He was also dismayed with the unfinished state of both the house and park: “The park is traversed by a common road between two high hedges” and “the great apartment [the Great Hall], which is magnificent, is untouched: the chimney-pieces lie in boxes unopened … In the habited part of the house, the chimney-pieces are like tombs; and on that in the library is the figure of this Lord’s grandfather in a nightgown of plaster and gold. Amidst all this litter and bad taste, I adored the fine Vandyck of Lord Strafford and his secretary, and could not help reverencing his bedchamber. With all his faults and arbitrary behaviour one must worship his spirit and eloquence: where one esteems but a single royalist, one need not fear being too partial.”145 Many years later, when Walpole visited the estate again, he still found the house lacking in taste and commented that the Great Hall had yet to be finished.146 Walpole’s churlish remarks were clearly coloured by his great friendship with the 2nd Earl of Strafford, perpetuating the family rivalry that had peaked so many years before. In contrast to Wentworth Woodhouse, he wrote in 1756 that Wentworth Castle was “one of the very few that I really like,”147 and in 1772 he swooned over the new Palladian front that the 2nd earl had “entirely designed … himself,” writing that “nothing ever came up to the beauty of it. The Grace, proportion, lightness & magnificence of it are exquisite.”148 He also called it “one of the lightest and most beautiful buildings on earth.”149 In short, Wentworth Castle was everything that Wentworth Woodhouse was not.150 Whether admiring or critical, Young’s and Walpole’s accounts reinforce the presence of Wentworth Woodhouse. In its imposing magnitude, it paralleled Chatsworth and Castle Howard, the two other great stately homes of the north. This, combined with being owned by one of England’s most

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prominent and politically active peers, made it a “must-see” on the northern circuit of the English grand tour. Wentworth Woodhouse would, in turn, serve as inspiration to others. Contrary to Walpole’s grumblings about the lack of completion, the very fact that the house and park were still being built may have further spurred others on; they were not relics of times past but very much the opposite, a going concern of the active young marquis. Shelburne’s efforts at Bowood are a case in point, as are William Weddell’s efforts at nearby Newby Hall. Weddell, who had acquired an immense fortune from his father at the age of twenty-six in 1762, was intent on carrying out the rebuilding of Newby Hall which his father had bought in 1748. In 1764 and 1765 he was in Italy, buying at an astonishing rate. He dealt almost exclusively with Thomas Jenkins and shipped home twelve cases of marbles and eighty-six paintings. The marbles were all supposed originals, although the much patched together Barberini Venus indicated otherwise. Back in Yorkshire, Weddell had Robert Adam design a gallery for the sculptures, based upon Adam’s drawings from Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli and some of the catacombs in Rome. At the same time, Weddell pursued a political career, becoming a loyal Rockinghamite. The friendship between the two men flourished, with Rockingham very much as the mentor, and Lady Rockingham took it upon herself to matchmake Weddell with her half-sister, Elizabeth Ramsden. Weddell’s gallery and sculpture collection was au courant for the 1760s and displayed in Adam style but Wentworth Woodhouse was the inspiration and immediate precedent.151 Not too far away was Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, built by Nathaniel Curzon in the 1760s. It too was largely designed by Adam, the centrepiece being an immense hall and saloon modelled on the Roman Pantheon. The design is much indebted to Holkham Hall, with the emphasis on the creation of a rural idyll that exemplified genuine taste. But, in contrast to the elaborate narratives that Leicester had generated at Holkham, Curzon embellished Kedleston with examples of the aesthetic canon inserted in the niches of the rooms.152 Significantly, Henry Fuseli’s 1765 translation of Winckelmann’s Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks) was dedicated to Curzon (by then Baron Scarsdale).153 In contrast to Rockingham, Curzon was a Tory and his efforts at Kedleston have been evaluated by Mark Girouard and Peter da Bolla as a Tory riposte to nearby Chatsworth.154 Thus, in the factious political environment of the 1760s, the Tory voice could once again be heard and, remarkably, the Tory landed peer also had recourse to the conservative exemplum of the country house, the ideal lair of the natural aristocracy of all political stripes.

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as the 2nd Marquis of Rockingham anachronistic? The answer is no, for Rockingham was an Old Whig. As in politics, his aesthetic preferences were rooted in an earlier generation, but that grounding provided a framework for moving into the future. In describing Rockingham’s mature politics of the 1770s, John Brewer calls the Rockinghamite Whigs “Janus-faced”: they believed the way forward, and the way to counter the king’s imposing will, was through party. The notion of party derived from the first half of the eighteenth century: Whig, Tory, Court Whigs, Opposition Whigs, Country Party, and even the Pelham-Newcastle Broad Bottom coalition. But the Rockinghamite conception of party was far more defined and thus more modern, with an articulated if rudimentary creed backed up by the determination to ensure party hegemony within the governing ministry.155 In Rockingham’s case, that ruling party consisted naturally of members of the landed aristocracy. A sense of continuity combined with a decided component of evolution was the key. Rockingham’s aesthetic preferences were utterly intertwined with and cannot be separated from his political ideology, which, in turn, informed his perception of the natural ordering of society. Wentworth Woodhouse was display on the level of the old order: he continued to build his father’s house with a great suite of staterooms and drawing rooms enfilade, on a par with Castle Howard and Chatsworth.156 He chose not to tear down his father’s work and replace it with the latest fashion for a much smaller state apartment with one or two staterooms and no drawing rooms. Indeed, in this respect, Wentworth Woodhouse was anachronistic, more in line with the older Baroque mansions than even Houghton and Holkham, which were both important forerunners of the smaller, less overwhelmingly formal houses of the 1750s and 1760s, such as Kedleston.157 As Arthur Young stated, Rockingham had taste – and here taste embraced continuity – and was above mere fashion.158 Rockingham’s decorative embellishments of Wentworth Woodhouse reinforce the display. However, in contrast to the narrative dialogues that filled the entrance halls of earlier country houses such as Chiswick, Houghton, and Holkham, Rockingham had a predilection for aesthetic works of classical antiquity. In this he was very much of his time, after the end of the War of the Austrian Succession and before the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War and the near contemporaneous lifting of restrictions on the exportation of recently excavated antiquities. Collecting aesthetically significant works at mid-century positioned Rockingham as a man of taste and virtue. Yet, at the same time, by celebrating the aesthetic and stepping back and recognizing these pieces as the best of Greece and Rome, he was also acknowledging a

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figure 2.22 | John Carr, Keppel’s Column, Wentworth Woodhouse, 1776–81.

temporal distance between the ancient civilizations and his own time. His collection as a whole, dispersed throughout the rooms of his houses, was representative of the greatness of classical antiquity and was permeated with a belief that he, and his England, were capable of attaining the same greatness. Authenticity, in terms of owning originals, did not drive Rockingham’s decorative program. Instead, he acknowledged the past as the past and that past propelled his present into the future. In short, he engaged with the classics in a diachronic fashion.159 In what would be Rockingham’s last major commission before his premature death at the age of fifty-two, he hired John Carr in 1779 to erect an immense Tuscan column in the landscape at Wentworth Woodhouse, dedicated to his friend, loyal Rockinghamite, and fellow landed peer Admiral Viscount Augustus Keppel (Fig. 2.22). Keppel had just been acquitted at a court martial on charges of treason and incompetence brought forward by Sir Hugh Palliser, Keppel’s second-in-command in the indecisive Battle of Ushant in the previous year. The Rockinghamites, always suspicious of political subterfuge, thought that Palliser had been advised to lay charges by Lord Sandwich, first lord of the admiralty in Lord North’s administration. (Keppel had refused to serve against the American colonists on the pretext that war in America opened Britain up to attack by the French, so he had little choice

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but to take up the command of the Channel fleet under his political rival.) Keppel’s trial consumed a nation already edgy after nearly a decade of fractious political instability and beset by the maelstrom of the American rebellion. The popular press stirred the pot. When inconsistencies in Palliser’s case, such as missing logbook entries, were revealed, the press and much of the nation rallied behind Keppel; and when the charges were thrown out, celebrations ensued on a scale not seen since the Seven Years’ War. Throughout this saga, the opposition was careful to compare Keppel to Wolfe and Pitt and the nostalgia-soaked heady days of victory and empire building. Rockingham and party members had rallied behind Keppel at the trial at Portsmouth and three days before the verdict was declared Rockingham ordered preparations for a celebration at Wentworth Woodhouse. However, the celebration exceeded the Rockinghams’ bounds of propriety; an effigy of Palliser was burnt and Lady Rockingham complained in her private correspondence that this “was not proper at ones own House, because foolish people might think it was done by order.”160 The vulgarity of the mob parades and rampages in London as well as in many other cities and villages throughout the country was also utterly alien to the aristocratic Whigs.161 Rockingham’s great column at Wentworth Woodhouse was more in keeping with the Old Whig mind.162 Designed to be 186 feet high and meant to be topped with a statue of Keppel (Rockingham’s heir finished it at 136 feet and with no statue), the column was a bombastic display of Rockinghamite Whiggery, equal to Hoober Stand, his father’s Court Whig/anti-Jacobite invective on the opposite side of the park. Yet, as a monument and thus invested with timelessness and memorial, it did not descend into the vulgarity of the present, although of course it was also aimed at a contemporary audience. Lord North would hang onto power for another three years before Rockingham formed a government in 1782 at the helm of a coalition of former political rivals. He was poised to implement the platform his party had formulated in opposition. However, already in poor health, Rockingham was dead by July of that year. The mausoleum that his heir and nephew, Earl Fitzwilliam, built at Wentworth Woodhouse, also by John Carr, is filled with Rockingham’s statue and busts of his allies.163 It is a fitting tribute to a man who made party a modern effective political tool. The Duke of Bedford’s Temple of Liberty (designed 1801), positioned at the end of his gallery of classical antiquities at Woburn Abbey and filled with Nollekens’s busts of Charles James Fox and his political friends, would be the next instalment.

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3

The 3rd duke of richmond and His sculpture gallery in whitehall: munificence worthy of a prince We hear that His Grace the Duke of Richmond has ordered a Room at Whitehall to be opened (for the Use of those who study Painting, Sculpture, and Engraving) in which is contained a large Collection of original Plaister Casts from the best Antique Statues and Busts now at Rome and Florence: Where any Painter, Sculptor, Carver, or other Artist, to whom the Study of these Gesses may be of Use, will have Liberty to draw, or model, at any Time; and upon Application to the Person that has the Care of them, any particular Figure shall be placed in such Light as the Artist shall desire. And any young Man or Boy, above the Age of twelve Years, may also have the same Liberty, by a Recommendation from any known Artist. On Saturdays Mess. Wilton and Cipriani are to attend to see what Progress each has made, to correct their Drawings and Models, and give them such Instructions as shall be thought necessary. There will be given at Christmas and Midsummer annually to those who distinguish themselves by making the greatest Progress the following Premiums. A Figure will be selected from the rest, and a large Silver Medal will be given for the best Design of it, and another for the best Model in Basso Relievo. A small Silver Medal for the second best Design, and one for the second best Basso Relievo. The Servant who takes Care of the Room has strict Orders not to receive any Money.1

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harles Lennox, the 3rd Duke of Richmond, advertised his gallery of plaster casts in the London Chronicle, the Daily Advertiser, and the Gentlemen’s Magazine in late February 1758. In contrast to Lord Rockingham, his fellow Whig peer and later political ally who had installed most of his sculpture collection in his house in the depths of Yorkshire,

Richmond concentrated his collection in a purpose-built wing in Richmond House in Privy Garden, Whitehall. The wing, designed by William Chambers, was a long narrow room about 40 by 15 feet with a niche on one of the long walls.2 The collection was meant to be used by young English artists in training. Thus, Richmond’s was a collection of classical specimens that was also a practical working academy. The artists and men of taste were ecstatic about the duke’s initiative; finally England would have, as Horace Walpole boasted in the preface to the first volume of his Anecdotes of Painting, “a school of statuary in the house of a young nobleman of the first rank [that] rivals the boasted munificence of foreign princes.”3 This chapter assesses the collection as a dimension of Richmond’s civic virtue. Like the Marquis of Rockingham’s, Richmond’s collection demonstrated exemplum although, in contrast to Rockingham’s, it functioned in a much more active way, as a didactic tool to inculcate a classical aesthetic in young British artists. The locations of the two collections are telling: Rockingham’s at his country seat, which had been built by his father (reflecting his preoccupation with fending off challenges to his legitimacy to his titles and expiating his ancestor’s actions) and which the younger Rockingham would fashion into his political powerbase; and Richmond’s in his London home, an anchor of the bon ton of London society. The chapter will also examine the contents of Richmond’s collection and in so doing will further articulate the preference for the graceful and the beautiful at the middle of the century.

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wo eighteenth-century published accounts – one written in 1770 by the artist Edward Edwards and the other, dating to 1782, by Robert Dossie, the apothecary and early historian of the Society of Arts – describe in detail the contents and arrangement of the sculptures in the Duke of Richmond’s gallery.4 Two drawings for the ceiling of the gallery are also extant.5 As far as the contents are concerned, the two written accounts are nearly identical, although they were recorded a dozen years apart, suggesting that the collection remained relatively static. Casts of twenty-four free-standing statues were arranged around the room; a dozen busts were supported on brackets on the walls; some smaller busts and bas-reliefs embellished the chimney mantle; and casts of noted hands and feet from a few statues were placed on tables. Affixed to the wall behind the entrance were 105 casts of Trajan’s Column.6 The majority of the casts of free-standing statues were after Greek and Hellenistic originals or after Roman works in a Grecian style, all of which were highly revered examples of the ideal: the Venus de’Medici, the Dancing

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Faun, the Wrestlers, the Borghese Gladiator, the Dying Gladiator, the Cupid and Psyche, the Antonious and the Flora from the Capitoline, the Meleager, the Idol, the Paetus and Arria from the Villa Ludovisi, and several more. Edwards’s list indicates that the initial collection of busts was almost exclusively Grecian and included busts of Alexander (presumably the Dying Alexander from the Uffizi), Ariadne, Juno, and Seneca.7 Sometime in the 1770s several busts of Roman emperors were added, along with a cast of the Discobolus, owned by the acknowledged aesthete William Lock.8 The collection also contained casts of Renaissance sculptures considered equal to the work of the ancients, including the Bacchus by Michelangelo, the Ganymede and the Bacchus by Sansovino, and the heads from Giambologna’s free-standing Rape of the Sabines and a cast of his relief of the same subject, as well as Ghiberti’s Bacchanalian Triumph. There was also a cast of François Duquesnoy’s Santa Susanna from the Church of Santa Maria in Loreto, Rome. Casts of exceptional examples of hands and feet were also included so that artists could focus on these critical body parts. In addition to casts of the feet of Michelangelo’s David, there were casts of the hands of Bernini’s figures of Charity and Fortitude from the tomb of Pope Urban VIII and of the hands of the colossal silver statue of St. Ignatius by Legros at the Il Gesù.9 Notably, consistent with the distaste for Baroque theatrical display and effervescent drapery, Bernini and Legros were represented only by these hands. The benchmark for the collection was the Apollo Belvedere, of which there were two versions: a plaster cast inside the gallery situated between the Santa Susanna and the Paetus and Arria, and a full-size marble copy by Wilton located in a recess at the entrance to the gallery (Fig. 3.1).10 Never before in England had such a comprehensive collection of classical sculptures been gathered under the auspices of one nobleman or the state for the benefit of artists. The lack of a crown- or government-sponsored academy of art in England had as much to do with politics and anti-Gallican sentiment as with anything else; the spectre of monarchical absolutism as evinced in the king’s interference in the arts and sciences in France was too much for the liberty-loving English to contemplate. However, the lack of any formal institution dedicated to the education of artists in England had the effect of preventing most English artists from gaining an education beyond one of mechanical dexterity. In comparison to their Continental counterparts, the English artists were woefully lacking in their knowledge of the classics and history, philosophy, anatomy, and perspective. The consequence was that the more erudite patrons in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries looked to the Continent for artists to carry out their commissions. As the taste for the classical took hold and percolated down to a much wider

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patronage base in the eighteenth century, English artists were definitely at a disadvantage. William Hogarth, with his suspicions of European academies and the primacy of the classical, was proving to be an increasingly lone voice in the face of the growing hegemony of the classical goût.11 Yet Hogarth did recognize the benefits of artists coming together in at least an informal academy-like atmosphere to increase their profile. In this respect, a number of artist-run spaces had been established in the first half of the eighteenth century. Among the more successful were Godfrey Kneller’s academy in Great Queen Street (active from 1711 to about 1720); and the academy run by James Thornhill, Hogarth’s father-in-law, active from 1724 and which ran first in parallel to and then evolved into the St Martin’s Lane Academy, of which Hogarth was a key member.12 In general terms, the various venues offered a meeting place, an opportunity to draw after the model, and access to a moderate selection of plaster casts after the antique. The latter had been purchased by the artists. Some artists also had access to the noted collection of the physician and antiquarian Dr Richard Mead.13 Yet these ventures had trouble moving forward; they languished in need of the financial stability and social prestige that could be provided by a noble or royal patron. To this end, artists agitated for a crown- or government-sponsored institution with increasing frequency, especially in the 1740s as the formation of groups and societies, and gentlemanly philanthropy, became de rigueur. The most cogent of these was John Gwynn, who published in 1749 An Essay on Design: Including Proposals for Erecting a Public Academy to Be Supported by Voluntary Subscription (Till a Royal Foundation can Be Obtain’d) for Educating the British Youth in Drawing, and the Several Arts Depending Thereon.14 The artists had pinned their hopes on Frederick, Prince of Wales. In contrast to his father and grandfather before him, Frederick actively patronized English artists, as we have seen, and a phalanx of artists had gathered about him. To a certain extent he wielded the arts in his political battles with his father, and in 1749 he went so far as to initiate plans to establish an academy in London under his protection.15 The scheme was stymied by his premature death two years later and the lacuna in the education of English artists seemed all the more gaping. The Duke of Richmond’s academy was poised to fill that void. Yet, for all this, the duke’s academy had a stuttering existence and lasted only about fifteen years, into the late 1770s. What is important, from the standpoint of the

figure 3.1 (opposite) | Joseph Wilton, marble copy of the Apollo Belvedere,

c. 1754.

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larger historical trajectory, was the beginning and early years of the young duke’s academy, coming as it did at the moment of the increasing groundswell for support for a state-sanctioned infrastructure of artistic education in England. The fact that the academy was not state-sponsored but rather the product of the munificence of a nobleman was entirely consistent with the British governing system as it evolved out of the Post-Restoration era. Indeed, as a civic-minded enterprise, the young duke’s academy ranked with his father’s virtuous endeavours of a generation before. The 2nd Duke of Richmond was a direct descendant of Charles II, the son of the 1st duke, who was, in turn, the son of the king and his mistress Louise de Kéroualle. After the Glorious Revolution, the 1st duke espoused his Whig allegiance and the 2nd duke, in the face of the first Jacobite Rebellion, was quick to describe himself as “bred up from a child in Whig principles.”16 Freemasonry was also a strong undercurrent and perhaps a guiding force. The 1st duke had been a Freemason, one of the increasing number of peers who became attracted to Freemasonry following the Restoration; legend even has it that Charles II, the 1st duke’s father, had been a grand master.17 The 2nd duke would take up Freemasonry with zeal, serving as grand master in 1724–25, in the years immediately following consolidation of the four lodges in London that marked the beginning of Official Freemasonry and after the power struggle to purge Freemasonry of Jacobite elements.18 Perhaps prudently, given his Stuart lineage, the 2nd duke was eager to display his loyalty to the Hanoverian Succession. One of the most overt examples of this desire is the series of eight large paintings of allegorical tombs dedicated to distinguished turn-of-the-century Whigs that he acquired for the dining room of Goodwood, his manor house in Sussex. They commemorated the 1st Duke of Devonshire, the earls of Dorset, Godolphin, Stanhope, and Cadogan, the 1st Marquis of Wharton (father of the errant Jacobite Philip, Duke of Wharton), Joseph Addison, and Archbishop John Tillotson (Fig. 3.2).19 These were joined by a portrait of William III. The initial plan for the display also included a painting commemorating Sir Cloudsley Shovell, Queen Anne’s great admiral who had met his fate on the rocks of the Isles of Scilly. However, when George I died in 1727, that painting was sacrificed to include one of the king and the order reshuffled to give the king’s painting pride of place.20 The paintings of the two kings were noticeably larger than the others.21 The idea for such a scheme was not the duke’s. While on his grand tour in 1721–22, the duke, who was still Earl of March, met Owen McSwiny, the Irish impresario of dubious reputation who had fled London in 1713 with the box-office takings from the Queen’s Theatre.22 McSwiny had a plan

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figure 3.2 |

Canaletto, Giovanni Battista Cimaroli, and Giovanni Battista Pittoni, Allegorical Tomb of Archbishop Tillotson, c. 1722–26.

for a series of paintings for Lord Cadogan, Richmond’s father-in-law, that celebrated key events in the life of the Duke of Marlborough. That project evidently never came to fruition.23 Instead, McSwiny found in the young and impressionable Earl of March a patron for his much larger scheme of paintings of allegorical tombs. In an undated promotional pamphlet, To the Ladies and Gentlemen of Taste in Great Britain and Ireland, McSwiny described the scheme: each of the allegorical tombs in the paintings was to contain an urn “wherein is supposed to be deposited the Remains of the deceased Hero. The Ornaments are furnish’d partly from the Supporters and

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Arms of the respective Families; and the Ceremonies supposed to be perform’d at the several Sepulchres, as well as the Statues and Basso-Relievo’s, allude to the Virtues, to the Imployments, or to the Learning and Sciences of the Departed.”24 Anxious to maximize on his venture, McSwiny proposed as many as fifteen paintings to the duke over the course of the 1720s. In addition to the eight that the duke did acquire, McSwiny also proposed to commemorate the Duke of Marlborough; the earls of Sunderland and Halifax; John Somers and William Cowper (who had served as lord chancellor under Anne and George I respectively); Admiral Arthur Herbert, Earl of Torrington; Edward Russell, Earl of Orford; William, Lord Russell; Algernon Sydney; Sir John Holt (lord chief justice under Anne); Queen Mary; and Queen Anne. A group portrait commemorating Robert Boyle, John Locke, and Thomas Sydenham and a copy of a painting dedicated to Isaac Newton that was owned by Sir William Morrice were also proposed.25 In short, it was to be a suite of stars in the Whig firmament. McSwiny planned to hire several Venetian and Bolognese artists who would each contribute a part of the painting (figures, landscape, and architecture). One of these was the young Canaletto, whom the 2nd Duke of Richmond would again patronize at the behest of McSwiny some twenty years later.26 As Francis Haskell has stated, the Italian artists were bemused by the precise instructions McSwiny had laid out. Furthermore, the complex yet sameness of detail in the paintings ultimately render them unsuccessful as a group since there was no opportunity to articulate the merits of each commemorated individual.27 Nonetheless, by installing the paintings in his dining room at Goodwood, the Duke of Richmond transformed the room into a quasi-sanctuary of Whiggish heroes. The 2nd duke used the occasion of the installation of the paintings to proclaim further, without any shadow of a doubt, his political position. An Ode to His Grace the Duke of Richmond; Occasion’d by Some Fine Italian Paintings at Goodwood, Designed to Perpetuate the Memory and Actions of Several Eminent Persons in the Three Last Reigns was published in 1735. It is a sixteen-page panegyric celebrating the supremacy and peacefulness of Britain under William, Anne, the first two Georges, and Robert Walpole. Notably, the eradication of faction is emphasized, glossing over the Excise Crisis that was rending the Whigs asunder at the time. The timing of this pamphlet coincided with Cobham’s construction of his Temple of British Worthies at Stowe. The final praise in the ode is reserved for the duke himself, claiming that the list of British worthies would not be complete until Richmond’s name was added.28 The last line emphasizes the duke’s role as counsel, in Masonic tone, to the king: “the Guard of States and Guide of Kings.”29

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figure 3.3 | View of the Fire-Workes and Illuminations at His Grace the Duke of

Richmond’s at White-hall and on the River Thames, on Monday 15 May 1749, 1749.

In the same year that the ode was published, Richmond was made master of the horse and a lord of the Privy Council. He would remain an amiable Court Whig, acting as an intermediary between George II and Frederick, Prince of Wales, in the disagreements of the late 1730s. He was also named a lord justice of England during George II’s several absences from England in the 1740s, and, in the continuing struggle against the Jacobites, he would rise to the level of lieutenant-general, ultimately fighting the Jacobites at Carlisle. In another great display of his Hanoverian loyalty, he celebrated the conclusion of the War of the Austrian Succession with a spectacular fireworks display over the Thames in front of Richmond House, his sumptuous new town house (Fig. 3.3).30 The 2nd duke rounded out his civic presence in a manner consistent with the Whiggish principles of the natural aristocracy and in accordance with Freemasonry principles. He reserved his primary philanthropic interests for medicine and science. In the same year that he served as grand master he was made a fellow of the Royal Society, in 1728 he was appointed a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, and in 1741 he was made president of the

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London Hospital and supervised its move to Whitechapel. He was also an early patron of Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital. His interest in the natural sciences was particularly deep-rooted; he kept an exotic menagerie at Goodwood and he planted hundreds of trees, many of which were rare species.31 Among his close friends was the noted zoologist Abraham Trembley, whose seminal discovery of the self-reproductive powers of fresh-water polyps was especially well received in Masonic circles.32 The duke’s love of horses (and promotion of the Charlton hunt) aligns with his natural-science interests. It was in this respect that John Wootton served essentially as the duke’s artist-in-residence at Goodwood, producing many portraits of the Richmond horses and dogs.33 The 2nd duke was also very keen on cricket, a hitherto not very popular team sport that shared a variety of affinities with Masonic ritual, including honesty and egalitarianism. The 2nd duke’s election to the Society of Antiquaries in 1736 and his subsequent elevation to president shortly before his death were also natural endeavours for a landed peer of his standing and for a Freemason. In a striking parallel to William Stukeley’s fascination with Celtic and Druidic Britain, the 2nd duke held a lodge meeting in 1730 on St Roche’s Hill, now called The Trundle, an ancient hill fort on the Goodwood estate. Local legend had it that Masonic meetings had been long held on the summit and the 1st Duke of Richmond is reported to have had the last meeting of an old order of Freemasons at this site in the 1690s.34 Finally, the 2nd duke’s interests in architecture went hand-in-hand with his Freemasonry zeal and the expression of exemplum. As a friend of Lord Burlington he was one of the earliest proponents of Palladian architecture. In 1724 Colen Campbell prepared an elaborate plan and elevation for the rebuilding of Goodwood House which was subsequently published in Vitruvius Britannicus.35 Although the building did not come to fruition in its entirety – only a new kitchen wing was built – the intention to rebuild in this manner places Goodwood in the first significant wave of eighteenth-century English Palladian mansions. Yet, while Goodwood would be the 2nd duke’s primary focus, he was also careful to maintain his presence in London. In 1725 he tore down his father’s house in Whitehall (already in ill-repair) and had Lord Burlington design a Palladian town house with interiors by William Kent (to the left in Fig. 3.3). In the 1740s the duke added a dining-room wing, designed also in a Palladian manner by Matthew Brettingham the elder. It jutted out toward the river, commanding formidable views of the terrace and the river beyond.36 The duke also oversaw the cleaning up and stabilization of the riverfront in Privy Garden. Richmond House and the newly built neighbouring Montague House, also built in a Palladian style

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figure 3.4 | Canaletto, Whitehall and the Privy Garden from Richmond House,

1746.

for the 2nd Duke of Montagu, who had served as Masonic grand master in 1721, occupied one side of Privy Garden and were the fulcrum between Christopher Wren’s great eleven-bay pedimented mansion at one end and Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House at the other. Richmond celebrated the preeminence of Richmond House with two views taken from the house painted by Canaletto who had arrived in London in 1746 and who had sought out the duke for whom he had painted some of the allegorical tombs twenty years before. The results are two of Canaletto’s finest English paintings, one view up Whitehall across Privy Garden and the other out over the Thames (Figs. 3.4 and 3.5). Although Richmond House itself is not visible, its presence and

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figure 3.5 | Canaletto, View of the Thames, from Richmond House, 1746.

centrality in mid-eighteenth-century London is palpable. On the occasion of the fireworks celebration at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, the duke also authorized a print which showed Richmond House as part of the backdrop to the display (Fig. 3.3). At Richmond House, the duke’s sophistication and antiquarian interests were evidenced by the well-stocked library, the large number of paintings, and the elaborate furnishings, including marble sculpture and bronzes.37 In the only surviving painting showing the interior of Richmond House, the duke is portrayed with the entrance to the library in the background, where shelves of books line the wall behind a reproduction of an antique Flora (Fig. 3.6).38 The statue may have been acquired on the duke’s grand tour in 1721

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figure 3.6 | Charles Philips, Charles, 2nd Duke of Richmond, Lennox and

Aubigny, c. 1730.

at which time he had met the thirty-year-old Cardinal Albani, describing him as a “very odd Cur, Ignorant enough & proud as Hell, butt has the finest library, one of them, in Europe, & without exception the very best collection of bustos in the world.”39 Growing up, the future 3rd duke was thus immersed in a social and material culture of refinement that was underscored by Masonic principles. This extended to his education under the tutelage of Abraham Trembley,

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who also served as the bear-leader for the young duke and his brother, Lord George Lennox, on their grand tour in the early 1750s. While on the Continent, Trembley made certain that the young men met the requisite learned figures, many of whom were also Freemasons, including the aging Montesquieu, Frederick the Great, Antonio Cocchi, Paolo Frisi (the noted mathematician based at the university in Pisa), Vitaliano Donati (the natural historian and architect of the repairs of St Peter’s Basilica who also held the professorship of botany at Turin), and the poet and natural scientist Albrecht von Haller in Berne.40 In terms of the military, the 3rd duke followed in his father’s footsteps. He rose to the rank of colonel in the army and was engaged in active battle on the Continent in the early years of the Seven Years’ War. He was particularly praised for his distinguished service in the battle at Minden in 1759 where he served as aide-de-camp to Frederick of Brunswick. After he retired from active service in 1760 he kept his hand in, overseeing the Sussex militia and ultimately becoming a field marshal in 1792. The 3rd duke would also continue his father’s endeavours in scientific agriculture at Goodwood and became a member of the Royal Society in 1756, within months of returning from his grand tour. He was even more deeply attached to his horses and involved in the Charlton Hunt than his father. To this end, before he turned his attention to further improvements of the house at Goodwood, he had William Chambers build an enormous classical stable as early as 1757.41 Just as his father had regularly employed John Wootton to paint portraits of his horses, so the 3rd duke was George Stubbs’s first and most significant patron, from about 1758.42 It was through Richmond that Stubbs likely obtained the patronage of Lord Rockingham.43 Thus, like Rockingham, Richmond had all the trappings that befitted a man of his standing and that were consistent with the patrician perception of the natural order of society. However, the 3rd Duke of Richmond seems not to have been as interested in erudite pursuits as the future Marquis of Rockingham. Indeed, his characterization of his relationship with the Venus de’Medici, quoted earlier – “I am in love with the Venus and take great pleasure to stroke her bum and thighs”44 – perhaps betrays his less than intellectual turn-of-mind. Richmond was less interested in acquiring virtù than Rockingham. Indeed, in Italy, Trembley despaired that the duke’s interest in military strategy, sport, and women tended to distract him from his studies of both the natural sciences and history.45 Of the two portraits that the young duke commissioned during his grand tour, one, by Pompeo Batoni, shows him with his two favourite dogs seated on a fine scagliola marble table (Fig. 3.7), and the other, by Anton Raphael Mengs, shows his interest in the military as he is posed in

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figure 3.7 | Pompeo Batoni, Charles, 3rd Duke of Richmond, 1755. figure 3.8 | Anton Raphael Mengs, Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond and

Lennox, 1755.

front of a colossal bust of Minerva clad in her helmet and chest plate (Fig. 3.8). In this portrait the young duke also wears fancy Van Dyckian dress of the era of Charles II, an evident indication of the attention he paid to his regal family lineage. It is unlikely, given the duke’s less than profound scholarly nature, that the conception for the gallery/academy was his. All in all, he was less a virtuoso than Rockingham, but, moulded by the Whiggish humanist principles of his father and other mentors, he nonetheless understood that aristocratic taste could fashion society and ultimately improve the nation as a whole. For so many people, artists and laymen alike, the lack of formal academic training for young English artists had hit a crisis point by mid-century as any momentum to set up an academy had come to a crashing halt with the death of the Prince of Wales in 1751. Many of the English artists based in Florence

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and Rome, of whom there was then an unprecedented number, took up the cause. Joseph Wilton, Simon Vierpyl, Prince Hoare, Francis Harwood, Richard Hayward, William Chambers, James Russel, James “Athenian” Stuart, John Parker, Alexander Cozens, Thomas Patch, and Joshua Reynolds already had, like their colleagues who had stayed in England, the technical skills for painting and modelling, but they had subsequently gone to Italy to augment their aesthetic refinement through exposure to the material remains of the classical past and the masters of the Florentine and Roman Renaissance. The artists were anxious to secure employment among patrons for whom the classics increasingly, and seemingly inevitably, became the measuring stick of erudition and civilization. At the same time, they were themselves caught up in the pursuit of the classical ideal. In 1749 James Russel recorded that an academy had been formed in Rome by sixteen British artists to study “the nobler art of History-painting,”46 probably an informal venue where fellow British artists could gather. However, in comparison to the very formal state-sponsored French branch academy in Rome, this artist-run venture must have appeared rather feeble. Viscount Charlemont seems to have stepped into the breach and announced in May 1752: The English Noblemen and Gentlemen now at this Place [Rome] on their Travels, having taken into Consideration the Disadvantages young Students of their Nation in Painting and Sculpture lie under here, for want of the Foundation of an Academy, with Pensions for the Encouragement of those whose Circumstances will not permit them to prosecute their Studies for a sufficient Time at their own Expense, have begun a generous Subscription towards the Foundation of an Academy, and have appointed Mr. John Parker, History-Painter, to be Receiver and Director thereof. The generous Promoters of this Foundation are the Lords Bruce, Charlemont, Tilney and Killmorey, Sir Thomas Kennedy, Bart., Mess. Ward, Iremonger, Lieutheilier, Bagot, Scroop, Cook, Lypeat, and Murphy. And as all other Nations in Europe, particularly the French, have Academies, and great Encouragements, ’tis hoped all Lovers of the Arts will promote this generous Design.47 Charlemont’s initiative would no doubt have been applauded by such men as Mann, Cocchi, Albani, and Stosch as well as many British patricians. Yet, for all the potential support and appreciation, Charlemont’s efforts proved unsuccessful. Dependence upon subscriptions from a transient elite

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proved unsustainable and the miscreant behaviour of some of the artists cast aspersions on the whole enterprise: John Parker, who had been away from the academy for several months in 1754 on account of an injury, told Charlemont that the academy had become “an asylum for artistic scamps.” Charlemont ultimately closed the academy in 1755 following a fight between Thomas Patch and Thomas Warner.48 Nevertheless, despite the failure, the artist-run initiative and Charlemont’s academy articulated both the artists’ and the British elite’s recognition of the need for an academic, intellectually driven study of art grounded in the classical ideal. The young Duke of Richmond may have been aware of Charlemont’s initiative, since he arrived in Rome about the same time that the academy shut down.49 However, there is nothing to suggest that the impetus for the founding of a new academy came from the duke himself. Rather, the credit seems to lie with Joseph Wilton and William Chambers, who, like all artists, were keen to secure noble patronage. Both men were also very familiar with the academic mode of education, having been among the first English artists to receive such an education, Wilton with Jean-Baptiste Pigalle and Chambers with Jacques-François Blondel, both in the late 1740s in France.50 In Italy the two men supplemented their training with first-hand exposure to classical ruins and sculptural remains. Franco-Italian sketchbooks survive for both men.51 Chambers’s notebooks consist of drawings after antique remnants and architectural detailing, often with a Baroque flair.52 He also engaged in elaborate designs on paper, in keeping with the complex projects undertaken by the students at the French academy in Rome. One of these is the design for a mausoleum for Frederick, Prince of Wales, of which he drew both an intact building and an elegiac ruin.53 Wilton’s books contain drawings mostly after Renaissance and Baroque figurative sculpture. He had a certain predilection for Bernini and Algardi which may have been the result of his exposure to the sometimes sublime element of French classicism of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Fig. 3.9). Wilton also developed an intimate knowledge of the great classical sculptures, evidenced by the many casts and copies he made in Italy and after his return to England. It is more than likely that he moved from Rome to Florence in 1751 to take advantage of the latter city’s growing trade in casts and copies for English tourists (by then, Simon Vierpyl and Matthew Brettingham the younger were well ensconced in Rome). Wilton was named to the Florentine Accademia del Disegno in 1752 and was favoured by both Mann and Cocchi.54 As demonstrated by their own training and later involvement in the various societies of artists in England, including their key roles in the formation of the Royal Academy of Arts, Wilton and Chambers were strong

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figure 3.9 | Joseph

Wilton, drawing from his Franco-Italo sketchbook, early 1750s.

proponents of the academic mode of education and recognized the need for such an institution in England. By 1755, the two were thus poised to return to England. Along with Giovanni Battista Cipriani, a Florentine painter who had associated with the English artists in Rome and Florence and who had secured several commissions from English patricians, they made the move evidently under the patronage of the Duke of Richmond.55 While Chambers

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would design the room for the duke’s academy, Wilton and Cipriani would be the first directors. By securing the duke’s patronage, Wilton, Chambers, and Cipriani had undercut Matthew Brettingham the younger, their primary potential rival in England. Robert Adam, who had just recently arrived in Italy and consequently was not well known to Wilton, Chambers, and Cipriani, recognized, as the other artists presumably did, that Brettingham was a serious threat.56 An architect who dealt in sculpture, Brettingham was already well connected with the older generation of English nobility when he arrived in Italy in 1747 under the auspices of the Earl of Leicester, for whom he purchased many of the plaster casts and some marble copies for Holkham Hall.57 In 1754, a year before Wilton, Chambers, and Cipriani, Brettingham had returned to England where he set up business in London and attempted to secure further patronage from Lord Leicester or through other members of the older nobility for whom his father had worked, such as the Earl of Egremont at Petworth House, or from the younger Earl of Dartmouth and Lord North, both of whom he had solicited in Rome. With respect to an academy of art, Brettingham was also much farther ahead than Wilton, Cipriani, or Chambers. In a letter to his father, dated 27 May 1753, the younger Brettingham outlined in considerable detail his plans to open an academy of art in London.58 The proposal included a description of the intended building, to be designed by the Brettinghams, and a list of some of the plaster casts that would be housed in the academy. As far as the latter was concerned, Brettingham had acquired these and many more as part of another scheme to answer the growing demand for classical statuary in England. To save patrons the expense of ordering casts from Italy, Brettingham could supply them from London.59 The inspiration for Brettingham’s academy, as he stated, came from Frederick, Prince of Wales.60 Brettingham also remarked upon the academy that the Abbé Filippo Vincenzo Farsetti was setting up in Venice and for which Paolo Posi was employed making numerous moulds of the best antique sculptures.61 Pope Benedict XIV had allowed Posi to take moulds of some of the works in the Vatican collections on the condition that a set of the casts be deposited with the academy at Bologna.62 Brettingham had struck a deal with Posi in 1753 to acquire the third cast from each mould.63 He figured it would take another three years for Posi to make all his moulds so in the meantime he and his father could construct the building. The only thing wanting was subscriptions to get the project off the ground, but the younger Brettingham thought that, once the academy had begun, it would quickly gain the king’s approbation. Throughout the letter to his father, Brettingham

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emphasized the uniqueness of the venture – it had no equivalent in France or anywhere else in Europe – and the benefits it would have for their position in society; the “Glory and reputation of being sole agents … and executors of so considerable a work [would] greatly raise our Name whilst living and convey it when dead to Posterity.”64 In the postscript he asked his father not to publicize the academy too much, except to get a few people’s opinion of it, in case the Abbé Farsetti heard of the plan and retracted his consent for Brettingham to take the plaster casts.65 Farsetti seems not to have heard of Brettingham’s plans and Brettingham was able to acquire the casts but nothing more came of the scheme. Maybe the elder Brettingham quashed it as being too ambitious or the younger Brettingham was simply not successful in getting commitments from members of the nobility. Whatever the case, Wilton, Chambers, and Cipriani succeeded where Brettingham had failed. Ironically, the elder Brettingham had worked for the 2nd Duke of Richmond, both in London and at Goodwood,66 yet it is unlikely that the 3rd duke would have known about the younger Brettingham’s scheme since the latter had returned to London a year before the duke arrived in Italy. The only involvement Brettingham had in the duke’s academy was in supplying some of the casts to Wilton in 1756 and again in 1759.67 Indeed, the Brettinghams may have been wary of dealing with Richmond since the elder Brettingham had not yet been paid for the work he had done for the 2nd duke. Potential competition to Brettingham’s scheme may also have come from the Society of Arts, which had been founded in 1754. As early as February, Henry Cheere had presented a plan for an academy of art to be run by the Society.68 While the Foundling Hospital, Guy’s Hospital, and London Hospital looked after the physical health of England, the Society of Arts was meant to support the economic health of England and its colonies, and, like these other philanthropic ventures, it very quickly grew in popularity among the patrician and artisan classes alike. The 3rd duke became a member in 1758 and by 1761, when he was just twenty-six years old, he was elected vicepresident, thereby giving the Society the mark of aristocratic approbation.69 To some extent, his academy answered Cheere’s proposal. Indeed, the early history of the duke’s academy is intertwined with the Society of Arts. In February 1758, a few weeks before the advertisement for the duke’s gallery appeared in the newspapers, Horace Walpole told Mann about the Society of Arts immediately before discussing the duke’s initiative: “There is now established a Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences and Commerce, that are likely to be very serviceable; and I was pleased yesterday with a very grand seigneurial design of the Duke of Richmond, who

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has collected a great many fine casts of the best antique statues, had placed them in a large room in his garden, & designs to throw it open to encourage drawing.”70 Walpole recognized them as comparable philanthropic ventures. On 15 February 1758 it was reported in the minutes of the Society of Arts that “Dr. Manningham acquainted the Society that he had, pursuant to desire of last meeting, waited on his Grace the Duke of Richmond for permission that the candidates for the Drawing from his Grace’s Collection might draw from such Collection, to which his Grace very readily consented. Dr. Manningham was desired to return the Society’s thanks to his Grace.” It was at that same meeting that Manningham proposed the duke as a member.71 Drawing and design were considered skills necessary to a wide range of occupations; William Shipley, often credited with being the founder of the Society of Arts, was a drawing master by trade, and, from the inception of the Society, drawing was considered “absolutely Necessary in many Employments Trades & Manufacture, and that the Encouragemt. thereof may prove of great Utility to the Public.”72 The duke’s academy functioned in a manner comparable to a secondary school. Students would learn the basic mechanical fundamentals at Shipley’s school and those who wished to be artists would move on to the duke’s academy. Thomas Jones, who trained to be a painter at an older age than what was common at the time, remembered experiencing the humiliation of “copying drawings of Ears, Eyes, mouths & Noses among a group of little boys of half my age” at Shipley’s school until he was “thought sufficiently qualified [to be] introduced by Mr Shipley to the Duke of Richmond’s Gallery in Privy Gardens, to draw after those fine Copies of the most celebrated Antique Statues.”73 Certificates were handed out to allow entrance to the duke’s academy.74 Consistent with the Continental academic model, the emphasis on sophisticated study of the human form through exposure to ideal examples was central to the conception of the duke’s academy.75 Wilton’s marble copy of the Apollo Belvedere at the door set the tone for the academy (see Fig. 3.1).76 The works inside the gallery had been selected for their aesthetic value; historical significance did not come into play as gods, saints, and warriors stood cheek by jowl around the room. Most of the figures were nude, and, when pieces included drapery, the drapery articulated rather than hid the form below, as in Duquesnoy’s Santa Susanna. The aim of the academy was explicitly laid out in the London Chronicle advertisement, perhaps written by Wilton and Cipriani: “The study of these most exact copies of the antiques [will] greatly contribute towards giving young beginners of genius an early taste and idea of beauty and proportion, which, when thoroughly acquired, will, in time, appear in their several performances.”77 All of the

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statues exemplified beauty and ideal proportion while the hands by Bernini and Legros and casts of the feet of Michelangelo’s David gave the students an opportunity to examine fine specimens of well-proportioned body parts, and the intertwining bodies of such pieces as the Wrestlers were considered to be exquisite examples of anatomy.78 Expression may also have been a governing factor in the selection of casts. According to the academic tradition, expression, along with beauty and proportion, was intrinsic to the rendering of the ideal human form.79 Wilton himself excelled in this regard with startling life-like portrait busts that are invested with character (see the busts of Antonio Cocchi, the earls of Huntingdon and Chesterfield, and Thomas Hollis by way of example, Figs. 4.5, 4.7, 4.10, and 5.11). A range of emotions and physical states were represented in the duke’s gallery, including serenity, contemplation, joy, love, pain, resignation, and death. Notably, the Laocoön, one of the most famous works of antiquity and one that had been praised by the Richardsons and prominently displayed in a bronze copy at Houghton Hall, was represented in the duke’s academy only by the head of one of the sons, despite the fact that a cast of the whole could be acquired through the French academy in Rome.80 The omission seems to have been a deliberate aesthetic choice. In 1722 the Richardsons had extolled the Laocoön group, convinced that, because of the beauty of the form and expression, the sculptor must have used Pliny’s description as the source since Virgil, in his account, was “rather more particular in the images of the Serpents than of the Priest, and his sons; but he makes Laocoön roar out hideously.” They went on to say: “The sculptors on the contrary have fix’d their point of time to that when [Laocoön’s] strength was in a great measure exhausted, and he is ready to sink under the Weight of his vast calamity; his mouth is open’d but a little, and he looks up as imploring pity, and succour from the gods, without any appearance however of hope, but seeming in great pain. This gives an opportunity of a fine expression, and one more noble, and more suitable to his sacerdotal character, than that violent emotion that must have appear’d had the sculptors taken him in the same view as Virgil did.”81 In 1755 Winckelmann continued along the same line of discussion in the Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, citing the Laocoön as the epitome of expression in sculpture: ’Tis in the face of Laocoön this soul shines with full lustre, not confined however to the face, amidst the most violent sufferings. Pangs piercing every muscle, every labouring nerve; pangs which we almost

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feel ourselves, while we consider – not the face, nor the most expressive parts – only the belly contracted by excruciating pains: these however, I say, exert not themselves with violence, either in the face or gesture. He pierces not heaven, like the Laocoön of Virgil; his mouth is rather opened to discharge an anxious overloaded groan, as Sadolet says; the struggling body and the supporting mind exert themselves with equal strength, nay balance all the frame. Laocoön suffers, but suffers like the Philoctetes of Sophocles: we weeping feel his pains, but wish for the hero’s strength to support his misery.82 However, William Lock, who was travelling in Italy at mid-century, offered another perspective, claiming that the Laocoön was less than ideal because of the lack of appropriate paternal expression on the father’s face. Lock did not publish anything, perhaps considering the act of publishing beneath his gentlemanly standing as he strove to overcome the handicap of being the natural son of a merchant. However, his erudite musings on the Laocoön come down to us in Dr John Moore’s Italian journal, written in the 1780s: Nothing can be conceived more admirably executed than this affecting groupe; in all probability, it never would have entered into my own head that it could have been in any respect improved. But when I first had the happiness of becoming acquainted with Mr. Lock, a period of my life which I shall always recollect with peculiar pleasure, I remember my conversing with him upon this subject; and that Gentleman, after mentioning the execution of this piece, in the highest terms of praise, observed that, had the figure of Laocoön been alone, it would have been perfect. As a man suffering the most excruciating bodily pain with becoming fortitude, it admits of no improvement; his proportions, his form, his action, his expression, are exquisite. But when his sons appear, he is no longer an insulated, suffering individual, who, when he has met pain and death with dignity, has done all that could be expected from man; he commences father, and a much wider field is opened to the artist. We expect the deepest pathos in the exhibition of the sublimest character that art can offer to the contemplation of the human mind: A father forgetting pain, and instant death, to save his children. This Sublime and Pathetic the artist either did not see, or despaired of attaining. Laocoön’s sufferings are merely corporal; he is deaf to the cries of his agonizing children, who are calling on him for assistance. But had he been throwing a look of anguish

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upon his sons, had he seemed to have forgotten his own sufferings in theirs, he would have commanded the sympathy of the spectator in a much higher degree. On the whole, Mr. Lock was of opinion, that the execution of this groupe is perfect, but that the conception is not equal to the execution. Lock’s musings on the Laocoön go beyond the physical agonies of the priest that would incite the Richardsons and later Winckelmann, to consider the priest as father. This is where Lock felt the sculptor had faltered since, in his view, the father, as depicted, was too preoccupied with his own plight to the point that he has ignored his sons. As such, the sculpture fails since it does not express this most “sublime and pathetic” character. Moore went on to say that he was sure that Lock was speaking both as a man of taste and as a father. He then weighs in on the side of Virgil in the debate about the source for the sculpture group since Virgil says that, “although every other person around sought safety by flight, the father was attacked by the serpents, while he was advancing to the assistance of his sons – auxilio subeuntem ac tela serentem. This deficiency in the sculptor’s art would have been finely supplied by the improvement which Mr. Lock proposed.”83 Although Lock has been almost lost to modern scholarship because he did not publish, his influence in his own time seems to have been far-reaching. In 1787 William Hamilton would name Lock one of the three “true Connoisseurs of the arts in England,” alongside Charles Townley and Charles Greville, and at Lock’s death in 1810 Joseph Farington lamented the loss of “a gentleman who for nearly half a century has been ranked in the first class of Amateurs of the fine arts, possessing superior taste and information.”84 His erudition is further evidenced by the range of publications dedicated to him. These include: John Moore’s Medical Sketches (1786); William Gilpin’s Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: to Which Is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting (1792); and Sophie Burrell’s Maximian; A Tragedy Taken from Corneille (1800). In Italy at mid-century, Lock would have a formative impact on many of his generation. He travelled from Venice to Rome with Richard Wilson, persuading him to switch from portraiture to Claudean-inspired classical landscapes which were instantly successful and would essentially redefine the genre of landscape painting in England.85 J.T. Smith recorded that Lock and Joseph Wilton were also “inseparable companions” in Italy and that Lock had also travelled with Thomas Jenkins and James Russel.86 Lock himself would amass a small but influential collection. It included a Discobolus, Claude’s Embarkation of St. Ursula (later a cornerstone of the National Gallery’s col-

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lection), a torso that Richard Wilson had found, a Venus Victrix, a copy of the Venus de’Medici, copies of Michelangelo’s slaves, numerous models by Fiamingo, Le Gros, Bernini, Lucca della Robbia, and Algardi, and twentytwo wax models by Giambologna.87 Lock’s thoughtful commentaries on classical statuary would resonate. Besides John Moore, Peter Beckford and Joshua Reynolds also recounted Lock’s opinions, the latter contesting Lock’s assessment of the Laocoön, stating: “Though this observation comes from a person whose opinion, in every thing relating to the arts, carries with it the highest authority, yet I cannot but suspect that such refined expression is scarce within this province of art; and, in attempting it, the artist will run great risk of enfeebling expression, and making it less intelligible to the spectator.”88 Years later, Nollekens would also take up the challenge presented by Lock and Reynolds and modelled a Laocoön group that effects a strong emotional tie between father and sons. The composition is clearly inspired by Giambologna’s intertwined, spiralling figures; significantly, Nollekens had purchased all of Lock’s Giambologna wax models at Lock’s sale in 1785.89 Lock’s preference was clearly for a sublime beauty, an ideal Grand Manner evoked by the poise and grace of perfectly proportioned classical precedents. This is demonstrated by his championing of Arcadian landscapes, the contents of his collections, and his pronouncements on the perfect body of the Laocoön. For him, the Laocoön would have reached the epitome of the sublime had it evoked a frisson of paternal anxiety, a concept of the sublime that aligns with the god-like graceful majesty which, according to Chloe Chard, made the Apollo Belvedere so thrillingly appealing.90 Both conceptions add complexity to what has become the typical notion of the sublime as manly, muscular excess. The sublime is achieved when all parts – proportions, muscles, and expression – work as a whole to achieve a superlative totality. This then readily accommodates Lock’s obvious distaste for the Farnese Hercules, in which he found problematic the contradiction of strength, rest, and fatigue, seeing it as “faulty both in his form and attitude: the former is too unwieldy for active exertion, and the latter exhibits vigour exhausted.”91 While Lock’s views are entirely consistent with the taste exhibited by Rockingham, Richmond, Charlemont, and others of his generation, the fact that Moore, Beckford, Reynolds, William Hamilton, Farington, and probably many more acknowledged his connoisseurial musings suggests that Lock was an arbiter of taste.92 This is further corroborated by his evident familiarity with and seeming influence over many of the artists on the ground in Italy in the 1750s. In terms of the duke’s academy, he seems to have been directly involved since he allowed Wilton to make casts of his Discobolus and

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his Giambologna models of the Rape of the Sabines and Samson.93 Notably, the Farnese Hercules is represented in the duke’s collection only by a cast of its head. The reward structure of the duke’s academy, based upon Continental models and consistent with other pursuits encouraged by the Society of Arts, was another way in which the taste for the ideal could be inculcated into British society. Monetary and silver and gold præmia were to be awarded semi-annually.94 For the first several years, the duke was honoured with the distinction of being appointed a judge, along with two or three artists; in 1758, for example, he, Reynolds, and Henry Cheere judged models in clay and wax.95 There is also some indication that an en loge competition was in place, in the manner of the French academy, whereby students were given a subject that had to be mastered in a certain time without the student leaving the gallery. In April 1759 Charles Furmage, presumably the duke’s servant who was the keeper of the gallery, certified to the Society of Arts that “all the Drawings which were enclosed in the Portfolio which was sent directed to the Society for the Encouragement of Arts Manufactures & Commerce were made by the Several Candidates whose Names were annexed to them according to the best of my Knowledge & that they were all begun at his Grace the Duke of Richmond Room & not taken from thence till finisht.”96 The minutes of the Society of Arts record several other competitions of models done after particular sculptures in the duke’s gallery (Fig. 3.10).97 Wilton and Cipriani, for their part, would have been familiar with the en loge system, both in Paris and in Rome. Other competitions were for drawings or models after any of the pieces in the duke’s collection.98 The connection between the Society of Arts and the Duke of Richmond’s gallery continued into the 1760s, but not without incident. In 1759 the duke was called to lead his regiment in battle at Minden and so was not in England to award the præmia. When he returned he found a notice pinned to the door of the gallery stating that the duke was too poor to award the præmia that year. Understandably annoyed and given to impetuous outbursts anyway, the duke temporarily closed the gallery.99 Two years later, Wilton and Cipriani resigned as directors. At about the same time, Chambers also ceased to work for the duke. In his reminiscences many years later, Wilton cited one of the reasons he resigned was that he had not been paid.100 Lack of payment was the duke’s prerogative; however, Wilton’s, Cipriani’s, and Chambers’s departure may well have also been prompted by their contemporaneous break with the Society of Arts. An Exhibition Committee, elected by the majority of London’s artists and architects who had come together to address the pressing issue of the lack of exhibition opportunity

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figure 3.10 | William Parry, drawing after the copy of the Borghese Gladiator in

the 3rd Duke of Richmond’s Gallery, 1758.

that was not associated with dealers and auctions, approached the Society of Arts in late 1759 and early 1760 to back a public exhibition. Among the committee members were Wilton, Cipriani, and Chambers, who had also signed the Society’s plan for a public academy in 1755.101 The resultant exhibition in the Society’s Great Room in 1760 was a resounding success with the public, but the artists were not entirely satisfied since their work was shown alongside that of children and other productions which were considered art in its widest sense: wax models, needlework, hairwork, and other handcrafts. Still more troublesome for the artists was the Society’s steadfast refusal to institute an admission charge, something that Thomas Jones stated that the artists were eager to have, under the pretext of advancing the arts, in order to assist those of them “whose Age, Infirmities or other lawful Hinderances suffer them to be no longer Candidates for Fame Praise.”102 Because the Society of Arts would not countenance an admission charge, many artists broke with it and established the Society of Artists of Great Britain. In 1761 some ninety-eight artists, among them the leading artists of the day, including Wilton, Cipriani, and Chambers, showed works in the rooms that the newly formed Society had rented in Spring Gardens. Entrance was granted with an admission charge. By contrast, only fifty-seven artists exhibited at the Society of Arts exhibition the same year, and of these only two were “principal painters,” a miniaturist and a pastel portraitist.103 Despite the Society of Artists’ exhibition being in a space normally reserved for auctions, which was just what the artists had tried to avoid but were forced into because of the lack of suitable public space in London, it succeeded in distinguishing the artists’ works as something on a loftier plain than the children’s productions from Shipley’s school and the handcrafts shown at the Society of Arts exhibition. Furthermore, the very existence of the Society of Artists of Great Britain defined the artists as professionals, discrete from the artisanal and manufacturing pursuits also promoted by the Society of Arts. Following the departures of Wilton and Cipriani, the Society of Arts seems to have continued to control access to the duke’s gallery, although there were no specific directors per se; when Thomas Jones “graduated” to the duke’s gallery in 1762, he remarked that “this noble Institution was now on the Decline … However the gallery was still open to all young Artists upon proper Application.”104 As a teaching resource, the gallery languished, and it was poised to fade into redundancy when the Royal Academy was established in 1768. However, the Society of Artists of Great Britain solicited the Duke of Richmond in 1770 to gain access to the gallery. The Society, from which eight of its directors, including Wilton and Chambers, had resigned in November 1768 to form the Royal Academy, was now in the awkward position of

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being the rival organization to the crown-sanctioned academy, despite itself having received royal approbation in 1765.105 The Society of Artists’ president, the disputatious James Paine, who had gained the directorship in June 1770 in a move that amounted to a factional coup, was anxious to forestall any notion that the Society might be the last refuge of artists not accomplished enough to be in the Royal Academy.106 To this end, he recognized the need for a powerful backer and on 31 July 1770 Paine and eight artists of the Society, two of whom were John Mortimer and Ozias Humphry, who had studied at the duke’s academy under Wilton and Cipriani, waited on the Duke of Richmond. The duke agreed and gave exclusive access to the gallery to the Society of Artists, after a few rules and regulations were prepared.107 For the duke’s part, his decision was not one entirely of altruistic philanthropy. It was also likely a challenge to the king, who had given his prerogative to the Royal Academy. Relations between the new king and Richmond deteriorated rapidly throughout the 1760s. After his return from Italy in 1755, the young duke strove to maintain his family’s prominent profile and insinuated both himself and his family within the inner circle of George, Prince of Wales, the future king. Yet Lord Bute feared that an increase in the political power of Richmond and his brother-in-law Henry Fox would spell his demise as the favourite of the king-in-waiting.108 Thus, in December 1760, the duke’s brother, Lord George Lennox, was passed over for the post of one of the king’s aides-de-camp. Infuriated by this perceived slight to his family, the duke resigned his post as lord of the bedchamber, to which he had been appointed only a month before.109 The duke was further piqued by the young king’s decision to enter into a political marriage, engineered by Bute, with Charlotte of Mecklenberg-Strelitz despite the king’s obvious affection for the duke’s younger sister, Lady Sarah Lennox. Moreover, the duke may well have been rankled by the perception that George III was the new Maecenas of English art and culture. In his frontispiece to the second catalogue of the Society of Artists of Great Britain exhibition in 1761, Hogarth was not alone in identifying the young king as the saviour of British art (see Fig. 2.13). Horace Walpole also captured the exhilaration of the moment in the introduction to the Anecdotes of Painting. Immediately preceding the praise that he heaped on the Duke of Richmond, he wrote: “If there are any talents among us, this seems the crisis for their appearance; the Throne itself is now the altar of the Graces, and whoever sacrifices to them becomingly, is sure that his offerings will be smiled upon by a prince, who is at once the example and patron of accomplishments.”110 Indeed, even before coming to the throne, George had shown himself to be an active patron of England’s artists with his extensive building projects at

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Kew. Beginning in the late 1750s, he regularly employed Wilton, Chambers, and Cipriani – Richmond’s protégés – who were perceived to be on the cutting edge of classical taste. Chambers served as tutor to the king-in-waiting in the late 1750s and at the same time, as we have seen in chapter 1, designed several of the buildings at Kew, including the Pagoda, the Temple of the Sun, the Temple of Bellona, and the Gallery of Antiques for which Wilton supplied the statuary.111 After his accession, George appointed Chambers (and Robert Adam) as clerk of the king’s works and Wilton as sculptor in ordinary to the king, along with Allan Ramsay as principal painter in ordinary, all posts that were strategically revived by the young king.112 This was in 1761, the same year that Wilton and Cipriani resigned as directors of the duke’s academy and when relations between the king and Richmond were particularly acrimonious. In their capacity as artists to the king, the most significant commission that the three men received was the new state coach that was unveiled at the opening of Parliament in 1762. As we will see in chapter 4, the state coach was the most ostentatious – and the most public – display of royal patronage since Frederick had sailed down the Thames in his rococo royal barge (see Fig. 4.12).113 Throughout the 1760s many groups and societies clambered to become incorporated under royal charter.114 Within the arts, the Society of Artists of Great Britain had secured royal incorporation in 1765, mostly at the behest of Chambers, Wilton, and Cipriani. Three years later, the same men were key players in the formation of the Royal Academy, also under the auspices of the king. What subsequently played out between the Society of Artists and the Royal Academy, and, by extension, between the Duke of Richmond and George III, was a microcosm of the breakdown in political relations between the Rockingham Whigs and the king in the 1760s. By the middle of the decade, Richmond had allied himself with Rockingham, although his maverick personality and southern roots – he apparently visited Yorkshire only once, in 1761 – meant that he would always be on the periphery of the party. In the brief Rockingham administration in 1766 he served as secretary of state, after several people closer to Rockingham had turned it down.115 As we have seen, the Rockingham Whigs felt betrayed by the Hanoverian Succession in the person of the king. He was perceived as exerting undue influence, thereby disrupting the balance of English government and threatening the sanctity of English liberty. At the end of the decade, the duke was also bristling at the perceived undue interference of the crown in the controversy surrounding the return of John Wilkes from exile and his subsequent ill-fated attempts to stand as a parliamentarian.116 The contemporaneous establishment of the Royal Academy, with its extreme hierarchy,

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having a mere forty full academicians in contrast to the two-hundred-strong membership of the Society of Artists of Great Britain, was yet another example of the king’s disruptive, non-egalitarian, and absolutist tendencies, all deeply alien to Whig principles. The artists of the Society of Artists could contend that the king, in his support of the few artists who had initiated the formation of the Royal Academy, had infringed upon the freedoms of the rest of England’s artists. As Matthew Hargraves has cogently pointed out, the artists could hang their argument on Burke’s recently published Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, which articulated the creed of the Rockingham Whigs. In this light, it is significant that by this point Burke and Richmond had shared a long if tumultuous friendship.117 The situation between the two artists’ groups was no doubt aggravated by the fact that the Royal Academy had taken over, apparently illegally, the pedagogical equipment, including the plaster casts, of the St Martin’s Lane Academy.118 The Society of Artists, in contrast, did not have a formal school. George Stubbs, who had remained loyal to the Society of Artists and who was Richmond’s favourite artist, most likely effected the Society’s proposition to the duke, thereby securing a training venue for its students.119 By gaining access to the duke’s gallery, the Society could position itself as a legitimate rival to the Royal Academy. The duke, for his part, could wield his gallery as a sword in the political battles with George III. Richmond’s patronal challenge to the king did not end there. The Society of Artists, under Paine, pursued a plan to build its own rooms, and a fourstorey structure was built near the Strand at the Exeter Exchange in time for the May 1772 exhibition. The Society thus succeeded in outshining the Royal Academy, which was forced to rent exhibition space in a print warehouse on Pall Mall. (The academy was still housed in Inigo Jones’s crumbling Old Somerset House.)120 The dukes of Richmond and Northumberland, the latter having awarded Paine some building work, were invited to be the stewards at the grand opening of the new premises of the Society of Artists.121 However, despite the efforts of the Society of Artists, the Society could not, in the end, maintain a sustained rivalry with the Royal Academy. In the 1772 exhibition there was a large number of handcraft exhibits, such as hairwork and needlework, which lowered the tone of the exhibition for artists and connoisseurs alike. Several prominent artists previously loyal to the Society had also reduced their connections with the organization or had broken with it altogether, not least because of Paine’s cantankerous personality.122 Furthermore, the Society’s building, funded by a variety of loans, had run into financial difficulties attributable to the sharp economic downturn of 1773 combined with Paine’s removal of his security on the loans following

The 3rd Duke of Richmond | 123

his disgruntled resignation from the presidency in October 1772.123 George Stubbs, Paine’s successor, was forced to lease the Society’s exhibition space to James Christie, the auctioneer, a prospect that had been so unpalatable to the artists in 1759 that it had driven them to band together to avoid such circumstances. While the Society was beset with such troubles, no one seemed to be supervising the students in the duke’s gallery. Students had apparently not been heeding the prescribed opening hours, and they committed several other misdemeanours.124 The Society’s directors responded by issuing a threat of expulsion if any student was found to have damaged or removed any of the figures or if the regulations regarding opening times were not followed. The last straw came when “some young men … mutilated many of the statues by wantonly breaking off fingers, thumbs or toes. This naturally produced an exclusion of the innocent with the guilty” and the duke permanently closed the gallery to students.125 The duke may also have thought that the Society, now consumed with internal turmoil and suffering an eroding reputation especially vis-à-vis the Royal Academy, was unworthy of his further patronage. Indeed, by 1774, the duke had become so distant from the Society that he did not even know who was president and it could be that George Stubbs took his patron with him when he left the Society of Artists the following year.126 At this point, the duke evidently also still had misgivings about the Royal Academy. This was when he began to patronize George Romney in earnest. Romney, an established portrait painter who had studied at the duke’s gallery and who had returned from Italy in 1775, chose to throw his lot in with neither the Society of Artists nor the Royal Academy. The duke may well have been drawn to Romney’s unaffiliated status and independent spirit.127 The duke would continue to patronize artists: Romney and Stubbs received many more commissions and Angelica Kauffman would also benefit from the duke’s desire to commemorate his family. He also actively sought out family portraits and his most significant coup was the purchase, during the French Revolution, of Van Dyck’s immense canvas of Charles I, Henrietta Maria, and the infant Charles II, which still hangs at Goodwood.128 The duke, however, would never open his gallery to students again. The casts and copies languished in the gallery at Richmond House after a fire in 1791 destroyed much of the rest of the building.129 Ironically, that was the year of the last Society of Artists exhibition.130 Sometime after the fire, the duke approached the British Museum and made one last philanthropic gesture, offering, as Farington recorded, “to sell his collection of Statues to the Nation to be placed in the British Museum.” He still would not release them to the Royal Academy. However, “[the artist John] Northcote said the

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Trustees of the Museum were sure to oppose any scheme which proposed to alter their establishment,”131 referring to the trustees’ preference at the time for acquiring specimens of natural history, books, and manuscripts rather than sculpture. (This was at least five years before Townley left his collection to the British Museum.132) In the end, several of the marble copies went to Goodwood House and others were sold, including Wilton’s marble copy of the Apollo Belvedere, which was bought by Lord Bessborough in 1801. From there it found its way to Sledmere House in Yorkshire where it still stands on the landing of the main staircase.133 The subsequent life of the plaster casts is more difficult to trace. J.T. Smith thought that several of the casts ultimately did go to the Royal Academy, a belief that is corroborated by John Kenworthy-Browne, who has detected thirteen plaster casts in early drawings of the Royal Academy collection that may have come from the duke’s gallery.134 The duke’s principled zeal did not diminish as he aged. Rather, he just channelled it into other endeavours that were more consistent with his primary interests. His support for the American colonists was vociferous and his infamous act of sailing his yacht with the American colours on the masthead through the British fleet in front of the king off the coast of Portsmouth was really too much for the more reserved Rockinghamites to bear.135 More emphatically than the other Rockingham Whigs, Richmond supported the Americans’ claims of infringements upon their liberties and ultimately pressed for their independence. In 1780 he proposed a bill for universal manhood suffrage. Tabled at the height of the Gordon Riots, it found little support and his later toned-down yet still impassioned pursuit of parliamentary reform finally destroyed his already tenuous connections with the Rockingham Whigs and with Burke in particular. Hating Lord North, Richmond sided briefly with Lord Shelburne before reaching the conclusion that Shelburne had given up too much at the 1783 peace negotiations. Increasingly perceived as a cantankerous crank – although he was only in his fifties in the 1780s – the duke attended Parliament less often and focused his energies on the Royal Ordnance Survey to map all of Great Britain at one inch to the mile, an indispensable military defensive measure.136 By the early 1790s, the ailing king had reconciled himself to the duke, stating in reference to the duke’s work on the Ordnance: “There was no man by whom he has been so much offended, and no-one to whom he was so much indebted, as the Duke of Richmond.”137 Anxious to stay in Parliament, the duke saw in William Pitt the younger a man of comparable principle and he became one of the more experienced members of Pitt’s early cabinet. But the duke’s often public wrangling proved to be a liability and Pitt dismissed him rather unceremoniously from the Ordnance in 1795. From then on, the duke

The 3rd Duke of Richmond | 125

concentrated his energies on Goodwood, initiating the horse races there and hiring James Wyatt to build an enormous wing on the house which included the stunning Egyptian Dining Room.138

D

espite its brief and erratic history, the Duke of Richmond’s academy made a significant contribution to the shaping of English art education. Many of the students who drew at the academy would go on to become accomplished artists; among them were William Parry, William Pars (who with his brother Henry would take over Shipley’s school at the Society of Arts in 1760), Edward Edwards, Alexander Gresse, John Hamilton Mortimer, Tilly Kettle, George Romney, the miniaturist Richard Cosway, the medallist Lewis Pingo, and the seal engravers Nathaniel Marchant and Edward Burch.139 However, the real importance of the duke’s initiative lay in its potential. When it was opened in 1758, it came at a critical time in the forming of English taste. As the poet William Hayley wrote in his “Poetical Epistle to an Eminent Painter,” dedicated to George Romney: The youthful noble, on a princely plan, Encouraged infant art, and first began Before the studious eye of youth to place The ancient models of ideal grace.140 The sublimely beautiful ideal was central to the duke’s academy, as it was in English taste more broadly, in the heady years when Britain was on the verge of becoming a great empire. As empires of the past would offer inspiration, so too would the art of those empires. However, the duke’s personal and political ambitions would cloud a philanthropic vision that promised to bring inspiration to the young English artists of the time.

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figure 1.5 | James Gibbs, Colen Campbell, and William Kent, Stone Hall,

Houghton Hall, from 1722.

figure 1.6 | James Gibbs, Colen Campbell, and William Kent, Stone Hall with

François Girardon’s bronze copy of the Laocoön, c. 1690, Houghton Hall.

figure 1.7 | William Kent, Great Staircase with Hubert Le Sueur’s bronze copy

of the Borghese Gladiator, c. 1631, Houghton Hall.

figure 2.11 | Fitzwilliam Cabinet, Florentine pietra dura cabinet, probably early eighteenth century, adapted as a coin cabinet and supplied with a stand, c. 1770. figure 3.2 (opposite) |

Canaletto, Giovanni Battista Cimaroli, and Giovanni Battista Pittoni, Allegorical Tomb of Archbishop Tillotson, c. 1722–26.

figure 3.3 | View of the Fire-Workes and Illuminations at His Grace the Duke of

Richmond’s at White-hall and on the River Thames, on Monday 15 May 1749, 1749. figure 3.4 (opposite, above) | Canaletto, Whitehall and the Privy Garden from

Richmond House, 1746. figure 3.3 (opposite, below) | Canaletto, View of the Thames, from Richmond

House, 1746.

figure 4.1 | Humphry Repton, sketch of Donington Hall unimproved from the

southeast, 1790.

figure 4.7 | Joseph Wilton, bust of Francis Hastings, 10th Earl of Huntingdon,

1750s.

figure 4.10 (left) | Joseph Wilton, bust of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of

Chesterfield, 1757. figure 4.11 (right) | Joseph Wilton, bust of Oliver Cromwell, c. 1762. figure 5.5 (opposite, above) | Canaletto, View of Piazza del Campidoglio and

Cordonata, Rome, 1754. figure 5.7 (opposite, below) | Canaletto, St. Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1754.

figure 5.8 (opposite, above) | Canaletto, A View of Walton Bridge, 1754. figure 5.9 (opposite, below) | Canaletto, Interior of the Rotunda at

Ranelagh, 1754. figure 5.10 | Canaletto, Westminster Bridge under Repair, from the North, 1754.

figure 5.11 | Joseph Wilton, bust of Thomas Hollis, c. 1762.

figure 6.4 | Robert Adam, Sculpture Gallery, Newby Hall, c. 1767.

figure 6.9 | Johann Zoffany, Charles Townley and His Friends in the Townley

Gallery, 33 Park Street, Westminster, 1781–83.

4

The 10th earl of huntingdon and the arcadian plains of leicestershire I am instantly edifyed with your Pastoral Philosophy. Renouncing the frivolous bustle of the busy world, you seek, elegantly inglorious, the silver stream, the shady grove, and the flowing lawn; You are reviving the happy simplicity of the Golden Age, which many people have looked upon as fabulous, and the Plains of Leicestershire, will soon rival those of Arcadia. How uncommon, and how commendable is such Philosophy at your age.1

F

rancis Hastings, 10th Earl of Huntingdon, was twentynine when Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, praised him for the Arcadian retreat he had created at the family seat, Donington Park in Leicestershire (Fig. 4.1). Chesterfield, mentor to the young earl, recognized Donington Park for what it was, and what he wanted it to be: a refuge of the natural aristocracy, more consistent with the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century concetto of the country retreat than the Rockinghams’ exaggerated display at Wentworth Woodhouse or the younger Rockingham’s ultimate co-opting of it as a defining feature of his modern political persona. Likewise commensurate with the early eighteenth century, Donington Park was a sanctuary rife with Masonic allusion. Indeed, Huntingdon’s lengthy and distinguished ancestry was firmly intertwined with the history of Freemasonry in England. Legend had it that George Hastings, the 4th Earl of Huntingdon, was a grand master during the reign of Elizabeth I and Huntingdon’s upbringing, first by his father and then by Chesterfield after the 9th earl’s untimely death, reinforced the Masonic chain.2 Huntingdon’s nephew and heir, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, Marquis of

figure 4.1 | Humphry Repton, sketch of Donington Hall unimproved from the

southeast, 1790.

Hastings, later Earl of Moira, would also serve as grand master in the early nineteenth century. Yet for all of this, as we shall see, it remains unclear if Huntingdon was himself a Freemason, caught up as he was in negotiating – ultimately unsuccessfully – the turbulent social and political milieu of mideighteenth-century England.

T

he influences that played upon the young Huntingdon were far more variegated than may first appear and evidently more complex than those that shaped either the 2nd Marquis of Rockingham or the 3rd Duke of Richmond. Huntingdon descended from a long line of Royalists that had reached its apogee with the 3rd earl, the so-called “Puritan Earl,” during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, before steadily declining through the seventeenth century. In a bid to resuscitate the family honour and its claim to the lord lieutenancy of Leicestershire, the 7th earl, Theophilus, swung from Whig to Tory and maintained allegiance to James II, only to be relegated to the periphery after 1688 when he was charged with being a turncoat and a Jacobite.3 The 9th earl, also Theophilus and father of Francis, professed to be a Whig but his allegiance was soft; after breaking with Walpole’s administration over the Excise Crisis in 1733, rather than throwing his lot in with Viscount Cobham, the Earl of Chesterfield, and the other renegade Whigs,

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he chose to withdraw to Donington Park, ostensibly renouncing any clear political affiliation. Engaged in activities worthy of the natural aristocracy, he added a Palladian wing to an accretion of buildings that dated back to the sixteenth century and further enhanced his reputation as a linguist and classical scholar.4 However, there was considerable evidence that he and his wife, Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, fraternized with several Jacobite sympathizers during the 1740s.5 The countess’s outspoken condemnation of Robert Walpole – in 1739 she joined a dozen ladies of the landed gentry in denouncing Walpole’s pacifying stance on Spain by disrupting a sitting of the House of Lords, noisily heckling speakers whom they opposed6 – combined with her own notorious non-conformist spiritual wanderings – vacillating between Wesleyan Methodism and Whitefield’s Calvinism with samplings of mysticism and millenarianism – exacerbated the situation, although Theophilus himself had wearied early of such dalliances and remained a steadfast conformist.7 Ultimately, the 9th earl’s guilt was implied when he was summoned in 1745 to judge the Scottish lords who had been captured at Culloden. Already very anxious, he sought to obtain leave for reasons of his health. He succeeded but became increasingly despondent as news of the fate of the lords reached him, some of it via his two sons who were at Westminster and who wrote several highly descriptive letters to their parents about the trials and the frenetic anti-Jacobite climate in London.8 The gathering cloud perhaps precipitated the earl’s premature death at the age of forty-nine in October 1746. Near the time of his death, the 9th earl was wrought with anguish about the apparent real possibility that his estates would be confiscated, thereby destroying the Hastings’s family lineage altogether.9 In an effort to clear her husband’s name after his death, the countess deployed a number of tactics. Keeping the focus on the earl as a legitimate member of the natural aristocracy, she erected a very large monument in his honour in the family parish church at Ashby-de-la-Zouche, Leicestershire (Fig. 4.2). The lengthy inscription concentrates on Theophilus’s distinguished lineage, his erudition gained through classical scholarship and travel, and his principled removal from the gritty world of modern public life: Here lye the remains of The Right Honourable Theophilus Earl of Huntingdon, Lord Hastings, Hungerford, Botreaux, Moels, Newmarch, and Molins. If his birth deserved respect, his life deserved it more. If he derived his titles from a long roll of illustrious ancestors, he reflected back on them superior honours.

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figure 4.2 |

John Michael Rysbrack, monument to Theophilus, 9th Earl of Huntingdon (d. 1746), and his wife, Selena (designed by William Kent), 1749, Ashby-de-la-Zouche, Leicestershire.

He enobled nobility by virtue. He was of the first rank in both; good in every relation of natural duty and social life. The learning he acquired at school, he improved at Oxford, under the care of that excellent person, the late Bishop of Gloucester. Acquainted by his Studys with the characters of past ages, he acquired by his travels a knowledge of the men and manners of his own: he visited France, Italy, and even Spain. After these excursions into other Countrys, he settled in his own. His own was dear to him. No man had juster notions of the true constitution of her government; no man had a more comprehensive view of her real interests, domestic and foreign. Capable of excelling in every form of public life, he chose to appear in none. His mind fraught with knowledge, his heart elevated with sentiments of unaffected patriotism, he looked down from higher ground on the low level of a futile and corrupt generation. Despairing to do national good, he mingled as little as his rank permitted in national affairs. Home is the refuge of a wise man’s life; home was the refuge of his.10 Lengthy inscriptions tend to suggest that one doth protest too much. Furthermore, the countess had their old friend Viscount Bolingbroke, notorious Jacobite of the 1715 uprising, write the epitaph. Tactfully, the inscription is unsigned.11 After the 9th earl’s death, although Bolingbroke extended advice to the young Francis, the countess entrusted the mentoring of her elder son to the Earl of Chesterfield, who was above Jacobite suspicion although the countess did fear for her son’s soul in the face of such an ardent deist.12 A letter from Chesterfield to the countess pre-dating the death of the 9th earl implies that Chesterfield was already functioning in that capacity, perhaps at the request of the 9th earl in order to dispel any rancour directed at his son.13 Further to this end, Chesterfield would remove Francis from Christ Church, Oxford, which had been tarred with the Jacobite brush. The education of the young earl became something of a consuming passion for Chesterfield, his promotion to in loco parentis coming as it did just when Chesterfield, disgruntled with Newcastle’s machinations and tired over what he saw as the loss of integrity in the political realm, resigned from public office in 1748 and retreated to his suburban estate at Blackheath.14 Chesterfield set about grooming the new earl for a vaunted future, according to his unequivocal belief in the inherent right of the Whig natural aristocracy to govern the country. For him, Freemasonry was also at the core of this

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belief. Chesterfield was from a generation when Freemasonry was bound up with political ideology. As with many of his Whig compatriots, he found in Freemasonry a certain code of conduct, a standard of propriety and integrity that was wistfully wanting in the modern state of government under Walpole. In the making of the young earl, he sought to create, according to his terms, the model Whig aristocrat. In 1747 the Whig patriot poet and fellow Freemason Mark Akenside published an ode to Huntingdon, possibly at the behest of Chesterfield. Huntingdon was just eighteen years old and the purpose of the ode was to launch the young man into English society: O Hastings, not to all Can ruling Heaven the same endowments lend: Yet still doth Nature to her offspring call, That to one general weal their different powers they bend, Unenvious. Thus alone, though strains divine Inform the bosom of the Muse’s son; Though with new honours the patrician’s line Advance from age to age; yet thus alone They win the suffrage of impartial fame.15 He continued: Where empire’s wide establish’d throne No private master fills: Where, long foretold, the People reigns: Where each a vassal’s humble heart disdains; And judgeth what he sees; and as he judgeth, wills. Here be it thine to calm and guide The swelling democratic tide; To watch the state’s uncertain frame, And baffle Faction’s partial aim: But chiefly, with determin’d zeal, To quell that servile band, who kneel To freedom’s banish’d foes; That monster, which is daily found Expert and bold they country’s peace to wound; Yet dreads to handle arms, nor manly counsel knows.16

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These stanzas are preceded by several that celebrate Grecian oligarchical democracy in contrast to the degeneracy of ancient Rome under imperial rule, a thinly veiled swipe at the compromised state of contemporary English politics.17 Akenside went on to reinforce the young Huntingdon’s antiJacobite stance, aligning Jacobite support with those who were caught up in self-interest: Say, was it thus, when late we view’d Our fields in civil blood imbru’d? When fortune crown’d the barbarous host, And half the astonish’d isle was lost? Did one of all that vaunting train, Who dare affront a peaceful reign, Durst one in arms appear? Durst one in counsels pledge his life? Stake his luxurious fortunes in the strife? Or lend his boasted name his vagrant friends to cheer?18 Akenside’s ode articulated Huntingdon’s place in the world and reaffirmed the natural Whig aristocracy as the true leaders of the country: a natural oligarchy fending off imperial autocracy on the one side and new monied interests and the political aristocracy – the “swelling democratic tide” – on the other, while countering the constant threat of partiality inherent in faction. To help form the young earl, Chesterfield penned hundreds of letters to his charge, proffering endless advice on behaviour, ambition, and politics. Unlike the exactly contemporaneous stream of missives on similar subjects that Chesterfield sent to his natural son, Philip Stanhope, the letters to Huntingdon were written with the deference befitting an earl.19 Taken as a whole, the letters form a compendium that coincide with modes of education and behaviour appropriate for a good Whig governed by common sense and a zeal to do good for his country. Chesterfield was circumspect in every detail, including addressing Francis’s thinly disguised tolerance of his mother. Chesterfield, who himself put up with the countess’s evangelical dalliances with gentlemanly amusement, regularly urged Huntingdon to write to his mother for the sake of his own character and outward appearances: “My concern is only that you may appear blameless. One must sometimes sacrifice a little to appearances.” “Your character … must not have that little speck, which the least coldness between your mother and you would throw upon it, in the opinion of the majority.”20 By 1749, Chesterfield was so

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pleased with the results of his efforts that he wrote to Huntingdon claiming that the young earl’s “edifice is so solidly founded, and so strongly built, that [he had] nothing now to think of but the ornaments”;21 he was “the bright exemplar of the union of a scholar with the man of the world.”22 In short, Chesterfield saw him as the paradigm of the Castiglione/Peacham/Shaftesburian virtuoso. An extended grand tour would provide the ornaments and the polish and so Chesterfield organized a lengthy stay on the Continent that began in 1749 and took Huntingdon to Flanders and Holland (where Chesterfield had served as ambassador at The Hague from 1728 to 1732) as well as France, Spain, and Portugal. Huntingdon returned to England for a short period in 1753 before setting off on an Italian grand tour that lasted about eighteen months.23 A steady stream of letters followed Huntingdon around the Continent. Chesterfield recommended that Huntingdon study foreign governments so as to be better informed of the benefices of the English system. To this end, he facilitated introductions to such illustrious individuals as Voltaire, Bernard le Bovier de Fontennelle, Charles Pinot Duclos, Frederick the Great, and the king of Spain.24 Chesterfield also passed comment on foreign manners and customs and continued to emphasize proper deportment and dress, even touching on the subject of women, encouraging the young man to gain some experience.25 Conscience of his own foibles, having fathered his son by a young French woman, Chesterfield warned Huntingdon away from French dancing and theatre girls since they were “vilifying and dangerous.”26 Huntingdon, however, could not resist and a liaison with Louise Madeleine Lany, the principal dancer of the Paris Opera, produced a son, Charles. He promptly ignored Lany and continued his womanizing, admitting that his lack of constancy was “unluckily rooted in my nature,”27 although he ultimately acknowledged his son and gave him a position, essentially duplicating what Chesterfield had done in his own life. Huntingdon would never marry. Chesterfield’s preoccupation with manners, deportment, and dress evidently turned out a young man consummately aware of outward appearances. During his first Continental tour, after some time in France, Huntingdon moved on to Madrid where Sir Benjamin Keene, the British minister in residence, warned him to lose his “Frenchness” if he were to make his way in Spain.28 In the brief interlude in 1753 between his two Continental tours, Horace Walpole identified Huntingdon, and Lord Stormont, as “much in vogue.” Walpole thought Stormont “very lively and agreeable” while he found Huntingdon more reserved in behaviour yet “most cried up” in dress.29 It was about this time that Huntingdon commissioned a portrait of himself from Reynolds in which he wears a vivid blue silk waistcoat and coat, the latter of

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figure 4.3 | Joshua Reynolds, Francis Hastings, 10th Earl of Huntingdon, 1754.

which is embellished with gold galloon braid, fur lining, and upturned sable sleeves (Fig. 4.3). The extravagance and formality were unusual for an English gentleman of the period and more in line with Continental fashions, especially that of Russian nobility who, in their efforts to adopt Western dress, indulged in “heaps of gold and silver lace” beyond even the worst excesses of Parisian style.30 In the process of designing the silk coat, Huntingdon had

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his brother rummage through the wardrobe of the Russian ambassador in London to find a precedent for the ermine he was determined to use for the lining.31 Yet Chesterfield’s man also demonstrated some substance behind the proclivity for fancy dress. Horace Walpole guardedly thought Huntingdon “to have sense but I should think not extreme.”32 Mann, by contrast, was effusive after he met Huntingdon in Florence in 1754, writing to Walpole: We have [a …] rising genius here in Lord Huntingdon, who will most certainly make a great figure. He has parts equal to anything he undertakes, and a perseverance that surmounts all difficulties. He has acquired great knowledge of the world in his travels, with that very easy politeness that distinguishes those who have kept the best company, at the same time that the learned find him perfectly well-acquainted with every part of literature that the best education furnishes. He has learned Italian to a surprising degree of perfection in a month, and which he studies for three hours every morning, and then passes as many more with Doctor Cocchi at his medals, after which he stays til past four in the [Grand Duke’s] Gallery, to examine the statues and busts with Wilton. In short, he takes the best method to succeed in everything he set about, and with all this application he loves dress; so that in every article I think he is made to shine with great goût and ease. I seldom mention any of the English to you, because so few are ever worth mentioning, except for their absurdities; but Lord Huntington [sic] and his friend Lord Stormont, with your friend Colonel Conway, are such glaring instances of merit and parts as cannot pass anywhere unobserved.33 In response, Walpole changed his initial appraisal of the young earl and decided that he “was a man of parts, great good breeding, and will certainly make a fine figure.”34 With characteristic paternalism, Chesterfield guided Huntingdon away from the temptations of Florence: You are now My dear Lord at the seat of Arts, though perhaps not of Sciences, Florence, and by the pains you take to be a Virtuoso, I venture to pronounce that you will be Virtuosissimo, for you will always excel in whatever you undertake. A taste of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music, is both an ornament and an amusement to a man of sense. But when carried by fools and blockheads into pedantry and

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affectation, becomes a just and inexhaustible object of ridicule, and that is commonly the case of most of our travelling countrymen. As they have more money than taste, or manners, they lavish it equally ill in their Virtu and in their vices. The antiquities they purchase are often more modern than their mistresses.35 Chesterfield’s condemnation of the typical vacuous grand tourist was only slightly stronger than his criticism of the members of the aristocracy who had demeaned themselves, as far as he was concerned, by acquiring too much knowledge of the mechanical parts of architecture: “You may soon be acquainted with the considerable parts of Civil Architecture, [yet] for the minute and mechanical parts of it, leave that to the masons, bricklayers, and Lord Burlington, who has, to a certain extent, lessened himself by knowing them too well.”36 For Chesterfield, an aristocrat should restrict his interest in architecture to an enlightened, aesthetic level rather than actually engaging in the practice. Burlington had upset the balance appropriate for the Shaftesburian gentleman. In light of this, Chesterfield also put a stop to Huntingdon’s musings about travelling to the Levant: “The wild arabs in Egypt, and the Ignorant Slaves of Greece, are infinitely below your notice, and unworthy of the time they would take up. The broken Pyramids, and ruined Temples of those desolated Countrys, are below your attention, except in Copper Plates, which they are able to be seen with full as much advantage, and with much less time, trouble and danger.”37 Such armchair study of antiquity firmly placed him with an older generation that was not caught up, like Lord Charlemont and his contemporaries, in the youthful enthusiasm for the new fashion for exotic travel and archaeology. Yet, at the same time, Chesterfield recognized the value of empirical study. With respect to Rome he told Huntingdon: “Rome deserves a winter’s residence upon account of the inanimate remains of it’s antient lustre, and the shameful degeneracy of the present animated race (if they deserve that name) from their illustrious ancestors of 1700 years ago. A degeneracy, the natural result of civil and religious tyranny. They are now a nation of fiddlers, pipers, dancers and id genes omne, a ridiculous travesty of old Rome.”38 Chesterfield used the comparison between past and present to heighten the august pre-eminence of antiquity and guard against degeneracy and depravity wrought by Catholic tyranny. Huntingdon evidently heeded Chesterfield’s advice and, like his fellow high-ranking peers (Lord Malton and the Duke of Richmond specifically), maintained an erudite distance from the hands-on practice of archaeology. Besides observing various forms of government, he studied languages, at

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which he was particularly adept, viewed the ancient sites from a respectable distance, engaged in numismatic study of ancient coins and medals, and seems to have confined his artistic patronage to four painted views of the Arno by Thomas Patch and the acquisition of several copies, casts, and all’antica sculptures.39 Huntingdon’s appreciation of classical statuary was approved of by his old tutor, Robert Hennington, who lived at Donington Park: Your Lordships [letter] from Florence gave me great pleasure; much more pleasure than Information; since I never doubted of the two great points on which it runs. Your Industry & aptness to master the Italian language, & your excessive admiration of the ancient sculpture. Tho’ I cannot wonder at this, because I expected it. Yet I feel a great pleasure in reflecting how happy you must be to realize the Ideas you had before taken upon trust, for the certainty of which you had no security but the testimony of antiquity. Its well these monuments of Industry & Genius are still remaining; for not only the proof of their skill in Statuary depends upon them, but by analogy, a fair inference is drawn of their equal skill in painting and musick.40 Huntingdon bought one lot of classical statuary from Joseph Wilton, with whom he had spent many hours examining the sculptures in the Grand Duke’s collections, reproductions of the Wrestlers, the Arrotino, the Venus de’Medici, the Faun, the Idol, another Venus (probably the Crouching Venus), Sansovino’s Bacchus, numerous medallion busts of Roman emperors, a bust of Plautilla, busts of Seneca and Cicero, and a bust of Pan.41 Wilton’s surviving receipt is undated but it must date from early 1755, after Huntingdon had arrived in Florence for the first time and before Wilton departed for England in May.42 While none of the statues and only some of the busts appear in any of the surviving inventories from the late eighteenth century for Donington Park or Huntingdon’s other properties, it is likely they were installed throughout the house. The Palladian gallery built by the 9th earl would have been an appropriate venue for the statues, as the library was for the busts. Ancient sculpture and classical texts were mutually self-referential, the busts giving physical embodiment to the word, somewhat in the manner of Joseph Spence’s Polymetis.43 Preceding examples include university libraries such as Trinity College, Dublin, or All Souls College, Oxford, and libraries in private homes such as Holkham Hall and Dr Mead’s or Chesterfield’s house in London.44 In Chesterfield’s library, consistent with his penchant for using

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figure 4.4 | Louis François Roubiliac, bust of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl

of Chesterfield, 1745.

antiquity to point to the foibles of the modern world, he paired a bust of himself, carved by Louis-François Roubiliac in 1745 in a severely naturalistic all’antica mode, with an antique bust of Cicero that he had recently acquired, thereby presenting himself (Fig. 4.4) as the modern Cicero, a man of

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figure 4.5 | Joseph Wilton, bust of Dr Antonio Cocchi, 1755. figure 4.6 | Bust of Pythagoras, copy of Greek original, mid.-fifth century bce .

unwavering political integrity within an administration that had sunk into self-serving ambition and depravity.45 Like the country house of the natural aristocracy, the library was a venue to display virtù and humanitas, a liminal space, a sanctuary, retreat, and place of self-imposed exile amidst the debauchery of the modern world. Huntingdon’s imperial busts were a mix of good and bad emperors: Tiberius, “Antino” (probably Antoninus Pius), Agrippa, Claudius, the young Nero, Hadrian, Vespasian, Augustus, Galba, Plautilla, another Nero, Vitellius, Titus, Otho, the young Marcus Aurelius, Trajan, Caligula, Julius Caesar, Domitian, Geta, and another Marcus Aurelius.46 If Huntingdon’s busts of Seneca and Cicero were in the same room as the Caesars, their presence would have provoked a wry commentary on the pitfalls of imperial rule. Just as Chesterfield paired his bust with that of Cicero, Huntingdon engaged in an elaborate recondite concetto, likely formulated with his Florentine mentor Antonio Cocchi, in which he paired a bust of himself with one

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figure 4.7 | Joseph Wilton, bust of Francis Hastings, 10th Earl of Huntingdon,

1750s. figure 4.8 | Bust of Epicurus, Roman copy of a Hellenistic portrait,

c. 275–250 bce .

of Epicurus and a bust of Cocchi with one of Pythagoras. The two pairs were installed in the drawing room at Donington Park, an intimate liminal space comparable to the library. The busts of Huntingdon and Cocchi were carved by Wilton and the bust of Pythagoras and likely that of Epicurus were carved by Simon Vierpyl, probably both after examples in the Stanza de’Filosofi in the Capitoline Museum which, in turn, had come from Cardinal Albani’s collection (Figs. 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, and 4.8).47 (Both the Pythagoras and Epicurus copies are lost.) Cocchi had proven to be another strong tempering influence on the young Huntingdon. Chesterfield, who had met Cocchi in London in the 1720s, provided Huntingdon with a letter of introduction to the aging scholar, admonishing the young man to make good use of him.48 The letter of introduction was a mere formality since Cocchi had known the young earl’s father well,

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having travelled to London at the behest of the 9th earl in 1723 and continuing a long correspondence with him from the time Cocchi returned to Florence until the earl’s death.49 Cocchi’s diaries record many meetings with the younger Huntingdon, far more than with either Lord Malton (the future Marquis of Rockingham) or the Duke of Richmond.50 He was also evidently impressed enough with Huntingdon to facilitate his membership in 1755 in the Florentine Accademia degli Apatisti (the Academy of the Dispassionates), so-named as an indication of the members’ commitment to studied reason. The Apatisti was originally founded in 1631 for Tuscan and foreign scholars of the humanities, arts, and sciences.51 Milton, for one, was an early member. One of the features of the Apatisti was the use of an anagram or pseudonym to conceal one’s identity.52 This, combined with the fraternal tone of such a gathering, would have appealed particularly to those, like Cocchi, who were of a Masonic turn-of-mind. Indeed, such academies and clubs would have provided legitimate alternatives for fraternal gatherings after Freemasonry was banned by Clement XII in 1738.53 Cocchi seems to have found in the son of his deceased friend a young Englishman with whom he could engage in intellectual virtù with a dash of Masonic content; he appears to have been an equal partner in, if not the progenitor of, Huntingdon’s concetto.54 That concetto was infused with esoteric wit, pairing old age and youth, abstemiousness and aestheticism. Cocchi’s great hero was Pythagoras, the “ancient friend and Brother” of the Masons, father of geometry, and advocator of heliocentrism.55 In fact, in the spirit of the Mason’s duty to restitute ancient truths, many of Cocchi’s polymathic interests centred around elucidating Pythagoras’s allencompassing moral philosophy. As a medical doctor, Cocchi was particularly drawn to the supposed beneficial premises promised by Pythagoras’s vegetarian diet. In 1743 he had published a lengthy treatise (eighty-four pages) entitled Dell Vitto Pitagorico per uso della medicina. Two years later it was released in London in English as The Pythagorean Diet of Vegetables Only, Conducive to the Preservation of Health, and the Cure of Diseases. The treatise was a promotion of the ability of the Pythagorean diet to “cure Diseases and Corpulency, as well as gross Habits and clouding of the Senses and Understanding, by the Use of a sparing Diet upon chosen kinds of Food, and a total Abstinence of Wine.”56 The premise of the Pythagorean diet as recounted by Cocchi was linked to physiological theories, new to the eighteenth century, of the benefits of a diet that enhanced “fluid transport” in the bodily system.57 Accordingly, Pythagoras, and Cocchi, advocated a diet that was dominated by fruits and vegetables and a total rejection of wine, which increases “the Cohesion and glutinous Quality of our vital Fluid” and dis-

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turbs the operation of the nerves,58 in favour of pure water, milk, honey, and juices. An overabundance of dried pulses should also be avoided because they absorb too much necessary fluid upon which the body depends.59 Cocchi’s radical diet – avoidance of meat and alcohol-free – was extraordinary in the eighteenth century, although not without precedent. One of Cocchi’s regular English correspondents was George Cheyne, whom he had probably met while on his London sojourn and who was also connected with the Huntingdons. Cheyne had become a cult figure in his promotion of the medical benefits of an ascetic diet. His life story was almost legendary. He had arrived in London from Aberdeen in 1701 only to fall prey to the luxuries of the city, ultimately weighing in at thirty-four stone (478 pounds) and wallowing in nervous anxiety and self-pity. At the depths of his despair he took radical action and forsook meat and alcohol to subsist on a diet of milk, “Seeds, Bread, mealy Roots, and Fruit.”60 The resultant weight loss and physical and mental improvement became the vehicle by which he satisfied his craving for fame. He opened clinics in London and in newly fashionable Bath and his Essay of Health and Long Life (London, 1724) became an instant best-seller, running through twenty-four editions, while The English Malady; or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Distempers (Dublin, 1733) went through at least six.61 Guided by the writings of the European mystics and early Christians as well as by the Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay, the founder of French Freemasonry, he tapped into the human desire for self-betterment and presented his dietary regimen as a holistic cure not just for the individual but for all the ills of society. Cheyne’s holistic approach, underscored with his eschatological views, was consistent with Masonic thinking. He was also an ardent Jacobite and Tory who interwove a critique of Walpolean luxury in his condemnation of social decline. His theories and prescription for good health and good society resonated with many who believed that the modern world had sunk into depravity and debauchery. Among his many admirers were John Wesley, who approved of Cheyne’s temperance, and Selina, Countess of Huntingdon.62 As a young man Chesterfield was also briefly a client of Cheyne until he deemed the man’s theories folly.63 Cheyne could well have inspired Cocchi to publish his thoughts on the Pythagorean diet. Cocchi’s essay is very much of the same genre. It begins by situating Pythagoras’s diet within the context of his moral philosophy of a measured, abstemious, and hygienically pure lifestyle so that “the Whole of human virtue may be reduced to speaking the Truth always, and doing Good to others.”64 However, what distinguishes Cocchi’s moral philosophy

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from that of Cheyne is that Cocchi’s was grounded in the natural sciences while Cheyne’s was largely guided by early Christianity and mysticism, consistent with their preferred brands of Freemasonry. In terms of the diets, the primary difference was the emphasis Cocchi placed on the value of vegetables; while Cheyne was ascetic, Cocchi was merely abstemious. Wilton’s bust is a clear testament that Cocchi practised what he preached. The bust presents an older man (Cocchi was sixty when the bust was made) with little fat, well-defined features, and a moderately sagging neck, all of which are accentuated by the stark baldness and the lack of drapery around the shoulders (Fig. 4.5).65 This is the first known bust by Wilton from the life and it is startling in its seeming verisimilitude, right down to the large wart on the back of Cocchi’s neck.66 This accords with the then current belief that ancient philosophers were portrayed in a naturalistic manner, and also evoked Cocchi’s abstemious lifestyle, rather in the manner of the severe bust of Pythagoras in the Capitoline collection, presumably the source for Vierpyl’s now lost copy. The severity of the bust implies the stern and austere nature of the ancient philosopher (Fig. 4.6). Wilton’s bust of Huntingdon is likewise seemingly very life-like, although, like Cocchi, he is presented all’antica, wigless and sporting a fringed toga clasped at the shoulder with an elaborate brooch, consistent with Huntingdon’s penchant for fancy dress (Fig. 4.7). Huntingdon’s bust is paired well with the antique bust of Epicurus also at the Capitoline that was likely the source for Vierpyl’s copy (Fig. 4.8).67 Epicurus was a fitting companion for Huntingdon on his grand tour, a time when he was expected to experience life and indulge in new and varied pursuits. In contrast to Pythagoras’s strict daily routine of “measuring the Quantity of Victuals, and of Drink, of Exercise, and of Rest,”68 the Epicurean doctrine of voluptas – controlled hedonism – corresponded with the acquisition and development of refined taste which was at the very core of the rationale for a grand tour. Huntingdon’s interest in Epicurus might have been motivated by the discovery of a bronze bust of Epicurus in the library at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. Like many grand tourists, Huntingdon had spent several weeks examining the excavations in late 1754.69 Shortly after he returned to Florence he and Cocchi formulated their concetto. There was some youthful impudence about Huntingdon’s appreciation of Epicurus. Appreciation of, and adherence to, Epicurean philosophy had peaked among English courtiers in the years following the Restoration, only to be condemned around the turn of the eighteenth century as scandalous and amoral. Epicurus’s voluptas was miscast as sinful self-indulgence in a Protestant Christian world, rather than its true meaning of finding pleasure

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in variety.70 In Masonic thought Epicurus also did not play as central a role as Pythagoras but Huntingdon’s choice of Epicurus nonetheless resides comfortably within the Masonic domain. Epicurus’s concept of atomism allied well with Pythagoras’s reason-based philosophy, which in turn coincided with both deist and Masonic thinking. Epicurus also proposed a fluid form of government that rejected absolute authority, consistent with the Masonic emphasis on egalitarianism and something that particularly appealed to John Locke, whom the Freemasons claimed as one of their own. At the very least, the concept of an academy of equals shrouded in esoteric secrecy – whether Epicurus’s academy at Athens or Pythagoras’s school at Croton – would have been alluring. The Epicurean pursuit of indulgence would also have been attractive to Freemasons of a more libertine turn-of-mind who enjoyed living vicariously beyond the laws that governed and moderated society. Furthermore, Epicurus was esteemed among those Freemasons who favoured self-imposed exile, in luxuriant sanctuaries untainted by the corruption and depravity that beset modern society and politics. Of particular note in this respect is Sir William Temple, who published in 1685 Upon the Gardens of Epicurus; or, Of Gardening. This is one of the strongest Epicurean tracts in English history.71 Disillusioned with the corrupt court of Charles II, Temple advocated retirement from political life since the stress of living in such an amoral and unscrupulous environment was incompatible with one’s serenity. The forty-three-page tract begins with an account of the need for gardens for the sake of tranquillity of the soul and cites the origins of gardens and ancient philosophical precedent. It then elaborates on garden design (the regular design favoured in Europe versus the irregular design of the “Chineses”), the merits of fruit trees, and the problems of insect infestations. It concludes with reiterating the efficacy of such retreats; Temple pointedly stated that he had not gone once into town since he resolved five years earlier “of never entering again into any public employments.”72 Temple’s descendant, Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham, also invoked the Epicurean position at his beloved Stowe. As a testament to his superior virtue and dignity, his wife, Ann, and his nephew and heir, Richard Grenville (soon to be Earl Temple), erected a huge column with a statue of Cobham on top at the eastern end of the garden after Cobham’s death in 1749. Modelled after a classical Pharian lighthouse, the all-seeing Masonic eye sits at a nodal point overlooking the Grecian Valley and the Elysian and Hawkwell Fields (Fig. 4.9).73 Around the base of the column was engraved a Latin verse from Cicero’s De Officiis: Ut L. Luculli summi Viri Virtutem quis? At quam multi Villarum Magnificent iam imitati sunt? This was translated in Benton Seeley’s

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figure 4.9 | James Gibbs, Lord Cobham’s Pillar (1742), seen from the Temple of

Concord and Victory, Stowe.

contemporary guidebook to Stowe: “How many have imitated the magnificence of Lucullus’s villas! But how few have aspired to emulate his virtues!”74 Lucius Licinius Lucullus was the first-century bce Roman general who, relieved of his political duties after attempting to reform the corrupt Roman administration in Asia, retired in Epicurean serenity to his villas near Frascati and Naples, where he spent lavishly on his library, on delicacies, and on art. His gardens, modelled on Persian precedents that he had seen while on his Asiatic campaigns, were renowned and considered among the most exquisite of his day.75 Frederick, Prince of Wales, also a Freemason, reaffirmed the connection between Cobham and Lucullus by intending to pair busts of the two men along the path to Mount Parnassus in his ill-fated plans for Kew.76 Huntingdon’s own father’s purposeful retreat from public life to Donington Park in the 1730s offered an immediate precedent to the young earl and Chesterfield’s advice to his charge was essentially Epicurean at its core: the

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pursuit of education balanced by controlled pleasurable indulgences. Chesterfield also revelled in the efficacy of studied removal, first in the liminal space of his library in Chesterfield House and later, as his hearing and health deteriorated, at his seat at Blackheath.77 Indeed, his retirement to Blackheath resonates with Cicero’s removal to Tusculum. The busts of Cocchi and Huntingdon also prompted a reading of venerable old age in contrast to the esprit of youth, a fitting tribute by the student to the mentor. This was reinforced by the inscriptions Cocchi and Huntingdon each chose for the base of their busts. In a letter to Huntingdon in July 1756, as Huntingdon was making his way home to England, Cocchi proposed his inscription: Per la base del mio busto si potrebbero scrivere davanti querte lettere ΑΝΤΩΝIΟΣ ΚΟΚΧIΟΣ. Ξ, che è il numero degli anni aimè sessanta, e lateralmente alle destra ΟΥIΛΤΩΝ ΕΠΟIΕI ΑΨΝΕ, e alla sinistra ΓΗΡΑΣΚΩ ΔIΔΑΣΚΟΜΕΝΟΣ . (“For the base of my bust there should be written after my name the number 60, which alas is my age, and on the side at the right Wilton made [it] 1755 and on the left [the motto:] I learn as I grow old.”)78 The motto is derived from Solon, another Greek statesman who advocated a form of oligarchical government.79 Carved on an oblong medallion, the motto is surrounded by a serpent eating its tail, a symbol of the medical profession as well as eternity and perseverance. Huntingdon’s bust, meanwhile, is inscribed with “ΖΗθI” (“live”) and the motto “ΛΟΓΩΝ ΚΕΦΑΛΑIΟΝ,” also in an oblong medallion but minus the serpent, while his name and age in Latin are inscribed around the base of the socle. Huntingdon’s motto, chosen with the help of Cocchi and which is probably the one Mann found to be “very hack,”80 roughly translates as “the summation of the argument” and recalls the oratorical battles between Aeschines and Demosthenes, at the heart of which was the protection of Athenian liberty. Aeschines was yet another Grecian who retired from what he felt had become a corrupt political realm.81 The drawing room at Donington Park thus became a highly animated space, where the four busts must have seemed engaged in conversation, especially with the gestural turn of the head in the busts of Huntingdon and Cocchi. Chesterfield was evidently mightily impressed. After he visited Donington Park in 1757, he commissioned a bust of himself from Wilton to go with the earlier one by Roubiliac in the library at Chesterfield House (Fig. 4.10). Wilton’s bust is even more startling than Roubiliac’s in its seemingly uncompromised naturalism, with the animated turn of the head, craggy cheeks and nose, baggy eyes, and squiggly veins. This older Chesterfield was now a modern Cato sequestered alongside Cicero in the library, away from the vice and corruption of the outside world.82

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figure 4.10 | Joseph Wilton, bust of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, 1757. figure 4.11 | Joseph Wilton, bust of Oliver Cromwell, c. 1762.

Elsewhere in Donington Park, Huntingdon, presumably again with the input of Cocchi, continued to indulge in witty esoteric exercises that were rife with Masonic allusion. In the Stone Passage immediately upon entering the house, visitors were greeted by busts of Augustus Caesar and Julius Caesar. The former was considered the grandest of grand masters while the latter had instituted the Julian Calendar (the basis of the Masonic calendar, the Gregorian Calendar having only come into use in England in 1752) and developed Ceasar ciphers, which held great appeal to the cryptography-obsessed Masons.83 These now-lost busts were copies of originals that were in Rome; the copy of the Augustus was probably by Vierpyl and that of Julius Caesar by Harwood.84

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From the Stone Passage, visitors moved into the Gothick Hall, a former low-ceilinged chapel that the Countess of Huntingdon had “improved” while her son was in Italy, much to his dismay.85 There sat marble busts of Peter the Great and Oliver Cromwell. The bust of Cromwell was made by Wilton while Wilton was still in Florence, probably inspired by the Cromwell death mask in the Bargello (Fig. 4.11).86 The Cromwell bust is an extraordinary performance by Wilton. Clad in seventeenth-century armour – one might conclude based on this that the now lost bust of Peter the Great was in early eighteenth-century military garb – Cromwell has a jaunty turn of the head, the wind catching his long hair and scarf. He has a bulbous nose and loose malleable jowls while a receding hairline shows a heavily creased brow. A large wart sits above his right eyebrow. In short, he is portrayed in the manner he apparently wished: “warts and everything as you see me,” in contrast to the early seventeenth-century aristocratic predilection for Van Dyckian idealization.87 While the authorship of the bust of Peter the Great has gone unrecorded, it was likely also done by Wilton given the strong naturalism it apparently portrayed.88 John Throsby, who saw the Peter the Great bust in 1789, stated that “it is esteemed a good likeness; it may be so, and I think is a good piece of sculpture; but Lavater would have been puzzled to have found the marking lines in his countenance, denoting his greatness: It seems a good butcher’s face.”89 The reference to Johann Kaspar Lavater, the late-eighteenth-century Swiss philosopher who founded physiognomics (the “science” of determining character based upon facial features and the form of the body), is salient given Huntingdon’s, Cocchi’s, Chesterfield’s, and Wilton’s interest in expressing the character of the person portrayed. Huntingdon had already demonstrated his interest in Russia, at least in terms of fashionable dress, and Peter the Great was generally admired by the English, who were taken with his obvious appreciation for England and the English navy on his famous visit in 1698.90 By 1758, several favourable biographies had been published in Britain of the emperor, who, despite his tyranny, was intent on civilizing the “the rude and barbarous kingdom” that had been Russia, inspired, as many English thought, by England itself.91 One of the most popular English biographies of Peter the Great was written by the Freemason poet John Bancks (or Banks). His The History of the Life and Reign of the Czar Peter the Great, Emperor of All Russia, and Father of His Country ran through three editions, published in 1740, 1755, and 1756.92 Furthermore, as far as Freemasonry is concerned, legend has it that Sir Christopher Wren, thought to have been a grand master, had initiated the emperor into Freemasonry while he was in England and that Peter had started a lodge in Finland in 1717. Peter’s personal seal is inspired by the

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Pygmalion myth and as such is redolent of Masonic inference. It shows the mason-king hewing the rough stone into the ideal female form, a suitable allusion to his massive initiatives at social reform in Russia which in turn paralleled English/Masonic social evolution in the eighteenth century.93 At first rub, pairing the enlightened yet tyrannical emperor with Oliver Cromwell at Donington Park seems rather odd, yet it is entirely in keeping with Huntingdon’s and Cocchi’s arcane and witty juxtapositions in the drawing room. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Cromwell, even more than Peter the Great, had become a popular figure. Amidst the political strife and concern for Walpole’s autocratic tendencies, Cromwell’s reputation was significantly rehabilitated. For example, Isaac Kimber’s The Life of Oliver Cromwell was published in 1724 and ran to four editions by 1735.94 Some, like the radical Whig Thomas Hollis, were more extreme than others in their admiration. As we shall see in the next chapter, Hollis obsessively collected anything related to Cromwell – tracts, prints, paintings, busts, cameos, and so on – and oversaw the publication of Cromwell’s life by William Harris in 1762.95 More typical were the moderate Whigs who identified Cromwell’s moral and patriotic virtues. In addition to prints, paintings, and other visual mediums – the 2nd Marquis of Rockingham owned a paste medal of Cromwell96 – at least six marble busts of Cromwell other than Huntingdon’s were commissioned by a range of Whig patrons to grace their halls, libraries, and drawing rooms.97 Even the young George III acknowledged positive traits in Cromwell, calling him “a friend of Justice and Virtue,” and he also greatly admired Wilton’s bust when he saw it in 1761, presumably at the Society of Artists Exhibition in London.98 Cromwell’s virtuous zeal for governmental and social reform would have endeared him to the Freemasons. In the year before Bancks published his life of Peter the Great, he had released A Short Critical Review of the Political Life of Oliver Cromwell, which was 206 pages long. By 1755 it had run to four editions. Also, the Abbé Larudan published a long treatise in 1747, Les Francs-Maçons Ecrasés, in which he claims, with seemingly factual detail, that Oliver Cromwell was the founder of modern Freemasonry. Cromwell, he says, was driven to form the secret society one evening in 1648 so as to counter the monarchical assault on liberty and equality.99 While Freemasons unequivocally discount Larudan’s theory, it may have enjoyed some currency for a few years after its initial publication. For Huntingdon at least, it seems to have had some resonance even if simply in the arcane pairing of the republican with the enlightened despot. The inscription in Latin on the base of the Cromwell bust, laudent ea facta minores, which translates roughly as “Let the lesser folks praise these deeds,” seems to further connect

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the two busts in dialogue.100 (Unfortunately, the inscription on the bust of Peter the Great, if there was one, does not survive.) Huntingdon probably also enjoyed the fact that Cromwell had been born in the town of Huntingdon in nearby Cambridgeshire, and, as well, the inclusion of Cromwell likely had deep irony for Huntingdon since his ancestors were ardent Royalists. From the Gothick Hall at Donington Park, the visitor moved into the dining room, where a bust of Pan sat in a niche above the door.101 As the god of Arcadia, his presence defined the rural retreat that Huntingdon aimed to achieve. In terms of Freemasonry, the idea of the half-man, half-goat, originally derived from Pan, had through time come to be associated with the devil. In the eighteenth century it was put forward by the detractors of Freemasonry to portray Freemasonry as a heretical endeavour, yet, perversely, Freemasons took up the practice of “riding the goat” as part of their initiation ceremonies.102 Huntingdon seemed to share that same sense of perversity, as indicated by his affection for Cromwell. Furthermore, the seven pipes of Pan’s mystical syrinx have strong occult associations. After the dining hall, the visitor moved past the “best staircase” into the drawing room, where Huntingdon and Cocchi communed with Pythagoras and Epicurus. Nearby was the library, where, perhaps alongside the imperial busts, were nine landscape paintings, of which four were probably Patch’s views of the Arno, a portrait of Frederick, King of Prussia, and a half-length portrait of Galileo.103 Frederick the Great, whom Huntingdon had met on his first European tour, had been initiated into Freemasonry in 1738 and Galileo, while not a Freemason per se, was greatly admired by the Freemasons, particularly those of the Tuscan lodge, given the Pythagorean affinities with Galileo’s theory of heliocentrism.104 Indeed, Cocchi was one of a group of Tuscan and Pisan professors and clergymen who had exhumed Galileo’s remains in 1737 from his meagre burial place beneath the campanile of Santa Croce. Some of the group could not resist souvenirs and removed one of the thumbs, two fingers, a molar, and one of the lumbar vertebrae from the corpse – Cocchi ended up with the vertebra – before the body was reinterred in Santa Croce, this time under a grand monument as impressive as any in the church.105 The Masonic tropes at Donington Park enhanced the sense of liminality and atemporality of Huntingdon’s sanctuary, as did the location deep in Leicestershire, sequestered in a valley. Huntingdon had, according to Chesterfield, created a place of studied removal worthy of Arcadia.106 Huntingdon’s Arcadia, in Chesterfield’s mind, corresponded entirely to the vaunted political future that Chesterfield had laid out for his protégé. He had assiduously engaged in some serious place hunting for Huntingdon while the

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figure 4.12 | William Chambers, Joseph Wilton, Giovanni Cipriani, and others,

The Royal State Coach, 1762.

young earl was in Italy. Consequently, upon Huntingdon’s return in 1756, he took up the position of master of the horse to the Prince of Wales (the very post that Lord Rockingham had refused to accept as an expression of his loyalty to the Duke of Newcastle). In 1760, after the prince ascended the throne, Huntingdon, with characteristic self-assuredness, if not temerity, flung himself at the feet of the new king, saying that he would “seek no other protector to save him from the disgrace of not taking the great but natural step from Master of the Horse to the Prince to Master of the Horse for the King.”107 George III chose him over George Granville Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Gower, who was the incumbent and Bute’s preference.108 Shortly thereafter, Huntingdon was also appointed groom of the stole after Lord Bute had given up the post. In this capacity Huntingdon was charged with the arrangements for the coronation and carried the Sword of State at the actual ceremony.109 As Groom of the Stole, he also oversaw the building of the king’s new state coach (Fig. 4.12). Of the artists involved, Huntingdon had probably first met Chambers, Wilton, and Cipirani while he was in Italy. The design

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of the coach was likely a joint effort between the artists and Huntingdon, with input from the king and Lord Bute.110 In contrast to the dowdy closed black box that had been built for Queen Anne, the new coach was an effervescent display of carving, painting, and gilding that bespoke the promise of the new patriot king and Britain’s supremacy after the successes of the annus mirabilis. It was also an extraordinary exercise in flamboyance, something that must have appealed to the splendidly sartorial young earl.111 Two gilded tritons at the front of the coach heralded the king’s approach while the king, sitting in the highly fenestrated cab, was the centrepiece of a visual splendour that included Britannia attended by Victory, Religion, Justice, Wisdom, Valour, Fortitude, Commerce, and Plenty, along with other panels showing personifications of Industry, Ingenuity, the Liberal Arts and Sciences, History, Fame, Peace, Neptune, and Amphitrite. The coach cost a staggering £7,562.4.3½, over seven times the cost of the new coach for the lord mayor of London constructed just five years before.112 When the coach was first used at the opening of Parliament in November 1762, drawn by six white horses, people hired window space along the king’s route and the streets were packed with an unprecedented number of onlookers.113

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et Huntingdon’s place was not absolutely assured. Soon after he joined the royal household, Walpole reported to Mann that the prince had ignored Huntingdon on at least one occasion at court.114 Deeply offended, Huntingdon had retreated, sulking, to Donington Park. In 1761 he had an altercation with Lord Ashburnham over giving the king his shirt, and, within weeks of being made groom of the stole, he had managed to alienate all of the lords at court: “Lord Huntingdon has raised a flame in the bed-chamber, wh. Will at last destroy him … [he] has made all the lords his enemies, who seem agreed to dispute with him every point, and will at last drive him out of his place.”115 In another effort to outdo his peers, he burst forth to announce to the king that the queen had given birth to a fine girl, when in fact it was the future George IV.116 The king’s annoyance with him was further heightened when one of Huntingdon’s subordinates had become involved in a duel.117 Finally, the family-proud Huntingdon must have aggravated the already tenuous relationship when, in 1766, he launched a claim to a royal dukedom on the basis of his descent from the Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV. He was not successful.118 Beyond his ceremonial sinecures, these petty squabbles and attempts at personal and familial promotion mark the extent of Huntingdon’s active involvement in the political and public realm during the 1760s. Behaving in a manner consistent with his father before him and further inculcated in

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him by Chesterfield, he stayed away from the tumultuous factional realignments that would beset the Whigs throughout that decade. Nevertheless, his nominal ties to Bute and the king made him a “king’s man” in the eyes of most contemporary Whigs, even after he took a political stand, albeit a passive one, against the undue interference of the crown in the Middlesex election crisis of 1769–70. In January 1770, after the collapse of the Grafton ministry, Huntingdon was dismissed from his post as groom of the stole, “not for,” as Walpole noted, “having joined the enemy, but merely for having absented himself ” from the House of Lords. The perception, however, if we use Horace Walpole as our source, was that Huntingdon “has played the fool, he has no strength of his own, and had no support but the King’s and so he falls unpitied.”119 Huntingdon retreated to Donington Park, rarely to emerge again. He would die suddenly in 1789. Since he was unmarried and childless, except for his natural son, the estates devolved to his nephew, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, Marquis of Hastings, later Earl of Moira. In the next decade, Hastings tore down the agglomeration of buildings at Donington Park and built a fine neo-Gothic house. He also became grand master of the Modern Masons. The political act of self-removal that Huntingdon had studiously embraced belonged to another, earlier, generation. By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, such aloofness meant isolation and lack of influence in the increasingly fractious world of factional politics. For the natural aristocracy to succeed, they had to wage battle in what had become a much grittier and much more public political realm, as Rockingham and Richmond made abundantly clear. The country house was now the exemplar – embodied in Wentworth Woodhouse in particular – of this evolution in politics. Huntingdon was more in line with the previous generation, hardly surprising given the potency of his mentors. Disaffected by the imperfect modern world, he sought refuge in his beloved Donington Park where he could commune with the ancients in an atemporal Masonic setting. Horace Walpole’s acerbic description of Donington Park after he visited it in 1768 – “a disagreable park [with] a miserable house, small & placed in a hole”120 – accords with his, and his generation’s, ultimate view of the earl as a man of little import.

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5

thomas hollis and His life plan

An Englishman, A Lover of Liberty, the Principles of the Revolution & the Protestant Succession in the House of Hanover, citizen of the World.

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his is how Thomas Hollis often described himself on the flyleaves of sumptuously bound volumes of republican and radical Whig tracts that he regularly presented anonymously to deserving individuals and institutions. In contrast to Huntingdon, Hollis was anything but a soft Whig; he proselytized his particular brand of Whig ideology according to a carefully calculated life plan. As such, he unwittingly pointed to the fragmentary nature of Whiggery as it splintered apart and struggled to come together in the third quarter of the eighteenth century amidst a shifting societal paradigm. Unlike Huntingdon, Rockingham, and Richmond, Hollis was not of the natural aristocracy. He was of the rising bourgeoisie, men of such wealth that they owned property and did not have to work for a living. Yet Hollis was anything but the stereotypical parvenu who would acquire the trappings and deportment perceived to be essential for a man of gentlemanly stature: a country seat filled with paintings, sculptures, prints, and other objets d’art, elaborate parties, well-connected and beautiful wives, political office, and even, at times, a modicum of classical education. By contrast, Hollis was a lifelong bachelor who lived in a suite of rented rooms in London, dined regularly at a few favourite taverns and coffee houses, was an avid walker about town, shunned most social frivolities, and was an obsessive admirer of Oliver Cromwell, John Milton, and a range of Restoration-era Whig thinkers. In all these respects, he was

emphatically anachronistic in contrast to Rockingham, Richmond, and Huntingdon. He was also richly conversant in the classics and compulsively commissioned books and reissued other books as well as tracts and pamphlets on a prodigious scale in order to disseminate his concept of Whiggery. At the same time, his obsessive nature drove him to collect – coins, medals, gems, seals, vases, bronzes, sculptures, cineraria, sarcophagi, paintings, and books. He was the consummate virtuoso yet his pedantry, coupled with his political ardour, rendered him not a Shaftesburian virtuoso par excellence but ultimately an ideological, and ineffectual, antediluvian zealot.

H

ollis heralded from a wealthy non-conformist (Baptist and Calvinist) merchant family that had been early supporters of Harvard College in New England, among other dissenting initiatives. At a young age he inherited a substantial fortune and became a property owner by buying a substantial estate in Dorset at the age of twenty-one in 1741 from the debt-ridden Earl of Pomfret.1 On his two successive grand tours in 1748–49 and 1750–53, he began to acquire one of the most idiosyncratic collections of the eighteenth century. Although fully cognizant of the power of display, he chose not to build a grand country house and fill it with his collection but rather gave many objects away while keeping the rest in the rented rooms in which he lived in London. The rooms must have been crammed in the manner of Sir John Soane’s house a generation later. Much of what we know about Hollis comes from Hollis himself via his diaries, which survive in the Houghton Library at Harvard, and from the Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, a ponderous 537-page volume plus 426-page appendix, written by his friend and fellow dissenter Francis Blackburne and published in 1780.2 In addition to his own reminiscences, Blackburne used Hollis’s diaries and Hollis’s travel journals from his Italian tours as source material (the latter are no longer extant), as well as Hollis’s letters and his many squibs, several of which were published in the London Chronicle and the St. James Chronicle, the primary Whig mouthpieces of the day. Hollis was an ideologue in the truest sense of the word. In 1754, shortly after he returned from Italy, he formulated his “plan,” as he called it, to disseminate his Whig principles, and with few exceptions he strictly adhered to his plan for the next sixteen years. Each year on his birthday he assessed his progress. Unfortunately, he never fully laid out the plan in his diaries and Blackburne is no more helpful. However, Hollis recorded on his birthday in April 1759 that he “like[d] the plan of my collection more than ever. – In honor to Liberty, Science, Art, and ingenious men. O may the general plan not derogate from this.”3 This, combined with the wealth of documentation

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about Hollis and the range and preferences apparent in his collecting habits, gives a strong sense of that plan. Since Hollis took up the colonists’ side in the American Revolution and since he was obsessed – this is not too strong a word – with Oliver Cromwell, John Milton, and many of the Commonwealth writers, he was, and is, often perceived as a republican. This was not the case. He fundamentally believed in the balanced order of king, lords, and commons and was committed to the principles of the Hanoverian Succession, as he regularly enunciated in his flyleaf dedications. Blackburne’s Memoirs, published after Hollis’s death in 1774 and at the height of the American crisis, is also largely a repudiation of Hollis’s supposed republicanism.4 Hollis became disenchanted with royalty only when “a knave or a fool with a title of a king,” that is, George III, disrupted the balance of a mixed government and refused to give the American colonists their due rights.5 With profound weariness he resigned himself to disseminate his Whig principles longer than he had anticipated because of the king’s insouciant behaviour.6 In contrast to Rockingham, Hollis’s concept of Whiggism was not grounded in party. Once, when asked what would be the best qualities of a clergyman, after irreproachable morals, a “mild and tractable disposition,” and moderate learning, Hollis said the man should “undoubtedly be a whig in its most extensive sense, that is, an advocate for the civil and religious rights of mankind, without being actuated by the narrow views of a party.”7 For him, Whiggery was apolitical; it was a moral code of conduct. In the role of a gentleman, Hollis saw himself as a facilitator who promulgated Whig principles, rather than an agent provocateur in the manner of John Wilkes or his favourite Whig author, Catherine Macaulay. Consistent with this position, other than his squibs, Hollis did not write his own polemic. He let the authors of the past and of his time stake out his Whig ideology. In terms of defining his Whig precepts, the writings of Robert Viscount Molesworth provided Hollis with his primary template. Molesworth had pursued a tumultuous political career through the changeable English and Irish parliaments around the turn of the eighteenth century, always claiming adherence to Whig principles. As an author, he further articulated the Country Whig precepts of his compatriot ideologue, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. Molesworth defined the tripartite system of government of monarch, lords, and commons with its inherent checks and balances. He also believed in religious toleration – he was himself a dissenter – as long as religion did not interfere with government, thus his, and Hollis’s, antipathy to Roman Catholicism. Furthermore, Molesworth advocated frequent parliamentary elections in which the representatives were property holders, thereby

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theoretically preventing place selling and other forms of corruption, and he promoted militias over standing armies as yet another way to thwart potential tyranny.8 In Hollis’s appreciation and deep admiration for Molesworth and, by extension, Shaftesbury, he drank from the same cup as Rockingham, Richmond, and Huntingdon. For all, Whiggery was about the ideology of liberty. For the natural aristocrats, Shaftesburian Whiggery entrenched their hereditary position and inherent right to leadership. Yet for Hollis, the toleration inherent in Shaftesburian Whiggery, as put forth by Molesworth, allowed for the emergence of, and made room for, the gentry class, including dissenters. Like Molesworth, Hollis had risen from mercantile stock to property owner, and for both men, as well as the natural aristocracy, property was the fulcrum that determined social and political status. Hollis also loved Cromwell and Milton for their unequivocal pursuit and evocation of British liberty. As far as the former was concerned, Hollis was able to distinguish between Cromwell’s conquest of monarchical autocracy and his descent into tyranny. In this sense Hollis joined, and greatly promoted, the revival of appreciation for Cromwell in the third quarter of the eighteenth century.9 Milton, meanwhile, had always been one of Britain’s great worthies for the Whigs. Molesworth, Cromwell, and Milton were joined in Hollis’s Whig firmament by many more historical and contemporary stars including Algernon Sydney, Andrew Marvell, John Locke, John Hampden, James Harrington, William Pitt the elder, George III – at least at the beginning of his reign – Catherine Macaulay, and John Wilkes. Hollis’s diaries and some less than flattering contemporary characterizations – Samuel Johnson called Hollis “a dull, poor creature as ever lived” – render him a painfully boring ideologue who occasionally treated himself to a night at Ranelagh Gardens.10 His serious and intellectual temperament was best suited to the Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Society, and that expansive and largely Whig endeavour, the Society of Arts. The places where he regularly dined, such as the New Exchange and the Young Devil coffee houses and the Horne Tavern, were frequented by members of the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society.11 While not a Freemason – he pointedly told a Frenchman in 1748 that he was not12 – he was acquainted with many Freemasons through the social circles in which he operated; the membership lists of the Royal Society and Society of Antiquaries were rife with Freemasons and the Horne Tavern is known to have been the site of several lodges.13 Freemasonry was incompatible with Hollis’s dissenting predilection yet he had much in common with Masonic thought and practice – an intense dislike of Roman Catholicism (perceived as a constant threat to liberty), interest in Newtonian natural science and philosophy, and a fond-

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ness for print media, emblems, numismatics, and effigies. Hollis may also have found the clubbish and cultish atmosphere of the Craft repellent given his strong independent predisposition, evident in his pedantry and singleminded pursuit of his ideals. Hollis’s singular appreciation for certain historical figures verged on the sycophantic. In addition to tracking down any and all writings by his heroes, he sought out biographies and acquired any type of object that bore their likeness: medals, coins, gems, pastes, engravings, busts, and paintings. These, in turn, provided him with models for the commemorative portrait prints and medals that he would commission in great number. For him, viewing the effigies meant aspiring to his heroes’ greatness. In a letter to a friend he wrote: “For on what I can presume, when I behold on the effigies and reflect on the lives and actions, not only of those antient Greeks and Romans, heroes of the utmost size and dignity, but even of several of our countrymen yet almost breathing, such as Newton, Boyle, Locke, Algernon Sydney, the divine Milton and others? And yet, though humbled, I am always animated by it to walk after them in that path of virtue, that path through which they ran, they flew.”14 In the case of Cromwell and Milton, Hollis also made pilgrimages to the villages where they grew up, visited their homes, and searched out their descendants.15 He even acquired the bed in which Milton supposedly died and had a dedicated “Milton cabinet” filled with Miltoniana.16 The tangibility of these objects functioned almost as talismans for Hollis, warding off the dangers of absolutism and assaults on liberty. In his espousal of his Whig ideology, Hollis engaged in a form of exemplum that differed from that of Rockingham and Richmond and of the natural aristocracy in general. Unlike his aristocratic compatriots, his plan did not hinge on personal display. Indeed, in keeping with his dissenting views, he had an almost puritanical dislike of personal display, seeing in it intimations of profligate self-aggrandizement.17 Despite his considerable financial resources, he chose to live in rented rooms in London until his retirement to his Dorset estate in 1770 and even then his home was a modest farmhouse that would have been considered rudimentary at best by aristocratic standards. At times he also lived in rooms, which he had also purchased, above the Three Cups Inn in nearby Lyme Regis.18 Rather, Hollis’s concept of exemplum was grounded in much more overt acts of dissemination through text and image. Of the books, tracts, and pamphlets written by his favourite Whig authors, he reprinted them, inserted new title pages that he had designed, and bound them in exquisite bindings impressed with a range of idiosyncratic emblems referring to peace, wisdom, economic wealth, and liberty: owls, cocks, olive branches, palm branches, daggers, Aesculapian

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wands, caducei, Herculean clubs, tridents, cornucopias, harpies, lyres, Britannias, and caps of liberty.19 Hollis also commissioned engraved portraits of his Whig or Whiggish heroes and either enclosed them with the texts or issued them as separate prints. On 30 June 1762 Hollis recorded in his diary that he had dispersed compleat sets of prints from all of my plates to the following persons. The Countess of Northumberland, The Earl of Macclesfield, The Earl of Bath, Lord Romney, Lord Lyttleton, Lord Chief Justice Pratt, The Bishop of Rochester, The Bishop of Bristol, The Bishop of Carlisle, Thomas Pitt Esq. Rod. de Valltraves Esq. Robert Webb Esq. Joseph Wilton Esq. William Chambers Esq. James Stuart Esq. Richard Long Esq. Dr. Smollett, Joseph Wilcocks Esq. William Lloyd Esq. Charles Lloyd Esq. Joshua Reynolds Esq. Wm Hogarth Esq. Mr. Major, Dr. Birch, The Society of Antiquities, Owen Russhead Esq. John Upton Esq. Mr. Charles Wray, Mr. Umfreville. Lyde Browne Esq. Dr. Dela Cour, Mr. Edward Brent, Allan Ramsay Esq. Dr. Morton, Dr. Maty, Dr.Gifford, Dr. Campbell, Dr. Askew, John Spencer Colepeper Esq. Dr. Chandler, Dr. Lardner, The Rev. Mr. Caleb Fleming.20 Medals were another favourite medium of dissemination, and in this respect he either commissioned or oversaw the commission of many that celebrated victories in the Seven Years’ War, George III’s coronation, and other important events of the day, as well as medals that simply commemorated his Whig heroes. According to eighteenth-century standards of decorum, such vigorous dissemination might descend into vulgarity. Hollis, new to the landed gentry, of mercantile stock, and a non-conformist, seemed acutely aware of this danger. He did not want to be perceived as a kind of political hack such as John Wilkes, of whose personality he was ambivalent, although greatly applauding his actions.21 By giving away his books, tracts, prints, medals, sculptures, paintings, and other objects as gifts, he circumvented at least some aspersions of vulgarity. A gift was a magnanimous gesture and thus the gift giver was free of condescension; the act of gift giving was entirely socially acceptable.22 Also, through the distribution of his gifts under the cover of anonymity, any further taint of vulgarity could be dispelled. Although the unique bindings or the inscriptions accompanying Hollis’s gifts invariably gave him away, the veneer of anonymity preserved Hollis’s gentlemanly dignity. Similarly, all of his squibs were published either anonymously or pseudonymously.23

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Hollis’s personal commitment, in conformance with his plan, not to run for political office is also indicative of his penchant for anonymity and his desire to preserve his gentlemanly status. For the natural aristocracy, serving in Parliament was a natural right, but for men of Hollis’s stock, actively engaging in the political forum was a career. Hollis also perceived active political life as no less than a sop to compromise, which was utterly alien to his stalwart adherence to principle. This distaste may have been occasioned by his lack of ability, as Blackburne wrote, to “get into parliament in the manner he wished” upon his return from his grand tour. This then prompted him, according to Blackburne, to begin “his collections of books and medals for the purpose of illustrating and upholding liberty, and preserving the memory of its champions.”24 Nevertheless, Hollis was privately flattered by his friends’ encouraging him to stand for election.25 In accordance with his plan, he also refused to hold any other type of public office, turning down, for example, the vice-presidency of the Society of Antiquaries and the chair of the Foundling Hospital in 1759.26 Hollis did not distribute his gifts indiscriminately, again a sign of his gentlemanly stature as well as his perception of himself as a political facilitator. He was extremely selective as to who or which institution was to receive his favour. The individuals who benefited from his largesse included the young George III, aristocrats, politicians, writers, artists, and connoisseurs. In terms of institutions, Hollis had a few particular favourites. Carrying on the tradition his grandfather had begun by instituting professorships in mathematics and natural philosophy at Harvard College, Hollis made Harvard the primary recipient of his munificence.27 He was also especially impressed with the religious toleration for non-conformists (not Roman Catholics) in New England.28 When much of the Harvard library was destroyed by fire in 1764, Hollis’s gifts took on even greater import as he became that institution’s primary benefactor; he donated literally thousands of books, many with his signature bindings.29 On the Continent, Hollis regularly donated his imprints to the public library in Zurich and the university library in Berne, two other cities that had long non-conformist histories. In England and Scotland, he gave many books to universities that admitted dissenters. Hollis would also frequently make donations to the British Museum. Founded in 1753 “for the benefit of the public,” the museum encapsulated his Whig concept of education and enlightenment.30 In addition to the gifts of books and prints, Hollis occasionally bestowed upon the museum some of the objects he had collected, cognizant of the potential benefits inherent in display in the public realm. As Haskell and Penny have pointed out, “sculptures in the British Museum clearly stood a better chance of achieving

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figure 5.1 | Probably French, model of the Laocoön, late seventeenth or first

half of the eighteenth century.

international celebrity than those in private houses whether in London or the country – a fate so obscure, according to a German visitor to Italy, that they might as well never have been excavated.”31 Among the gifts Hollis proffered were a red wax statuette of the Laocoön (Fig. 5.1), a view of Lake Ariccia by Richard Wilson, a plaster bust of Seneca, a medal commemorating Milton, a satirical anti-Jesuit print, and his book and tract collection

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on Milton. The museum refused the last two items on the basis that the museum’s collecting mandate at that time did not include prints, books, and tracts. Hollis redirected the Miltonian collection to Christ Church, Cambridge, Milton’s alma mater.32 Since gift giving is a form of philanthropy, Hollis’s practices coincided with the general trend for philanthropy at mid-century, particularly among people with Whig proclivities who deemed such honourable pursuits consistent with the maintenance of liberty. In addition to gift giving, Hollis participated in more standard forms of philanthropy. He served as governor at both Guy’s and St Thomas’s hospitals but refused, upon being asked, to become a director, again avoiding full involvement. He also became a guardian of the Asylum and of Magdelen House for repentant prostitutes, the latter established by Hollis’s fellow gentleman Whig Jonas Hanway. Hollis also gave generously to Hanway’s Marine Society and his Committee for the Relief of French Prisoners of War (set up to show the magnanimity of the British), both ventures associated with the Seven Years’ War.33 Yet Hollis would direct most of his philanthropic zeal to the Society of Arts.34 The Society would have appealed to his Whig sensibilities, dedicated as it was to improving British products and occupations as diverse as fine arts, commercial dyes, and rat catchers, combined with its implicit support of the British colonies and colonial expansion. It was through the Society of Arts that Hollis engineered the commissions for many of the medals commemorating the victories of the Seven Years’ War. In many respects, Hollis heralded from the same social plain in English society as men such as Richard Mead, William Stukeley, William Lock, Lyde Browne, and Charles Townley. It was a rather nebulous plain where untitled men, some of them new to the landed gentry, could command respect or occasionally interact and converse with the aristocracy, regardless of the lack of distinction of their birth or their religious affiliations. People of this ilk could never be part of the true social elite but they were also not denigrated as parvenus. By the middle of the century, there were several venues like the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries, the Society of Arts, the Foundling Hospital, and Freemasonry where the social divides could be transcended.35 Within the Society of Arts, for example, Hollis served alongside the Duke of Richmond on the Committee of Polite Arts, which oversaw the medal commissions and awarded præmia to the artists who drew after the statues in the duke’s gallery.36 Hollis also enjoyed the occasional night out at Ranelagh Gardens, which was frequented by the aristocracy.37 Pointedly, he avoided the more gauche Vauxhall Gardens across the river.38 He attended a few oratorios, heard the Messiah twice (the latter mainly to see the new young king

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and his consort), and occasionally went to the theatre where he was particularly amused by Samuel Foote’s satires. Hollis also regularly attended the art exhibitions of the Society of Arts, the Society of Artists, and, later, the Royal Academy, all venues that cut across class distinctions.39 The artists with whom Hollis worked were also those favoured by the aristocracy and the king: Wilson, Jenkins, Wilton, Cipriani, Chambers, Stuart, and Adam, among others.40 These artists, like many of their patrons, including the king, were young and on the cutting edge, augurs of a new classical style in English art. Indeed, Hollis, rather like William Lock, saw himself as a mentor to several of these young men. In this respect, Hollis’s two letters to a “young painter, at Rome,” dated August 1753 and January 1754 respectively, after he had returned from his own grand tour, may have been formative for either Wilson or Jenkins, one of whom was likely the recipient. In the letters, consistent with his pedantry, Hollis gave precise instructions that combined a careful study of nature with knowledge of the old masters and the reading of “the best poets for ideas, and the best writers of the lives of celebrated artists for judgement.” He gave detailed directions for the execution of three landscapes: “one a landscape, where trees, a few cattle, and a piece of irregular still transparent water, make the principal objects; with a clear sky above. Another, where a river appears as in motion, with a bridge over it, a building on one side of it; both bridge and building being of regular architecture, and with a clouded sky, terminating in a storm. A third, a view of a sea-port, the water calm, with papal shipping, some houses, and the country appearing at a distance to be painted from the real objects themselves.”41 It is unknown if these pictures were ever painted. Beyond the artists, societies, theatres, and exhibitions, Hollis’s numismatic interests also brought him into the orbit of the aristocracy. He regularly supplied the Duke of Devonshire with coins and medals, for which he received an annual gift of a side of venison (which he always gave away), and occasionally acted as an agent for Lord Rockingham in the same capacity. To both he gave presentation copies of Anthony Lefroy’s Catalogus numismaticus Musei Lefroyani, published in 1763.42 Hollis also presumably came into contact with Lord Huntingdon in conjunction with the design of the king’s state coach in the early 1760s (see Fig. 4.12). Although there is no firm evidence to indicate the two men ever communicated, Hollis proffered significant advice regarding the design of the paintings on the cab (see below). Hollis and Huntingdon also had mutual friends in the future Unitarian minister Theophilus Lindsey and the Whig poet Mark Akenside.43 One of Hollis’s favourite epithets was “O Fair Britannia, Hail,” which he had borrowed

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from Akenside’s 1744 poem “On Leaving Holland,” and it was to Akenside that Hollis made a gift of Milton’s bed.44 Hollis was an example of what could be achieved according to the general Whig insistence on education. On the one hand, the promotion of education was a way to bolster liberty, and, on the other, it also created and perpetuated the nebulous parallel plain of the untitled but profoundly erudite gentleman.45 As we know, a proper education in the eighteenth century was dominated by the study of the classics, and in Hollis’s case, in contrast to Rockingham, Richmond, and Huntingdon, Hollis was redirected to a classical education only once he had inherited his fortunes at the age of eighteen; prior to that he had been on course to follow a mercantile career.46 After he gained his inheritance, he studied at Gresham College, which was the dissenters’ college of choice, and his tutor there was Dr John Ward, professor of rhetoric. Presumably it was from Ward that Hollis discovered and honed his deep admiration for his favourite authors. Consistent with Hollis’s sycophantic personality, his interests went far beyond the page, for, as William Bond notes, there are distinct similarities between Milton’s tract On Education, in which Milton advocates the study of the classics and languages along with exercise and a moderate diet, and Hollis’s own educational progress and rigorous daily regime. In addition to learning five languages and acquiring a profound knowledge of the classical authors and political philosophy, Hollis was an avid fencer and an inveterate walker, often walking around London for several miles a day or from Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the stables at Hyde Park to ride his beloved horse.47 Hollis’s connoisseurial preferences coincided with his classical literary education. John Ward seems to have guided Hollis toward antiquarian interests before he left on his first grand tour in 1748.48 Immediately upon the cessation of the War of the Austrian Succession, Hollis set out on an eighteen-month tour to Genoa and Milan with his friend Thomas Brand, owner of The Hyde in Ingatestone, Essex.49 This was followed in 1750 by a three-year trip to Venice, Rome, Naples, Sicily, and Malta, then back to Rome and up to Verona, Genoa, and Milan, again meeting up with Brand for the latter part of the trip in 1752.50 Unfortunately, the journals Hollis kept on both trips have been lost, but a list that he wrote of thirty-three names of people he either met or wished to meet survives on the flyleaf of an anonymous guidebook, Roma Antica e Moderna, published in 1750 (which he later gave to Harvard as a gift).51 Some of the Italians he met and with whom he would continue to correspond include Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Francesco Algarotti, and fellow

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numismatist Abbé Filippo Venuti. At Hollis’s request, Venuti wrote De dea liberatate, a “dissertation upon all those medals, Greek, Roman, or pontifical, which relate, or are supposed to relate to Britain,” which Hollis published in 1762.52 Hollis wanted to meet Albani, which he may have done; however, there is no reference to Hollis in Albani’s surviving correspondence in the Staatsarchiv, Vienna. Although Hollis’s name does not appear in Cocchi’s diaries, Hollis probably met Cocchi in Florence, evidenced by the fact that years later Hollis gave the British Museum a bronze medallion commemorating Cocchi that was probably the one cast by Antonio Selvi in 1743.53 Cocchi and Hollis likely discussed their mutual interest in numismatics and Hollis may have heard one of Cocchi’s lectures on cameos and medals that he gave in the Uffizi. Hollis also knew well the gem collection of Philipp von Stosch, which he held in high esteem.54 In terms of the English in Italy, Hollis presumably met Horace Mann, although again there is no firm evidence of this; and he met Joseph Smith during a three-month stay in Venice, put off by Venetian excess but intrigued by the “amours” of the place, “where a person’s private character and morals are little regarded, provided they do not affect the state.”55 He also met and subsequently corresponded with the British residents in Messina, Naples, and Malta. Beyond the British residents he was wary of fellow English travellers; several years later he advised William Taylor Howe that “English Company, English Customs, English Dress, English Houses, English Retainers, for the general to be avoided in Italy.”56 Like many of the erudite tourists, Hollis was caught up in the archaeological fervour of the time. He sent Ward detailed accounts of the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum and also subscribed to Stuart’s and Revett’s proposed publication. (He would send Stuart’s prospectus to Ward.)57 After his return to England he met Robert Adam and was an early and enthusiastic subscriber to the Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro, for which he designed the title page (see Fig. 5.14).58 Hollis was also an early patron of Richard Wilson and Thomas Jenkins, maybe having met the former in Venice.59 Once in Rome, he commissioned a portrait from Wilson which is the only portrait that Wilson is known to have painted while he was in that city. In it, Hollis is dressed in a fine silk coat and gazes out with an expression that reveals his good-natured disposition (Fig. 5.2). The broad expanse of chest with the comparatively puny wig and blank background accentuates Hollis’s massive frame; Cipriani, who also first met Hollis in Rome, described him as Herculean in size – he was over six feet tall – and strength.60 Thomas Jenkins, who lodged at the same house as Wilson in the Piazza di Spagna, executed a now lost portrait of Brand in

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figure 5.2 | Richard Wilson, Thomas Hollis, 1752.

the same year which may have been a pendant.61 In what would become characteristic of Hollis, he gifted the portraits to the chaplain at Livorno.62 Hollis also commissioned two landscapes from Wilson, A Landscape of the Grotto in the Villa Madama, inscribed on the back “painted on the spot in the open air,” and A View of Lake Albano. These are two early examples of Wilson’s shift to the classical landscape genre, thus reinforcing the possibility

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figures 5.3 and 5.4 | Andrea Pozzi, Thomas Hollis and Thomas Brand Hollis,

1752.

that Hollis, like Lock and Ralph Howard, was a potential influence in shaping Wilson’s career path.63 Two other grand tour souvenirs that Hollis commissioned are entirely more idiosyncratic than the painted portraits and landscapes. These are two small ivory bas-relief pendant portraits of Hollis and Brand, executed by Andrea Pozzi to commemorate Hollis’s birthday on 14 April 1752.64 The portrait of Hollis shows him in three-quarter view but instead of wearing contemporary clothing he is bare-chested and without his wig (Fig. 5.3). Thomas Brand, on the other hand, is rendered in profile with delicate features and contemporary dress, including a long wig with thick curls above his ears (Fig. 5.4). The pendants are both inscribed fecce dal natural (“made from life”) on the front. No doubt meant to be a contrast between the classical and the contemporary, the trope is not all that successful since Hollis’s portrait is a rather weak example of the natural all’antica,

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perhaps a result of Hollis’s fastidious involvement in the design process. The pendants contrast the effete with the masculine and suggest a homoerotic dimension to the relationship between the two young tourists. The preciousness of the ivory and the small scale of the portraits further reify the intimate nature of the two men’s friendship. Indeed, Hollis’s future devotion to Brand, as we shall see, and Hollis ultimately making Brand his benefactor and heir – Brand would change his name to “Brand Hollis” – attests to the strength of their relationship, homoerotic or not.

A

fter Hollis returned from Italy in 1753 he rented rooms in the house of Mrs Mott in Bedford Street, Covent Garden. There he hung the two landscapes by Wilson as well as a series of six paintings he had commissioned from Canaletto in 1754–55.65 Canaletto had been in London since 1746, with the exception a brief return trip to Venice in late 1750 and early 1751 where he might have met Hollis through Joseph Smith. Canaletto also probably came highly recommended by Thomas Brand of The Hoo – as opposed to Thomas Brand of The Hyde (they were first cousins) – who had acquired four vedute from Canaletto while on his first grand tour in 1738– 39.66 Only one of Hollis’s paintings by Canaletto has an Italian theme. It is a view of the Piazza del Campidoglio and Cordonata (Fig. 5.5). In terms of subject matter, it complemented Wilson’s paintings, and its comparatively tight composition offers a pleasing contrast to Wilson’s panoramic scenes. The Campidoglio was the seat of secular civic government in contrast to the other nominally Catholic sites in Rome and thus would have more appeal for Hollis. Notably, the statues of Castor and Pollux, who were the great defenders of liberty against tyranny, are prominently displayed at the top of the Cordonata in the painting. Hollis, Brand (of The Hyde), and Hollis’s dog Malta, as well as one of Hollis’s servants who accompanied him back to England (Francesco Giovannini), are included in the painting at the base of the Cordonata, which has been proportionally telescoped to allow the figures to be properly seen.67 As portraits, the painting is a conceit since Hollis and Brand were not in Rome at the same time. The other five Canalettos are English scenes that portray great feats of building. The oldest building depicted is Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House in Whitehall (Fig. 5.6). Pointedly, Le Sueur’s equestrian statue of Charles I faces the hall even though in reality the statue stood a half a mile away at the top of Whitehall, evidently a wry comment on the execution of the king. This painting is matched in size (52 × 61 cm) by one of St Paul’s Cathedral and here the statue of the non-tyrannical Queen Anne is prominently displayed in front of the cathedral in its appropriate place (Fig. 5.7).68 The other

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figure 5.5 | Canaletto, View of Piazza del Campidoglio and Cordonata, Rome,

1754.

three paintings are all the same size (47 × 76 cm) and have more contemporary subject matter. They also portray far more functional, non-ostentatious public structures. Walton Bridge, built in 1743–49, was a marvel of timber construction, built according to the unusual method of trussing which allowed any strut to be removed without displacing another. The result was a central arch 26 feet high with a span of 132 feet, apparently the largest arch in Europe (Fig. 5.8).69 The view of Walton Bridge is complemented by another showing the Rotunda at Ranelagh Gardens, Hollis’s entertainment venue of choice (Fig. 5.9). The Rotunda, which opened in 1742, was an amazing piece of wood construction, with an interior diameter of 150 feet.70 The third painting in this group shows Westminster Bridge (Fig. 5.10). This great stone bridge had been lauded throughout the 1740s as a masterpiece

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figure 5.6 | Canaletto, A Capriccio of Buildings in Whitehall, c. 1754.

of engineering but its opening was repeatedly delayed owing to pier subsidence or other structural problems, the irony of which was evidently not lost on Hollis; Hollis’s view was painted in 1754 but Canaletto shows the bridge under repair in mid-1750.71 The contrast between the stone arches of Westminster Bridge and the seemingly comparatively flimsy wooden Walton Bridge is also rather witty. Additionally, in the Walton Bridge painting, Canaletto inserted Hollis, Brand, Giovannini, and Malta the dog in the foreground, thus setting up yet another wry contrast with the painting of the Piazza del Campidoglio and Cordonata.72 Five of the six paintings are inscribed on the back in Canaletto’s hand: Fatto nel anno 1754 in Londra per la prima ed ultima volta con ogni maggior attentzione ad istanza del signor Cavaliere Hollis padrone mio stimatisso —

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figure 5.7 (opposite, above) | Canaletto, St. Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1754. figure 5.8 (opposite, below) | Canaletto, A View of Walton Bridge, 1754. figure 5.9 | Canaletto, Interior of the Rotunda at Ranelagh, 1754. figure 5.10 | Canaletto, Westminster Bridge under Repair, from the North, 1754.

Antonio del Canal detto il Canaletto (“Made in the year 1754 in London for the first and last time with every great care as requested by the lord knight Hollis my esteemed benefactor.”)73 Such an emphatic statement corresponds to the insistent inscription on Pozzi’s ivory reliefs, fecce dal naturale (“made from life”). Although the primary subjects were not all unique to Canaletto’s oeuvre, the details indicate Hollis’s punctilious involvement. While the Canaletto and Wilson paintings are modest in size, they would nonetheless have been imposing hung in what would have been Hollis’s modest-sized rooms, which must have already been filled to bursting with his large and diverse collection. As well as the objects directly associated with his heroes, Hollis records in his diary numerous cabinets filled with medals, coins, gems, pastes, and cameos, along with prints, paintings, busts, vases, and his beloved books. He often exhausted himself, spending much time lovingly sorting and dusting them.74 In contrast to the collector who was interested in acquiring complete sets, such as Rockingham, Hollis sought out the rare and idiosyncratic. As Blackburne stated, for Hollis complete sets were an indication less of erudition than of ostentation: “Mr. Hollis endeavoured to attain specimens of the Arts in all their various kinds; but did not aim at parade and show, as is remarkable in his collection of medals and coins; neglecting expressly to make a continued series, but preserving only the most curious and interesting. Any one, he was used to say, may make up the sett who chooses the pomp and splendor of it.”75 His antiquarian zeal got the better of him. Furthermore, the intimate nature of Hollis’s accommodations would have been utterly different from the spacious public rooms of the aristocrats’ town or country houses.76 In contrast to the aristocratic houses, Hollis’s rooms were not a quasi-public venue in a greater social whirl; when anyone came to visit, it was on a point of business or by invitation from Hollis to see his virtù. In addition to the books and ancient medals and coins that Hollis acquired, much of his collection consisted of small bronzes, vases, and gems that would have fit comfortably in his accommodations. He often used Jenkins and Byres as agents, as well as a European-wide network of British residents and booksellers who were no doubt happy to keep him supplied. Of the bronzes, there are several references in his diary. Hollis identified one as a group by Giambologna of the Death of Iphigenia that he had bought in Italy in 1752, and he referred to others that he had bought at various sales in England. Among these were an antique Venus, two figures after Michelangelo’s Morning and Evening in the Medici chapel, two ornamental Chinese bronzes, a female Moor, and several bronzes from the Earl of Bristol’s

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sale that Hollis did not identify but that he gave to Wilton to restore and for which he had Wilton make marble pedestals.77 He also owned the red wax statuette of the Laocoön that he eventually gave to the British Museum (see Fig. 5.1).78 The diversity and variety of his collection, with a particular concentration on the rare and the idiosyncratic, positions him more firmly in the realm of the antiquarian rather than someone primarily intent on “parade and show” as he described it.79 The vases that Hollis acquired distinguish him as particularly discerning. Most were made of clay and were primarily Etruscan. Several he had obtained while on his grand tours and others at later sales in England and Italy, including two large examples from William Lloyd in 1761 which he immediately passed on to Brand.80 He also felt comfortable proffering advice to Josiah Wedgwood and Thomas Bentley in 1769 and 1770 regarding designs for their pottery, based upon his own collection and a close reading of the Comte de Caylus’s Receuil d’antiquités.81 The gems, like the coins and medals, were collected for the relevance of subject matter to Hollis’s plan or for their rarity, thus the seemingly idiosyncratic agglomeration of cameos with the heads of Brutus, Alexander, and Iole, intaglios of Diana Venetrix, a flying horse with a palm of victory, and the head of Timoleon.82 Hollis also had a keen appreciation for larger classical sculpture and offered authoritative connoisseurial musings on it; in the London Chronicle he extolled William Lock’s Discobolus as a work of the “celebrated Myron,” and in his diary concluded that William Weddell’s Barberini Venus was a fine antique copy of the Venus de’Medici, although heavily restored.83 He also made several purchases both in Italy and after his return to England, but, rather than keeping them, he gave them to Brand for The Hyde.84 Brand, in turn, hired William Chambers in 1761 to design a new gallery. In Chambers’s typically robust classicism, he opened two storeys and five bays of Brand’s circa 1700 red-brick house into one enormous space.85 Wilton usually acted as the agent and restorer. In addition to the statues that graced the gallery, Hollis also supplied Brand with a sarcophagus that illustrated the story of Achilles and another with a Bacchic theme, which Brand installed in the main entrance to the house.86 Several antique marble reliefs and a cinerarium of Marcus Ulpius Fortunatus also came from Hollis, as did numerous antique busts, although these may have stayed in Hollis’s collection in London until his retirement or death. A bust of Marcus Aurelius that Hollis gave Brand was held in high esteem, both for its workmanship and for the good emperor it depicted.87 Other busts included Plato (for which Hollis had traded Lloyd a painting of St Paul by Guido Reni), Dionysius, Serapis, Domitian,

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figure 5.11 |

Joseph Wilton, bust of Thomas Hollis, c. 1762.

Minerva, and Paris and Priam, each wearing the cap of liberty.88 Another bust Hollis and Brand believed to be a self-portrait by Michelangelo in the character of Pan.89 In giving the statues to Brand to display, Hollis recognized and fully understood the power of exemplum in the manner of Rockingham and Richmond, but, instead of engaging in it directly, he did so by using Brand as his proxy. Indeed, Brand was the more appropriate choice given that he was more emphatically of the landed class. Having Brand own and display the sculptures worked in a manner similar to that of Hollis giving his favourite books and tracts to prominent individuals and institutions. The sumptuously bound presentation copies were works of art that were a form of display in their own right; the beauty of the volumes as well as their content would then refract back on their new owners. Hollis also gave Brand a marble bust of himself executed by Wilton (Fig. 5.11).90 The first documented evidence of it is at The Hyde in 1786 when John Adams, who counted Hollis a friend, remarked upon it.91 However, the style of the bust, which is compatible with Wilton’s mid-1750s busts of Cocchi, Huntingdon, and Chesterfield, places it much earlier; Wilton also seems to have scaled back his personal involvement in his business after his inheritance came in following his father’s death in 1768.92 Furthermore,

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since Hollis does not mention the bust in his extant diary (which begins in 1759), despite recording many visits to Wilton’s workshop for a variety of other reasons throughout the 1760s, it seems likely that the bust dates from before 1759. In its seeming simplicity, the bust is a triumph of complexity that corresponds with Hollis’s belief in his place in the world. Hollis is depicted bare-shouldered (with no chest hair this time) in antique Roman manner, yet the head is undeniably of the present and very much alive with a slight turn and more than a hint of a smile. The classical allusion is accentuated on the socle with Hollis’s favourite emblem of the pileus cap of liberty between two downward pointing daggers. In antiquity, the pileus was worn by Castor and Pollux and is thus a potent symbol of freedom. (It is notably different from the Phrygian cap that became the citizens’ symbol of revolution in France.) Hollis would use the pileus on his own book bindings and he also regularly placed it at the top of a staff held by Britannia.93 Hogarth’s famous print of the cross-eyed Wilkes holding a staff topped with the pileus is surely a play upon the latter.94 When the pileus is positioned between two short swords or daggers, as it was on a denarius owned by Hollis that commemorated Marcus Brutus and the Ides of March, the allusion to citizens’ rights to bear arms in defence of their liberty is further enhanced.95 In the English context, it is a potent reminder of the upheavals of the seventeenth century in defence of liberty. Wilton’s bust of Hollis is another remarkable example of temporal elision where antique imagery and stylistic design are transmuted into a contemporary setting. Such temporal disruption is also evident in Hollis’s other projects, his classical education and collecting preferences greatly informing the design of his new medals and new publications.96 In the many publications he designed, as far as the typography of the text was concerned, he made the text visually less cluttered by insisting on the use of lower case for nouns in the middle of the sentence, rather than the more traditional practice of using upper case.97 While this corresponds to the general trend of the time, Hollis’s title pages were entirely more idiosyncratic. The text often looks like an inscription cut in stone: justified, perfectly symmetrical, and rather sparse, surrounded by an abundance of white space (Figs. 5.12, 5.13, and 5.14). Hollis also developed his own font, the capitals of which are almost rectilinear in their blockiness, and the inscribed nature of the text is further enhanced by the regular height of the capitalized letters. In their austerity, Hollis’s title pages contrasted with the typical busy and often florid title pages of the eighteenth century. His title pages have a ponderous quality that is in keeping with the ancient inscribed plaques, ossaria, sarcophagi, coins, and medals in Hollis’s (and Brand’s) collection. Furthermore, the

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RIVNS OF THE PALACE OF THE EMPEROR DIOCLETIAN AT SPALATRO IN DALMATIA BY R. ADAM F.R. F.S.A ARCHITECT TO THE KING AND TO THE QVEEN PRINTED FOR THE AVTHOR MDCCLXIIII

JOHN

MILTON

DRAWN AND ETCHED MDCCLX BY LB. CIPRIANI A TVS AT THE DESIRE OF THOMAS HOLLIS F.R AND A.S.S FROM A PORTRAIT IN CRAYONS NOW IN THE POSSESSION OF MESS, TONSON BOOKSELLERS IN THE STRAND LONDON

THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND FROM THE ACCESSION OF IAMES I TO THE ELEVATION OF THE HOUSE OF HANOVER. BY CATHARINE MACAULAY EDIT.II VOL.I

LONDON PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR AND SOLD BY I. NOURSE, BOOKSELLER TO HIS MAIESTY, IN THE STRAND, I. DODSLEY IN PALL MALL, AND W. IOHNSTON IN LUDGATE STREET, MDCCLXVI

emblems impressed in the rich Moroccan leather covers – a material Hollis chose for its preservation qualities98 – and highlighted with gilding derive from antique sources, the pileus cap of liberty being the most evocative. Several of the emblems also found their way onto gems commissioned by Hollis from Lorenz Natter as well as Wilton’s bust of Hollis.99 By mining the past for emblems and styles and combining or adjusting them for his contemporary mission and intending to propel that mission into the future, Hollis invested his projects with a “shadow of eternitye,” as Sir Thomas Roe described ancient inscriptions in the early seventeenth century.100 A total temporal elision does not, however, occur; by amassing ancient objects into a discrete collection, Hollis acknowledged that these objects were of a different time and place. Yet, by referring to them, they act as points of departure, of inspiration, for projects of his own that were in themselves invested with posterity to inspire future generations. In this sense, Hollis’s projects exist on a continuum, rather than transcend time. Portraiture, the primary genre of classical art, was an integral part of Hollis’s plan. Beyond the sculpted and painted portraits of himself and Brand, he commissioned innumerable print portraits as well as many commemorative medals of his favourite authors and heroes. By putting a face to the author or with the event commemorated, the text and event become vibrantly more relevant. The print portraits were usually designed by Hollis and drawn by Cipriani, who presumably tolerated the fastidious directives that would have accompanied each commission. Most of the print portraits are in an all’antica style that was consistent with Hollis’s medal designs. Profile bust print portraits are regularly enclosed in wreaths of oak and laurel and the person’s name is engraved with chiselled sharpness. Sometimes the subject wore quasi time-appropriate dress, as in the case of Vincenzo Martinelli’s edition of the Decamerone, which was probably sponsored by Hollis and which shows Boccaccio with a thirteenth-century Tuscan headdress

figure 5.12 (opposite, above left) | Giovanni Battista Cipriani, after William

Faithorne, John Milton, 1780. figure 5.13 (opposite, below) | Frontispiece and title page from Catharine Macaulay, The History of England: From the Accession of James I to the Elevation of the House of Hanover, 1766–71. figure 5.14 (opposite, above right) | Robert Adam, title page of Ruins of the

Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia, 1763.

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crowned with a laurel wreath.101 The portrait is made to look like a carved bas-relief, encircled by a thick oak wreath and situated above a sarcophagus inscribed with Latin text. Similarly, Milton and Cromwell are portrayed in seventeenth-century attire but encircled by oak, olive, and laurel wreaths, with the pileus cap below and their names and captions rendered in Hollis’s all’antica font, usually in capitals (Fig. 5.12). Similarly, Hollis financed the second edition of Catherine Macaulay’s History of England, a triumph of Whig writing, in 1766. In it, he included a portrait of Macaulay rendered in classical profile wearing antique earrings and necklace and surrounded by her name in a stone-like inscription with a wreath of oak branches (Fig. 5.13).102 The font of the title page is in Hollis’s characteristic majuscule rectilinear design. In terms of the medal commissions, the most cohesive project is the series that celebrate the victories of the Seven Years’ War. Many of these commissions were orchestrated by Hollis through the Society of Arts.103 The medals are contemporaneous with the war, marking each victory in quick succession, and are thus evocative of the heady optimism of the time, at least in the conflict’s early years. Several of the medals were designed for Hollis by James “Athenian” Stuart and most of the dies were engraved by John Pingo.104 In line with the sometimes obtuse emblems impressed in the leather bindings of his publications, Hollis’s medals are rich in classicizing allusions. However, rather than static emblems, the medal designs are steeped in allegory, invariably containing Britannia or Pallas/Minerva triumphant on a sea chariot and carrying a laurel wreath for the naval victories, or personifications of the cities or colonies taken. Details such as the deshabillé depiction of the figure of Canada or the pine trees, tomahawks, and beavers geographically situate the victories and so make the medals more apposite (Fig. 5.15). Some of the medals are inscribed with Akenside’s “O Fair Britannia Hail!” while obverses were embellished with Pallas or another relevant ancient deity. Britannia is also regularly portrayed in bust profile, as if she was a real person, while others bear profile bust portraits of George II, George III, or, in the case of the Plassey medal, Robert Clive. Significantly, these portraits are always rendered in modern dress, thereby firmly placing the victories in the modern world, but the victories are made more legitimate by the classicizing allusions. In parallel to Hollis’s publishing efforts, the medals, and thus the victories they commemorate, contribute to a palimpsest of classicism and position Britain as the ideal empire for the moment and into the future, where autocracy is held in check. For particular medals commemorating the victories of the Seven Years’ War that Hollis had set aside for special presentation, he had “william

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figure 5.15 | Thomas Pingo, obverse: bust of George II; reverse: Canada, 1760.

pitt administering” inscribed around the edge, in praise of his hero of the day.105 As far as Hollis was concerned, Pitt embodied all of the defining principles of true Whiggery. He heralded from gentry class and had apparently put aside his own ambition to pursue the cause of liberty, having fought against corruption and undue influence in the latter part of George II’s reign. He also advocated a strong colonial base to strengthen Britain’s economic position, something that was dear to Hollis’s heart. Until Pitt took his peerage and thereby revealed his true ambitions, Hollis admired him from afar and honoured him with periodic gifts of Whig tracts and medals.106 As did nearly everyone else, Hollis also held great hopes for the young George III, seeing in him an opportunity to preserve Whig ideals. After the death of George II, Hollis wrote in his diary of the new king: “May his pattern be alfred , as historiated by the incomparable John Milton! and may he be supported effectually in his counsels and undertakings throughout a long and glorious reign, by wise and faithful Parliaments and Ministers, and by the affections of his people! That the constitution may be preserved, the age re-formed, Science and art encourages, Posterity attended to, Mankind in general benefitted.”107 Hollis then busied himself with a range of activities associated with the coronation. Through the Society of Arts he oversaw the design of a coronation guinea.108 For the actual event, he managed to secure eight places for himself and friends at George Stubbs’s house on Parliament Street.109 Soon after, his friend Jonas Hanway asked him to prepare an inscription for a portrait of the young king and the two men settled on a suitably Whiggish inscription: “salvs popvlorvm .”110 Then, after the

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king’s accession, Hollis engineered through the king the acquisition for the British Museum of an extensive collection of Civil War tracts. When still Prince of Wales, George, like Hollis, recognized Cromwell as a “friend of Justice and Virtue” and, in 1761, he expressed admiration for Wilton’s bust of Cromwell owned by the Earl of Huntingdon which he presumably saw at the Society of Artists’ exhibition.111 The Civil War tracts were purchased by Bute, from whom they were bought by the king, who, in turn, presented them to the British Museum. Hollis was ecstatic with the result, pleased that the collection was to benefit the public rather “than [be] shut up in any private library.” For him, this was a clear exemplar of the king’s (and Bute’s) commitment to the perpetuation of Whiggish principles.112 Hollis’s most visible and most enduring contribution in celebration of the young king was his advice concerning the design of the painted panels for the cab on the king’s new state coach (see Fig. 4.12).113 There is no surviving record of Hollis’s official involvement in this enterprise, but throughout 1761 and 1762 he made regular visits to Wilton’s workshop to check on the progress of the coach and consulted regularly with Cipriani on the designs for the panels.114 Early in the process he also offered advice to Chambers on the coach’s design, based upon the virtù in his own collection.115 Like the rest of the coach, the paintings on the cab are steeped in allegory. The front panel shows Britannia seated on a throne holding the staff of liberty and attended by Religion, Justice, Wisdom, Valour, and Fortitude while Victory presents her with a crown of laurels. On the back panel, Neptune is being drawn by sea horses and is attended by the winds, rivers, Tritons, and Naiads, who bring the tribute of the world to British shores. On one door, Mars, Minerva, and Mercury support the imperial crown of Britain, and, on the other, Industry and Ingenuity give a cornucopia to the Genius of England. Other panels celebrate the Liberal Arts and Sciences being protected under the king’s auspices, History recording the reports of Fame, and Peace burning the implements of war. Combined with the gilded conch-blowing tritons, the genii of England, Scotland, and Ireland supporting the imperial crown atop the roof, and numerous other references that celebrate Britain’s victories and its new imperial position, the painted panels are comprehensive – and profoundly euphoric – in addressing the content of the new, decidedly Whiggish, empire. The foregoing description is derived from the detailed description of the coach published in the London Chronicle a few days after the coach made its first public appearance at the opening of Parliament in 1762.116 The description, which was almost certainly written by Hollis, was then taken up and republished in other newspapers and journals.117 The idea of a new state coach fit perfectly with Hollis’s plan. It was a highly visible, and also very public,

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figure 5.16 | Interior, Temple of Concord and Victory, Stowe, 1747–49.

form of display – pointedly ostensibly unconnected with him – in which the nation, its achievements, and Whig ideology were celebrated. Another contemporary project that bears the stamp of Hollis was initially equally imbued with the euphoria that permeated Britain following the annus mirabilis and the coincidental accession of George III. This was the embellishment of the interior of the Grecian Temple at Stowe (Fig. 5.16).118 Initially constructed in the late 1740s as part of the larger scheme to develop a Grecian Valley (northeast of the main house) as a memorial to the War of the Austrian Succession, the temple had languished undedicated in a kind of limbo, owing to the unsatisfactory – as far as Lord Cobham and the Whig Patriots were concerned – conclusion of that war. The temple was to have been paired with a triumphal arch at the opposite end of the valley which was

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never built. The monument to Captain Thomas Grenville, Cobham’s nephew who was killed in the war and thus represented Cobham’s personal sacrifice, was situated in a line to the northeast of the temple, visually complementing the great pillar to Cobham himself to the southeast (see Fig. 4.9). Richard Earl Temple, who inherited Stowe and was Pitt’s friend, brother-in-law, and primary ally in the House of Lords, decided while laying awake one night in June 1761 to consecrate the Grecian Temple as the “Temple of Peace,” erect a statue of Peace inside, and embellish the interior walls with fourteen medallions celebrating the victories of the Seven Years’ War. An obelisk in commemoration of James Wolfe, the protégé of Pitt and Temple, replaced the monument to Captain Grenville (which Temple had moved to the top of the Elysian Fields). Wolfe’s mighty obelisk thus effectively balanced the column to Cobham, the mentor of Pitt and Temple, and Temple’s uncle.119 Temple, who may have had a hand in the first inception of the Grecian Valley in the late 1740s, had cut his teeth at Stowe learning the propagandistic potential of visual arts and print and their inherent component of permanence. Although there is no extant reference that indicates Hollis was directly involved with Temple’s redecorating plans, the medallions in the Temple of Concord and Victory – as the Grecian Temple came to be called – are, for the most part, derived from the medals Hollis had commissioned himself or through the Society of Arts. In 1758 Temple had become a member of the Society of Arts and Hollis presumably found in him a kindred Whig spirit. The plaster medallions, illusionistically hung on the wall with lead ribbons, each commemorate a specific victory and are enlargements of the modern all’antica allegories that Hollis and “Athenian” Stuart had conceived for small medals one and a half inches in diameter. The ambiance upon entering the temple is defiantly triumphant, and, if Temple’s role in the pursuit of these victories is known to the viewer, it is also self-aggrandizing.120 The euphoria engendered by the victories of the annus mirabilis and George III’s accession collapsed quickly, and rather spectacularly, for Temple, Pitt, Hollis, and any other good Whig who had supported Pitt’s pursuit of war with Spain to protect Britain’s economic well-being and colonial endeavours. By 1761, the king, on the advice of Lord Bute, was pressing for a quick end to the expensive war. Pitt and Temple were disgusted and resigned from Parliament in October of that year. The scheme in the Grecian Valley took on new import, not unlike the Elysian Fields following Cobham’s political exile in the 1730s. The Temple of Concord and Victory, with its plaster medallions, came to commemorate the specific victories of Pitt’s and Temple’s administration, rather than the war in general, as well as the concordance between Britain and Prussia which, in Temple’s and Pitt’s estimation,

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had been abandoned by Bute and George III. Temple built a triumphal arch in 1764, dedicated specifically to Frederick the Great, in line with the south front of the house, while the vista from the Temple of Concord and Victory remained empty. In the pronaos of the temple, Temple inserted medallions of Concordia Fædoratorum and Concordia Civium, in commemoration of Britain’s alliance with Prussia and nationwide concord under Pitt’s administration respectively. Inside, Temple changed the intended design for the as yet unrealized medallion that commemorated the battle at Felinghausen, Pitt’s last continental victory. Instead of depicting Astraea, one of the goddesses of justice, the medallion has a portrait of Pitt and it is the only medallion in the temple that bears a portrait. Pitt is shown as Virtus, the Roman warrior god. Such a depiction seems to have been derived from an unrealized medal that Hollis had proposed to commemorate Pitt that was a companion, of sorts, to another medal honouring Frederick the Great.121 The victory medals overseen by Hollis that were not issued, or had their issue delayed because of the changed circumstances of the war, took on the wistful tone of what may have been. It was at about this same time that Hollis’s relationship with the Society of Arts cooled, perhaps because, in his estimation, the Society was not taking a strong enough stand against what he saw as incursions on the natural evolution of Britain’s liberty and supremacy.122 For Hollis, the obvious influence of Bute on the young king, which disrupted the tripartite system of government that Hollis held so dear, as well as the king’s and Bute’s obvious antipathy to Pitt, enhanced his disenchantment with the new regime. The disenchantment intensified with the North Briton controversy in 1763, when Bute and the king attempted to censor John Wilkes by throwing him in the Tower for seditious libel in connection with the publication of issue number 45 of the North Briton which had attacked the king’s endorsement of the Treaty of Paris at the opening of Parliament in April 1763. Hollis was horrified at the assault on the freedom of the press and liberty in general. In his diary, he recorded sending Wilkes a copy of Toland’s Life of Milton and the works of Algernon Sydney, perhaps to fortify him while he was in prison.123 Meanwhile, at Stowe, Temple, who had financed the publication of the North Briton and who would bail Wilkes out of the Tower, was equally critical and replaced the intended statue of Peace (which was to bear the face of Pitt) inside the Temple of Concord and Victory with a statue of “Publick Liberty.” Hollis was also preoccupied in the same year with the decision by the king and Bute not only to tolerate Catholicism in Quebec but to condone it and allow for the appointment of a Catholic bishop. The contemporaneous attempts to establish episcopacy in New England were only marginally less palatable to him.124

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figure 5.17 | The Repeal, or the Funeral of Miss Ame-Stamp, c. 1766.

With his and his family’s long ties with New England, the fate of the colonists was of special concern to Hollis. The Stamp Act crisis in 1765, which Hollis saw as a particular assault on the liberty of the American colonists, pushed him to unprecedented vituperative action. According to his life plan, he had intended to retire to the country by the mid-1760s, but the seriousness of the actions against the colonists motivated him to defend, anonymously and pseudonymously, the Americans’ cause.125 He saw Bute as the “principal fomenter of all the disturbances in America, by his pernicious influence in the cabinet.”126 He intensified his squib writing and increased the dissemination of books and tracts by Whig authors. Some of these were written by his American friends, including Jonathan Mayhew and John Adams.127 Hollis’s alarm drove him to break with his resolution never to enter into the political realm. In October 1765 he approached Lord Rockingham with a letter from Mayhew that described the intensity of riotous rebellion in New England against the Stamp Act. Rockingham, to Hollis’s disappointment, seemed relatively unmoved, and took no action.128 However, Hollis’s gloom soon turned to ecstasy at the news of the repeal of the Stamp Act. He immediately distributed a print entitled The Repeal, or

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figure 5.18 | Thomas Pingo, obverse: William Pitt, 1766.

the Funeral of Miss Ame-Stamp in which Bute and George Grenville, the man responsible for implementing the act, are the chief mourners at its funeral (Fig. 5.17).129 Lord Temple is also in the procession since, much to Hollis’s consternation, he had voted against repeal. Grenville carries the tiny coffin to the “family vault” that contains the general warrants used in the arrest of Wilkes in 1763 and the skulls inscribed with the dates of the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745. In the background a case labelled “Statue of Mr Pitt” is being loaded onto a ship bound for New England. This corresponds with Hollis’s squib that he also immediately published in the London Chronicle, in which he urged “Englishmen, Scottishmen, Irishmen, Colonists, Brethern, [to] Rejoice in the Wisdom, Fortitude of one Man, which hath saved you from Civil War & Your Enemies! Erect a Statue to that Man in the Metropolis of Your Dominions! Place a garland of Oak Leaves on the Pedestal and grave in it Concord.”130 Perhaps spurred on by Hollis’s squibs, high-ranking citizens in at least four American colonies called for statues of Pitt. Three of these were erected, two of which were designed by Wilton, one for New York and one for Charleston.131 Hollis saw the latter in Wilton’s workshop.132 It, in turn, was modelled on another statue of Pitt that Wilton had made for the city of Cork in 1764.133 All wore classical garb. As a personal sign of gratitude, Hollis sent Pitt an antique bas-relief in “oriental alabaster” of the bust of Phocion, the Athenian statesman known as an incorruptible political thinker.134 Hollis likely also had a hand in the design of a medal honouring Pitt on the occasion of the repeal of the Stamp Act (Fig. 5.18). One side bears

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a profile portrait of Pitt, bewigged and in contemporary dress. The other is inscribed in capital letters, “the man / who having / saved the / parent pleaded / with success / for her / children,” thereby linking Pitt’s successes in the Seven Years’ War to his latest triumph.135 When in August 1766 Pitt accepted a peerage from George III and styled himself Earl Chatham, Hollis’s idol was knocked from his pedestal. In his wrath, Hollis had Pingo cut away the inscription on the Stamp Act medal and replace it with “william pitt / lost in parchment / and butism / ivlvxxx mdcclxvi.” 136 In private, Hollis called him “Earl Cheat’em.”137 Nine days later, when Pingo delivered the altered medal, Hollis decided to keep it in his cabinet and not multiply it, having regretted his vitriolic and rather ungentlemanly outburst.138 Soon after, with the collapse of his weak and ineffectual administration, Pitt retired to Burton Pynsent, the Somersetshire estate that had been bequeathed to him by another admirer (Sir William Pynsent) in early 1765. He thus became Hollis’s country neighbour and shortly thereafter the two men resolved their differences and became good friends, Hollis being a ready font of knowledge about agriculture and the local landscape and culture.139 Hollis seems to have explained away Pitt’s acceptance of the peerage as less a weakness on the part of Pitt than one more example of the dastardly tactics used by Bute and George III to upset the balance of power and undermine the pursuit of liberty. Hollis’s frustrations with Bute and the king accentuated his republican proclivities. In 1767 he finally agreed to sit for a portrait that had been requested as a sign of gratitude from the president and fellows of Harvard College (Fig. 5.19).140 It is an insightful commentary on Hollis’s own recognition of the attributes of commemoration and permanence inherent in the mediums of print and stone. The portrait is an engraved print showing the lower portion and base of a stone monument in the shape of an obelisk. The obelisk sits on a square base that has an inscription that emphasizes Hollis’s brotherly companionship and his representation of the colonists in London: “thomae hollis angli / r. etant. ss. lond. sodalis / mdcclxvii.” The inscription is underlined by two swags of oak leaves heavy with acorns, an ancient symbol of England’s strength and longevity. On the side of the base, Britannia is portrayed seated on her throne, holding a triton in one hand and a staff with the pileus in her other. Inset in the obelisk is a Romanized portrait of Hollis, much like Wilton’s bust of a few years before. The pileus situated between two daggers is carved into the obelisk directly below the portrait, while above the niche an owl in flight clutches a palm frond in its talons, alluding to both wisdom and peace. Peace is further emphasized with the olive branch on the oblique side of the

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figure 5.19 | Giovanni Battista Cipriani, monument to Thomas Hollis, 1767.

obelisk above Britannia. The whole is situated in the foreground of a deep landscape with a sky of storm-tossed clouds, signifying the recent stormy relationship between the colonies and mother country and their now strained peace. A caption is appended to the print and consists of an excerpt from the life of Brutus in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, upholding Brutus’s moral and civic character and his actions in the face of despotism. Like the inscription on the base of the obelisk, the caption is rendered entirely in capital letters, with Vs in the place of Us, as if engraved in stone. In the bottom right corner is a humorous vignette showing a rather fleshy profile portrait of Hollis in contemporary dress and wig that undercuts the profundity of the ponderous obelisk above. Another leafy branch of oak is positioned to suggest that the contemporary portrait overlays the print, thereby also undercutting, while at the same time underlining, the suggestion of permanence in print. Consistent with his aversion to display and self-aggrandizement, Hollis wished the print to be seen by no one in England and by only a few compatriots in New England.141

H

ollis remained vigilant after the repeal of the Stamp Act. George III’s tendency toward despotism surfaced once again in 1768–69 with the Middlesex election controversy when the king, through his administration, prevented John Wilkes from taking his fairly won parliamentary seat. Wilkes’s attempt to stand for election coincided with Hollis’s own long-held desire for electoral reform to curb corruption and the resultant disruption in the balance of power in government. In addition to frequent elections, Hollis advocated, as Wilkes had managed to do in Middlesex, candidates chosen by the enfranchised (that is, those who held property) rather than placemen inserted by interested members of the lords and commons. Hollis was horrified by the king’s, and his Parliament’s, position in the Middlesex controversy, since it struck at the very heart of the Molesworthian Commonwealth that enshrined the liberties of the British people. Hollis reacted with alacrity, publishing and disseminating several relevant works, including Wilkes’s own The History of England from the Revolution to the Accession of the Brunswick Line142 and two sermons by a friend, the dissenting clergyman John Free, on the subject of the Massacre of St George’s Fields, in which William Allen, an apparently innocent bystander, was fatally shot by the militia during a mob demonstration protesting Wilkes’s treatment.143 A year later, Hollis received the news of the Boston Massacre. In his diary and among friends, he forecast ominous consequences if the British government continued with such firm measures in the colonies. With a notable air of doom he reprinted and published A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, written by three prominent citizens of Boston, and he bound sev-

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eral presentation copies in black.144 In June 1770 Hollis was asked by the same individuals to use his influence to press for the withdrawal of troops from Massachusetts. Adhering to his personal credo, strengthened by the ineffectiveness of his appeal to Rockingham fours years before, Hollis declined, saying that he was “so very a Whig, that I do not apprehend I can be of other use to them, than to send them a few books, occasionally, for their College.”145 In other words, his commitment to his Whig principles was so strong that he refused to compromise them by engaging in the active world of politics. Shortly thereafter, four years later than he had planned, Hollis retired to Dorset to soothe his “battered mind & aging body.”146 What had begun as a plan of education and enlightenment conceived by an ideologue had, by the mid-1760s, become a tooth-and-nail defence of liberty in the face of an autocratic regime in which the influence of Bute was malignant. The cause had become a struggle that did not conform to Hollis’s plan or to his character. He left the job to more combative men, such as John Wilkes or the Duke of Richmond. In Dorset, Hollis engaged in a project that was more in keeping with his ideologue personality. Characteristically, he did not engage in ostentatious display by building a great landscape park. Rather, he chose to commemorate his Whig principles by renaming the existing farms and fields. Thus, the farms of Locke, Ludlow, Marvell, Sydney, Harvard, Neville, Buchanan, Harrington, Milton, and Liberty each sit at the centre of fields (totalling over two hundred) that are likewise endowed with patriotic Whiggish names.147 Through the use of place names, his corner of Dorset would be forever Whig. All of Hollis’s efforts did not, in the end, amount to much. The ideologue who refuses to become actively engaged in contemporary politics, or who demurs to foster connections because to do so implies influence, is often ineffectual. Hollis’s uncompromising ideological stance was less a threat to the king and Bute and their administrations – although they seem to have kept a close eye on him – than an irritant.148 If Hollis were living now, he would be condemned as a kind of pedantic ideologue in which any sense of sophisticated detachment was lost by his sycophantic admiration for his heroes and the single-mindedness with which he articulated and pursued his ideology. He suffered from that same reputation in his own time. Samuel Johnson, who had few good words to say about any Whig, said Hollis had wasted a fortune on his political zealotry and called him a “bigoted Whig or Republican.”149 Horace Walpole described Hollis as “a most immaculate Whig, but as simple a poor soul as ever existed.” Like most people, Walpole also found Blackburne’s Memoirs to be deadly dull.150 Notably, in its turgid detail, the Memoirs bears the stamp of Hollis and represents another example of Hollis’s sub rosa involvement. Thomas Hollis | 191

By the time Hollis left London in 1770, Walpole said he was like “an old woman that goes to the mercer’s to buy a bombazine [a mourning dress] with an etching of the deaths of Brutus and Cassius.”151 His dream of a Whiggish empire founded on liberty and free of autocracy had been dashed by Bute and the king. Yet what Hollis did accomplish was a unique representation of old Whig principles according to his own interpretations. His early and unflinching support of the American colonists – except when asked to wield his influence on their behalf – largely defined his character for contemporaries from the mid-1760s and for subsequent historians earned him the moniker of a radical Whig. However, radical implies a break with established theoretical frameworks. Hollis was less radical than he was strenuous; he was an agitator who advocated fundamental Whig principles. In this sense, he was not dissimilar to several other Whigs of his time, including members of the natural aristocracy such as Rockingham and Richmond. The men partook of the same ideology, formulated by Shaftesbury and rearticulated by Molesworth and a host of other early eighteenth-century Whig writers, statesmen, collectors, and patrons. The way they differed is in how they articulated their ideology. The natural aristocracy put great store on the manner in which they presented themselves publicly, both in their deportment and in the building and embellishment of their houses. As members of the peerage, they saw themselves as natural exemplars. Hollis, who had a puritanical aversion to display for himself, nonetheless profoundly understood the power of display when used in the right circumstances. Thus his readiness to build up his friend Brand’s collection at The Hyde or his eagerness to assist in the design of an extraordinarily ostentatious yet also celebratory state coach for the new king. His commissioning of medals and anonymous gifts of bound volumes of Whig authors, prints, and medals are another form of comparable dissemination. In contrast to those on the front line, Hollis saw himself as a facilitator, an anonymous or pseudonymous individual working behind the scenes to perpetuate true Whig principles. Hollis, Rockingham, Richmond, and Huntingdon were similar in their relationship with the classical era; they acknowledged their separation from the time of the Greeks and Romans, but, by invoking and being inspired by them, they sharply attenuated the temporal distance between the classical past and the present. By the mid-1760s, Hollis, Rockingham, and Richmond found themselves fighting a rearguard action against successive assaults on each of their versions of Whig ideology; for them, their principles were under threat. James Boswell was the first to call Hollis “strenuous.”152 Coming from Boswell, this epithet carries the connotation of desperation, of fighting a losing battle.

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6

conclusion: The nuances of the classical archetype

T

he display of the classical aesthetic canon culminated not with Rockingham at Wentworth Woodhouse, Richmond at Goodwood, Huntingdon at Donington Park, or Hollis and Brand at The Hyde, but with the Earl of Northumberland at Syon House and Nathaniel Curzon at Kedleston Hall, both ultimately designed by Robert Adam.1 More than the Palladian mansions built earlier in the century or even Chambers’s comparably robust classicism at The Hyde, Adam created elegant and graceful interiors that seamlessly corresponded to the examples of the ideal sculptures displayed within. The Great Hall at Syon that serves as the entrance, modelled on a Roman basilica plan, is a place of profound gravitas bound at one end by a plaster cast of the Apollo Belvedere and at the other by the exquisite highly polished bronze cast of the Dying Gaul by Luigi Valadier (Fig. 6.1). Several more marble copies and bronze casts line the walls. The anteroom immediately behind the Great Hall is less austere yet no less imposing with its variegated columns topped with gilt casts of eight of the classical masterpieces, while another six white marble copies stand serenely in niches in the wall of the dining room. Northumberland’s work at Syon was preceded a decade earlier by a comparable project that involved the installation of painted copies after five works by Raphael, Annibale Carracci, and Guido Reni in the recently built gallery at Northumberland House in Charing Cross.2 At Kedleston, as we have seen, the interiors of the Hall and Saloon recall the Roman Pantheon, the walls of which are lined with plaster casts of the Apollo Belvedere, the Antinous, the Venus de’Medici, and the like (Figs. 6.2 and 6.3).

figure 6.1 | Entrance hall, Syon House, Middlesex, 1761. figure 6.2 (opposite, above) | William Adam, Section of the New Design for Sir

Nathaniel Curson Baronet at Kedleston / now Lord Scarsdale, Kedleston Hall, 1760. figure 6.3 (opposite, below) | Robert Adam, Marble Hall at Kedleston Hall,

1760s.

figure 6.4 | Robert Adam, Sculpture Gallery, Newby Hall, c. 1767. figure 6.5 | The Pantheon Gallery, Ince Blundell Hall, 1802–10.

Built in the early to mid-1760s, both Syon and Kedleston were on the tipping point toward a new direction in collecting, that of the acquisition of authentic original sculpture. Several of these later collections were housed in dedicated sculpture galleries such as the ones built at Newby Hall (designed by Adam), Ince Blundell, and Shelburne House (ultimately designed by Robert Smirke), the primary purpose of which was to showcase the sculpture, often one piece at a time (Figs. 6.4, 6.5, and 6.6). In contrast, the rooms at Syon and Kedleston were “lived-in” spaces – saloons, halls, dining rooms, libraries – where the sculpture and architecture are more firmly integrated, creating a cohesive whole as well as providing a setting for the owner’s dayto-day activities. It is precisely the presence of Valadier’s Dying Gaul or the Apollo Belvedere in the entrance hall of Syon, where “visitors handed their overcoats to the footman,” as one scholar complained, that characterizes this era of collecting and distinguishes it from what was to come.3

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figure 6.6 | Francesco Panini, design for the Gallery, Lansdowne House (later

Shelburne House), London, 1771–72.

The shift of the display of sculpture in “lived-in” spaces to dedicated galleries/museums within the country or town house, and the corresponding shift in preference from the acquisition of copies and casts of an aesthetic canon to original antiquities that were also appreciated for their aesthetic, plays into the narrative of the evolution of collecting in eighteenth-century England that I have posited in this book and underscores the discussion of the acquisition and display of sculpture by Rockingham, Richmond, Huntingdon, and Hollis.4 It is now time to step back from the individual case studies and position the narrative alongside and, indeed, in lockstep with the evolving articulation of the patriciate over the century, coupled with the

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emergent and increasingly nuanced field of aesthetics. Subsequently, I shall return to the case studies to focus on the period of the late 1750s and 1760s when the patriciate’s hitherto self-proclaimed natural right to lead faced unprecedented threat, from the rising merchant class, the career politician, and also the monarchy. This was also a period of emergent imperialism and a time when the Grand Manner found expression in painting and sculpture.

T

he evolution from identity-driven collections to collections of the aesthetic and ultimately to the collecting of authentic originals as fragments of a society long since past corresponds with the shift in emphasis from the philological to empirical observation, a shift facilitated by increased ease of travel to Italy and to the Levant as well as the rapid pace of archeological excavation from mid-century onward. From the latter seventeenth century through the first third of the eighteenth century, the interest in collecting sculpture for the figures whom the busts and statues portrayed was entirely consistent with the philological, a direct consequence of the collectors’ immersion in classical literature. In this respect, the philological also governed virtuoso antiquarian pursuit.5 The results were the elaborate narratives conceived by the earls of Leicester and Pembroke as well as Walpole and Cobham. For most of the patriciate, the diet of ancient texts was supplemented by the Post-Restoration authors, some of whom (Shaftesbury being the most important) represent emergent investigations into aesthetics.6 Likewise, more specific aesthetic texts were available, such as Roger de Piles’s Cours de peinture par principes avec un balance de peintres (1708) and the Jonathan Richardsons’ An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1708) and An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-Reliefs, Drawings, and Pictures in Italy (1722).7 Another critical ingredient was the ability of an increasing number of the patriciate to travel to Italy to engage in empirical observation of the remnants of the classical world. To this end, the Richardsons’ Account was an indispensable tool. Thus, ancient and modern texts and empirical engagement combined together to create a heady mix that resulted in a perfect, ideal classical world.8 For the generation who made their grand tours prior to the early 1730s, nostalgia for their youthful wanderings and dalliances must have intensified their fictive imaginings, further piqued by seriously adumbrated access to Italy later in the decade and into the 1740s owing to the War of the Austrian Succession. Rome became a city, to borrow Rosemary Sweet’s words, “where the delight was chiefly in the exercise of imaginative powers.”9 The impact of this imaginative world would be most keenly felt by their sons, who, coincidentally, came of travelling age in the late 1740s at the end of the war. It was

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this generation to which Sweet is referring. She cites James Russel, an artist based in Rome who hired himself out as ciceroni to several young men. He observed some visitors who stood “upon the same spot of ground for a good while, as it were in deep contemplation, where there was no appearance of any thing very remarkable or uncommon. Tho’ such a one might be thought, by those who saw him, to be non compos, he might probably from his knowledge in history, be then calling to mind some brave action, performed upon that very spot; and enjoying a pleasure, not to be felt by any one, confined within the walls of a study, or a chamber.”10 Sweet goes on to contend that these moments of contemplation of the wonders of the ancient world were generated because the visitors were “well stocked with reading, rather than [from] the immediate sensory experience.”11 However, being on site, as Russel indicates, was what prompted the imagination, and, even though the fragments at the site may have been undistinguished, they functioned semiotically as signs of the whole. Russel preceded the above with: It is with no small displeasure, that I sometimes meet with Travelers, who seem much disappointed when they enter the city of Rome; and often times go away dissatisfied, when they leave it. The first is occasioned by the great ideas they have formed to themselves, either from reading, or from oral relations, having seen and heard most of the ancient curiosities magnified too much: hence they expect to find the Capitol, the Temple of Peace, and other buildings, standing as it were in their old magnificence; not considering the many sackings, burnings and ravages, which they have from time to time undergone, from the hands of barbarous nations, whose delight was in destroying the most excellent pieces of architecture, and endeavouring not to leave one stone upon another. The dissatisfaction with which such persons leave Rome, proceeds from a remissness in not examining and reflecting upon things as they ought; and therefore it is no wonder, that having received no manner of pleasure in barely seeing a huge heap of old stones, bricks, and tiles, they consequently think their time lost in taking a view of them. But all this is owing to their want of reflection, and their not being sensible, that from one single part one may form a judgement of the whole.12 Paradoxically, for those intelligent travellers who could engage in reflection and imagine sitting with the Roman patriciate in the stands of the Coliseum or walking through the Forum Romanum, the fragmented material

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remains would disrupt a full elision of time. Similarly disruptive would be the viewing of ancient sculpture, removed from their original sites and gathered together in the Vatican, the Capitoline, and private collections such as that of Cardinal Albani. The acknowledgment of an aesthetic canon – the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, the Venus de’Medici – further suspends the illusion. Try as they might, the young tourists could not achieve a total sense of transportation. A natural extension of the powers of imagination is to make that vision become tangible and this, in turn, propelled the search for more signs, more fragments, thereby ushering in the great age of excavation. Ironically, as the fascination with each newly unearthed piece grew, the complete scene became thus more remote and more inaccessible. First-hand encounter and the unearthing of more and more fragments paradoxically drive the objects farther into the past. The vision at once drops back to act as context for the idiosyncratic individual pieces and becomes increasingly more discrete from the present as it becomes more whole. The distancing of the past was also evident in travel writing of the period. By the end of the century, as Chloe Chard has stated, objects had become “resistant to appropriation: vestiges of the ancient past. Ruins and antiquities are assumed to be mysterious and inaccessible by virtue of their origins in a remote past.”13 Chard cites as her example the protagonist in Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey, published in 1818, who sees a tour of Italy as an overrated wander “among a few mouldy ruins, that are only imperfect indexes to lost volumes of glory.”14 Similarly, by the end of the century, as Sweet points out, there is an increased emphasis on chronology in travel writing, on parsing the discussion of Rome into periods of historical development, in contrast to previous descriptions of the city as a more atemporal continuum.15 Such historical periodicity found its origins in antiquarian comparative empirical and literary pursuits followed by the much more exacting archeological studies of the Comte de Caylus, Charlemont, Stuart and Revett, and others at mid-century.16 The on-the-ground fledgling aesthetic conversations at mid-century – Lock’s musings on expression are a case in point – are also part of the equation and should not be ignored, despite the fact that they were not written down for publication. These, in turn, were informed, as we have seen, not only by the Richardsons’s seminal text but also by the nostalgic reminiscences of an earlier generation of tourists. Finally, the mid-century picturesque appreciation for the surviving plant-encrusted ruins, evidenced in Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s vedute, also functioned to push the past yet farther out of reach. These threads all come together and result in historicizing exercises such as Edward Gibbon’s ex-

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tremely popular narrative The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89), which represents, in many ways, the next benchmark of the evolving genre of both history and travel writing.17 With respect to texts specifically devoted to the art object, the shift from a bifurcated relationship of past to present at mid-century, evinced by the incipient appreciation of an aesthetic, to one where the past is more firmly entrenched in history is also encapsulated in Winckelmann’s Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755) and his Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764). The former, published at the height of the commissioning of casts and copies of the aesthetic canon, is brief and passionately inspirational, calling on artists to imitate and bring forth the Greek ideal in the modern world. The Geschichte, on the other hand, is a much more penetrating and systematic analysis of ancient art and civilizations, at once historicizing while still offering that art and those civilizations as universal models. Here, the aesthetic canon serves as the measuring stick for Winckelmann’s chronology. As we know, Cardinal Albani’s immense collection of antiquities, and Winckelmann’s attempts to organize it, lay at the heart of Winckelmann’s Geschichte. Similarly, the amassing of many other collections in this first golden age of archaeology touched off a torrent of catalogue publications. Le Antichità di Ercolano esposte (1757–92) and d’Harcanville’s sumptuous Antiquités Etruscques, Grecques et Romaines, tirées du Cabinet de M. William Hamilton (4 vols., 1767–76) are two of the earliest and most comprehensive. In conjunction with some of the British collections of antique sculpture, Lyde Browne’s Catalogus veteris aevi varii generis monumentorum quae cimeliarchio Lyde Browne was published in 1768 and his Catologo [sic] dei piu scelti e preziosi marmi, che si conservano nella galleria del Sigr Lyde Browne in 1779; the Museum Worsleyanum, or a Collection of Antique Basso Relievos, Bustoes, Statues and Gems, with Views of Places in the Levant Taken on the Spot in the Years 1785–7 appeared in 1796–1804; Henry Blundell’s An Account of the Statues, Busts, Bass-Relieves, Cinerary Urns, and Other Ancient Marbles, and Paintings, at Ince was published in 1803; and John Disney’s A Catalogue of Some Marbles, Bronzes, Pictures, and Gems, at the Hyde, Near Ingastone, Essex was issued in 1809. The catalogues, like the dedicated, often purpose-built, sculpture halls, reinforce the notion that the objects are to be admired as discrete artefacts of a bygone era. The distinction between past and present was never obfuscated. The various paintings of the Charles Townley collection reinforce the notion of the discrete assessment of each individual piece of sculpture. As Viccy Coltman has pointed out, Townley disdained the profusion of

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figure 6.7 | William Chambers, The Townley Collection in the Dining Room at

7 Park Street, 1794–95.

ornament characteristic of an Adam interior, seeing the architecture, such as the sculpture gallery at Newby Hall, as a distraction from the appreciation of the sculpture.18 In contrast, Townley chose to display his sculpture collection in comparatively unadorned rooms in his newly acquired house in Park Street, Westminster. He also decided to distribute the sculpture throughout a series of rooms rather than gather them together in one great hall, creating, as Gavin Hamilton said, “an elegant feast [in which] all the nice morsels must not be served up at once.”19 Three paintings of the Townley interior – two by the painter William Chambers (as opposed to the more famous architect of the same name) of the dining room and the living room respectively, both painted in 1794, and Johann Zoffany’s fictitious rendering of Townley’s library from 1781 to 1783 – show connoisseurs (including Townley) soberly examining the sculptures with comparative texts and guidebooks in hand (Figs. 6.7, 6.8, and 6.9). In Fabricating the Antique, Coltman

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figure 6.8 | William Chambers, The Townley Marbles in the Entrance Hall at

7 Park Street, Westminster, 1794.

states that Townley’s collection in Park Street was an urban equivalent to Wilton House, examples of “tramontane Italy” to use Stukeley’s words. However, I argue that the two are very different; while I agree with Coltman that Wilton functioned as a “metonym of antiquity,” Townley’s collection, sitting at the opposite end of the chronological spectrum of the eighteenth century, offers less a metonym or an opportunity for a dialogic exchange with the personalities of antiquity than an opportunity for a measured connoisseurial analysis of the representation of these personalities.20 A fourth painting, by Richard Cosway, Charles Townley with a Group of Connoisseurs, painted in 1771–75, portrays another form of connoisseurial appreciation, one of sexual allurement (Fig. 6.10). This work, as Coltman has demonstrated in Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760, exists within the capricious mid- to late-century genre of erotic sensibility that includes such works as Reynolds’s portraits of the members of the Society of Dilettanti.21

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figure 6.9 | Johann Zoffany, Charles Townley and His Friends in the Townley

Gallery, 33 Park Street, Westminster, 1781–83.

In Coltman’s comprehensive study on collecting classical sculpture in Britain after 1760, she notes that the Earl of Shelburne’s connoisseurial interests were sidelined by his political ambitions whereas Townley, who was a Roman Catholic and thus barred from holding public office, could indulge in his passion for collecting; the collection and its display in his Westminster town house essentially served as a substitute for public office.22 This is

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figure 6.10 | Richard Cosway, Charles Townley with a Group of Connoisseurs,

1771–75.

an important point to make since it implies that the distinction between connoisseur and politician was more emphatic in the post-1760 era and that, likewise, a politician did not always have to be a connoisseur (although Shelburne would eventually amass a significant and impressive collection and showcase it in a purpose-built gallery, as we have seen). This is consistent with the new breed of politician that emerged in the second half of the century: the career politician who made a conscious choice to pursue political life in contrast to the aristocratic politician who, by virtue of his vaunted status, entered the political realm (sometimes warily) in accordance with his Shaftseburian sense of civic duty. I would contend that the apotheosis of the true English natural aristocrat, of which the connoisseur and the man of politics were integral and co-dependent components, occurred at the middle

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of the century with the generation of young men who are the focus of this book. Huntingdon entered society with great promise, steadily groomed by his ever-watchful mentor, Lord Chesterfield, although his resultant overestimation of his own self-worth proved his downfall. Although not known as a great intellectual, Richmond’s status was never in question as, like his father before him, he took up his civic responsibilities with gravitas, whether as the stalwart military leader, supporter of the American colonists’ rights and instigator of the Royal Ordnance Survey, or collector of copies and casts of antique sculpture for the use of emerging British artists. Rockingham was, in many ways, the iconic natural aristocrat. He began his public life in the mode of his father, focusing his interests initially on his extensive demesne and indulging in a range of relevant intellectual pursuits including agricultural advancements, improved methods for coal extraction, and architecture, as well as more esoteric, yet just as relevant, activities such as coin and sculpture collecting. By the 1760s, with the natural aristocracy’s previously assured right to lead under increasing threat from both the new career politician and the king, Rockingham stepped into the breach. He reified the natural aristocrat and in so doing positioned himself as the figurehead of a man of many parts, one in whom each part makes the whole and who, as the moniker “Old Whig” suggests, reaches deep into the English animus. He was the embodiment of Shaftesbury’s balanced vistuoso. The emphasis on embedding the person of the natural aristocrat in his natural setting, that is, positioning him as an owner of a great estate and as a man of the public realm, is a variant on the idea of absorption that Michael Fried has posited in his study of contemporaneous French eighteenthcentury painting, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Fried argues that certain types of painting, notably the history painting of Jean-Baptiste Greuze in the mid-1750s, have the ability to captivate the viewer to the point where spatial distance between painting and viewer is transcended; the viewer essentially becomes part of the action that is staged before him or her.23 Chloe Chard elaborates on this concept in her study of travel writing, where she describes travellers becoming so enthralled with a figure in a setting that they experience “a moment of intense emotional identification.”24 Such a liminal experience may also have transpired when the thoughtful grand tourist (of the type James Russel so appreciated) encountered a particular architectural site, a classical sculpture, or a Renaissance painting. This state of absorption can be extended to include the presentation of the natural English aristocrat in the “natural” environs of his country house. Taking the Marquis of Rockingham as the paradigm, he is first encountered in the entrance hall of his immense Palla-

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dian house. Here he is surrounded by a restrained Palladian interior, punctuated by elegant iconic classical sculpture. From there, the visitor and the marquis traverse the state rooms of the house, which are also embellished with the occasional sculpture and history painting, and they may end up in the library sitting amidst the texts and busts of the great classical authors. The environs at once absorbs and contextualizes the marquis (and the visitor by extension) as well as functions as a backdrop to distinguish the marquis. As a consequence, time is both elided – the marquis is at one with the classical world – and disrupted – the classical trappings emphasize the marquis’s gravitas in the contemporary realm. The reification of the natural aristocrat – of all parts constituting the whole – at the beginning of the second half of the eighteenth century corresponds with the contemporaneous attempt to entrench a Grand Manner in artistic production, most recently explored by Martin Myrone in Bodybuilding (2005) and Douglas Fordham in British Art and the Seven Years’ War (2010).25 Britain’s increasing military and naval might through the decade of the 1750s, which would for many evolve into driving imperial ambition, was a fundamental component in crafting a Grand Manner, one that would ultimately operate as an imperial style of sorts. In the introduction to his book, Myrone discusses the passing of the era of arm-bearing virtue in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to one of property-owning virtue by the middle of the eighteenth century, a time when the “conventional poles of masculinity – defined by grace and ease at one end, effort and brutishness at the other” – began to be “tested out and interrogated.”26 As an imperial style, the former won out in the 1750s and into the 1760s, consistent with the presentation of the empire as benevolent and enlightened. Its heroes are not brawny brutes; as harbingers of English liberty and civility, they are imbued with sublime grace and majesty. For example, in text, painting, and monument, Major-General James Wolfe, the unanticipated victor of the decisive Battle of Quebec, is characterized as a man of peace, a lithe, almost scrawny young man who exclaims “Alas I die in peace” as he swoons in the arms of his comrades after learning the French had been defeated (Figs. 6.11 and 6.12).27 In Francis Hayman’s Vauxhall Gardens paintings, General Jeffrey Amherst appears as the benevolent Alexander the Great, relieving the distressed elderly, women, and children of Montreal while Lord Clive is “represented in the attitude of Friendship” as he receives the homage of Mir Jafar of Plassey, the nawab newly appointed by Clive (Figs. 6.13 and 6.14).28 Likewise, Vice-Admiral Sir Charles Watson was portrayed by James “Athenian” Stuart and Peter Scheemakers in a monument in Westminster Abbey in an elegant contrapposto pose, wearing a toga as

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figure 6.11 (opposite) | Joseph Wilton, monument to James Wolfe, unveiled

1773, Westminster Abbey. figure 6.12 | Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1770.

figure 6.13 | Francis Hayman, The Humanity of General Amherst, 1760.

figure 6.14 | Francis Hayman, Robert Clive and Mir Jafar after the Battle of

Plassey, 1757.

figure 6.15 | James Stuart and Peter Scheemakers, monument to Vice-Admiral

Charles Watson, 1759–63, Westminster Abbey.

opposed to military uniform, with arm outstretched to a freed Calcutta who exposes her breast in thanksgiving. Meanwhile, an obviously far more muscular, and thus brutish, chained Hindu scowls as he looks on (Fig. 6.15).29 A near contemporaneous monument by Joseph Wilton shows Admiral Sir Charles Holmes, who died of disease while commander-in-chief of Jamaica in 1761, in an Apollo Belvedere–like pose (with a rather jaunty swing of the hips), wearing classical armour and standing in front of a cannon and his regimental colours (Fig. 6.16). These, in turn, correspond with Joshua Reynolds’s somewhat earlier depictions of Augustus, Viscount Keppel (1752–53), and Captain Robert Orme (1756), which have been discussed at length by Fordham (Figs. 6.17 and 6.18).30 Significantly, Reynolds, along with Wilton and Chambers, would form the painting-sculpture-architecture triumvirate that would lobby for the establishment of the Royal Academy, the official proselytizer of the Grand Manner.

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figure 6.16 | Joseph Wilton, monument to Rear-Admiral Charles Holmes,

c. 1764, Westminster Abbey.

figure 6.17 | Joshua Reynolds, Captain the Honourable Augustus Keppel, 1753. figure 6.18 | Joshua Reynolds, Captain Robert Orme, 1756.

Several of the artists involved in the commissions cited above were of the new generation of artists, men who had spent time in Italy and had fully imbibed the classical mode of representation. Although many of the works make use of contemporary dress, all of the works are grounded in a classical ethos. Indeed, the most hotly contested debate surrounding the articulation of a Grand Manner was not about the classical essence in a work of art but rather about the use of contemporary dress; West’s painting of the Death of General Wolfe, for example, was ultimately successful as a grand history painting since it retained the dignity and serenity of classicism in its composition, emphasis on line, and articulation of colour, in contrast to Edward Penny’s earlier version of the death of Wolfe of 1764 (Fig. 6.19).

214 | then and now

figure 6.19 | Edward Penny, The Death of General Wolfe, 1764.

Although extremely popular, Penny’s painting was praised as a conversation piece rather than a history painting because of its small size and the far more uncompromising modern rendering, replete with minutiae of detail and depiction of Wolfe collapsing in an ungainly and pitiable pose.31 Hayman’s Vauxhall paintings, especially that of Amherst which recalls Le Brun’s composition of Alexander before the Tent of Darius (1660–61, Fig. 6.20), are thus important precursors for West’s painting.32 Sculpture was arguably more complicated since, compared to painting, it carried with it a far greater inference of permanency. By the end of the 1750s, there was a decided move away from the Baroque theatricality of Louis-François Roubiliac in favour of much more restrained classical compositions. Yet the need to infuse the compositions with more overt contemporaneity was also apparent. Wilton tried to juxtapose classical and contemporary in his monument to Wolfe by

Conclusion | 215

figure 6.20 | Simon Gribelin after Charles Le Brun, Alexander before the Tent of

Darius, 1693.

showing Wolfe all’antica almost in the nude accompanied by two soldiers in modern dress. The effect, however, is unresolved, especially in comparison to the Watson monument where the distinction between classical or modern dress (or undress) is far more ambiguous, and thus more harmonious, with Calcutta’s sari doubling as a toga and the “uncivilized” Hindu exposing his brawny chest. This desire and attempt to juxtapose the classical and the modern or to invest the modern with the classical is entirely consistent with the mid-century generation’s acknowledgment of the temporal distancing of the classical past while at the same time, paradoxically, eliding that temporality. The art of the moment, combined with the emerging aesthetic discussions on the ground in both Italy and Britain as well as texts such as Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry, would be joined a short while later by Reynolds’s discourses, presented, as they were, with an air of definitiveness. Although lacking the finesse and cohesion of Winckelmann’s Geschichte, Reynolds nonetheless sallied forth with a bifurcated appreciation of canonical masterpieces as both models and tacit historical objects.33 The emphasis was on grace, with 216 | then and now

the Apollo Belvedere consistently cited as the paradigm, in contrast to the ill-composed theatrical bravado of the work of Bernini.34 The predilection for grace, elegance, and expression combined in a satisfying whole was mirrored in the choice of sculpture that was collected by the mid-century generation of grand tourist, as we have seen. Indeed, the aesthetic taste was such that the Farnese Hercules was disdained for its brawny ill-proportion and related contradictory expression, and even the Laocoön, although acknowledged for its exquisite muscular tension, was deemed insufficient in appropriate expression. Of the Renaissance artists, Michelangelo’s works were admired although the admiration was tempered by concern for some of his overly muscular figures.35 Significantly, the Duke of Richmond’s collection contained a copy of only Michelangelo’s Bacchus and Lock owned copies of his Slaves, works that, in all of Michelangelo’s oeuvre, are the closest in conception, form, and expression to the Apollo Belvedere or Antinous. Even the David is represented by only his feet in the duke’s collection since the figure as a whole is ill-proportioned. The preference was decidedly more for Giambologna. Lock, as we know, owned twenty-two wax models by Giambologna and the Marquis of Rockingham had a particular affinity for that artist, as was evident by the numerous small bronzes by Giambologna in his collection. Foggini’s Samson and the Philistines at Wentworth Woodhouse is a conflation of Giambologna and Michelangelo, as well as an accolade to the Wrestlers, all in the sense that the figures exist in a perfect totality of proportion, harmony, and expression.36 This, joined to the narrative that plays out in the Pillar’d Hall, works wonderfully with the grace and ease inherent in the Callipygian Venus, the Venus de’Medici, the Capitoline Flora, the Apollino, the Dancing Faun, the Idolino, and other similar sculptures that complete the ambiance of visual serenity in the Great Hall above. Similarly, the theatricality of the Baroque was also disparaged; Bernini and Legros, for example, were represented only by casts of some of their figures’ hands in the Duke of Richmond’s collection. The preference for restrained elegance was also expressed in the Palladian style of the buildings, ultimately creating a holistic environment. The grace and ease that defined the Grand Manner of the 1750s, in which Shaftesburian intellectual fortitude and restrained emotion won out over physical might, ultimately destabilized traditional notions of masculinity and, in so doing, also became a harbinger of the return to highly polarized concepts of masculinity and effeminacy by the end of the eighteenth century. This point of climax and the subsequent denouement – a narrative parallel to and interconnected with the collecting of classical antiquity over the course of the century – has been identified and explored by several scholars, including most recently by Myrone and Fordham.37 As an imperial style, the Conclusion | 217

representation of the benevolent, intellectual commander lost some of its purchase as Britain gained the upper hand in the Seven Years’ War and the imperial cry reached a jingoistic crescendo. The highly sentimental trope of the dying young General Wolfe, although successful in Penny’s and then West’s paintings, was hardly a sustainable form of heroic representation that could be widely used and, indeed, seemed to have been a contributing factor to the less than enthusiastic response that greeted Wilton’s monument when it was unveiled in 1773.38 As Martin Myrone has charted in his study of Gavin Hamilton’s history paintings of the 1760s, the Grand Manner could too easily slip into sentimentality and excessive emotion.39 Hamilton’s career was intimately tied up with the generation of grand tourist that descended on Rome beginning in the early 1760s, a cohort that was unprecedented in its number and in its social heterogeneity as new money vied with old to gain the aesthetic upper hand. The grand tour, as Myrone and many others have explored, had become an exercise fraught with dangers: the acquisition of cosmopolitan elegance could degenerate into French foppery, ultimately embodied in the guise of the excessively effete macaroni that was au courant in the 1770s.40 As the cleavage between such effeminacy and masculinity became more pronounced, the act of aesthetic viewing could also fall prey to charges of “feminizing polish,” to use Chloe Chard’s words, and by the 1780s men such as Dr John Moore, who recounted Lock’s aesthetic disposition on the Laocoön and the Farnese Hercules, were, as Rosemary Sweet has pointed out, concerned about being taken for a connoisseur since connoisseurship had become dangerously aligned with the effete.41 The act of intellectual inquiry could be easily displaced by one of desire, sensuality, and, indeed, identification. John Barrell has tracked how the assessment of Venus as an expression of desire and sexuality became legitimate at the end of the century, as opposed to the earlier criteria of Shaftesburian civic humanist aesthetics.42 The inherent corollary was, as Myrone has called it, the public-schoolboy masculine appreciation of the Homeric primal force.43 In terms of sculpture collections, if we look at Zoffany’s portrayal of the results of Townley’s ostensibly intellectual aesthetic activities, desire and lust are laid bare as Townley sits below the watchful eye of Homer while he casts a longing eye to the bust of Clytie, his self-proclaimed wife, who sits among a multitude of sexually explicit figures (see Fig. 6.9). Richard Cosway’s Charles Townley with a Group of Connoisseurs (1771–75) and Reynolds’s portraits of the members of the Society of Dilettanti (1777–79) can be assessed in similar terms, as Viccy Coltman has so effectively done (see Fig. 6.10).44 Thus, by the 1770s, the definition of masculinity and femininity had once more become firmly polarized. What is fascinating vis-à-vis the preceding generation, the men who made their grand tours at the middle of the century 218 | then and now

and who are the primary subject of this book, is how this group negotiated the Grand Manner, which included collecting classical sculpture as a component of gentility at a time – the 1760s specifically – when the concept of gentility began to break down as a viable expression of nobility. In Myrone’s analysis of Richard Hurd’s Dialogues on the Uses of Foreign Travel (1764), he articulates the divergent unravelling threads of gentility in relation to the efficacy of making a grand tour in the 1760s: Hurd “succeeds in opening up a potential fault line within elite ideals of masculinity, between gentility as a socially desirable quality and an appropriate and necessary assistance to the political management of the modern British state, and gentility as a corrupting influence that undid manhood.” The former was espoused by the Hurd character called “Shaftesbury,” while the latter concern, verging too closely to effeminacy and superficiality, was voiced by “Locke.”45 While Richmond, Rockingham, Huntingdon, and even Hollis (in his convoluted way) were mentored in and initially ascribed to the Shaftesburian notion of the civic-minded, property-owning gentleman, not all could stay the course as their lives unfolded. The 10th Earl of Huntingdon was perhaps the most vulnerable, given his father’s dubious political status at the time of his death in the mid-1740s and the fact that the young earl was continuously badgered by the 4th Earl of Chesterfield, with his Whig history and strongly held opinions on deportment, etiquette, aesthetics, and the strengths and weaknesses of a grand tour. Huntingdon emerged from the experience having fully absorbed Chesterfield’s fawning insistence on his vaunted natural position in society, only to be cut down by his social peers and the king himself for his unwarranted arrogance. Although not a full-bodied, utterly vacuous macaroni of the type mercilessly caricatured in the latter 1760s and 1770s, Huntingdon, whose arrogance was combined with an obsession for fine dress and deportment, fell prey to the vices that were hidden in the concept of civic gentility. His response was to sever himself entirely from the political realm and retreat to his country house. Thomas Hollis is, of course, the odd man out since he was not of aristocratic standing. His lack of social stature and his obsessive political invective make him an ideologue, yet he nonetheless aspired to gentlemanly sophistication. To this end he did not overtly establish himself as a member of the landowning gentry (although he did acquire a vast estate) but rather set up his friend, Thomas Brand at The Hyde, as his aesthetic doppelgänger of sorts. Insofar as his collecting preferences are concerned, Hollis also stands apart. Pozzi’s miniature ivories of the rather delicate Brand, dressed in contemporary tunic with his hair in a long ponytail, and Hollis with his hairy bare chest and short-cropped hair, followed a few years later by Wilton’s robust Conclusion | 219

Romanizing bare-chested bust portrait of Hollis, perhaps unwittingly articulated the divergent polarities inherent in the civilized gentleman. Hollis was also the only one of his generation who acquired a reproduction of the Laocoön, although he may not have been able to resist the red wax miniature for its exquisite workmanship and novelty. As Shaftesbury indicated, the acquisition of virtù becomes a problem only when it is collected for the sake of rarity.46 The Duke of Richmond, much more than Huntingdon, accords with the paradigm of the mid-century Shaftesburian patrician. His lineage was impeccable, especially as the son of a court aristocrat with a strong sense of civic duty, and his grooming was absolutely consistent for a man of his standing. If one could qualify, Richmond was a manly aristocrat. He preferred the military, the hunt, sports, and natural history over matters of an aesthetic nature; his youthful remark about being in love with Venus and stroking her bum and thighs is most telling.47 His country house was very much that: it sat at the heart of a vast estate that was a model of productive, evolving agriculture and husbandry; it contained one of the country’s largest exotic menagerie; it had an exceptional stud and would become home to the Goodwood racecourse which the duke introduced in 1802 for the officers of the Sussex militia; and cricket would gain societal distinction as a result of its connection with the dukes of Richmond at Goodwood. Goodwood was not a locus for political strategizing and superficial showmanship. The 3rd duke’s acquisition of sculpture seemed to be more about his civic-mindedness than about any profound aesthetic inquiry on his part. The building of a sculpture gallery at Richmond House with the express purpose of educating young British artists as a way to improve the nation from the inside out was consistent with his stature as a Shaftesburian, natural aristocrat and that of his father before him, and, in turn, was indicative of the emerging mid-century nationalistic ethos in the country as a whole. The selection of the works for the gallery, like the day-to-day running of it, was delegated to those actually in the business of art. Richmond would, however, wade in when he perceived that the gallery was being misused. Likewise, he became more interested in art years later when he thought that George III was exceeding the bounds of his monarchical authority by throwing his approbation behind a royal academy. This was exacerbated by his own distrust of the king, who he believed had offended his family honour by not marrying his sister and even attempting to curtail the Richmonds’ power. Consequently, Richmond backed the Society of Artists of Great Britain. This was at about the same time that Richmond would make a very emphatic – and masculine – gesture by sailing his yacht bedecked with the American

220 | then and now

colonists’ colours up the middle of the king’s fleet. Once the crisis of the academies (and the American colonies) had passed, Richmond disengaged from active significant philanthropy in the arts. George III, for his part, was also throwing his weight around as he sought to position himself as monarch and as leader of a great empire. The young king co-opted not only the arts, including the collecting of a vast array of objects, but the very notion of the Shaftesburian virtuous gentleman; he sought to beat the natural aristocracy at their own game. His posturing came with a certain degree of bravado, as he actively engaged the public audience while passing through the streets of London in his exuberant state coach as head of the empire. It is the second Marquis of Rockingham who walked the finest of lines and succeeded in straddling the divergent tendencies of gentility in the 1760s. Like Richmond, he emanated from distinguished Court Whig lineage and his focus on his country seat as a microcosm of English society quickly broadened to include all of Britain. Wentworth Woodhouse was everything that Goodwood was (except for the cricket) and more as it became the political power base of the Rockingham Whigs, the literal example of Burke’s natural mansion. And Rockingham, as the even-keeled leader of the so-called Old Whigs, embodied the civility, profundity, and aesthetic richness of a man of true gentility. The erudite elegance of the architecture of Wentworth Woodhouse, along with the sculpture collection and the medal and gem collections within, like his aversion to iconoclastic or maverick behaviour, served to enhance Rockingham’s indubitable sophistication. The full expression of a man of all parts thus enabled Rockingham to weather the storm of effeminacy, commerce, and luxury that Burke described as the “great crisis” of the early 1770s and to turn the paradigm of gentility into an effective political trope.48 The natural aristocrat was now an entrenched definable protagonist in the world of modern politics. In a sense, Rockingham, Richmond, Huntingdon, and Hollis were engaged in a kind of restitution, looking back to antiquity yet creating spaces and tropes that were also consciously very much about the present. Indeed, the term restitution embraces that fluid temporal interconnection.49 The act of restitution rests on real or imagined memory. Nostalgia, evoked through the classical texts and the sometimes wistful recollections of their mentors’ grand tours, or prompted by the remnants of classical architecture or the surviving pieces of classical sculpture, informs that memory.50 By the end of the eighteenth century, the English landscape had quite literally been transformed by a proliferation of enormous country houses, each built at the centre of a large agricultural estate. The preponderance of the

Conclusion | 221

classical archetype suggested not only a universal but also an uninterrupted continuum from antiquity to the present day.51 Indeed, what had been constructed since the Restoration was a sweeping visual classical memory that also included Celtic and Saxon Britain. But, as any scholar knows, this memory was frankly new. Nothing truly classical had been built in England since the age of Roman Britain, with the exception of Inigo Jones’s Palladianism of the early seventeenth century.52 However, the implied continuity of classicism is a defining characteristic of legitimization, which is fundamental to the way in which so many of these houses and collections functioned within the socio-political realm of the eighteenth century. Accordingly, this book has examined in detail how each of the collections of Rockingham, Richmond, Huntingdon, and Hollis informed and articulated their social standing and their political preferences and positioning in a nascent form of cultural hegemony.53 Legitimization is a component of official memory, a memory that is constructed by the state and that usually comes in the form of great public monuments, put up by the governing body, whether emperor, monarch, or parliament. The collections of Rockingham, Richmond, Huntingdon, and Hollis, although ostensibly private, also operated in many ways as official memory. For the patriciate, the collections and the houses in which they were displayed reinforced, in the Shaftesburian-Burkean notion of the family mansion, the natural aristocracy’s rightful claim to leadership. Hollis’s proselytizing of true Whig principles also implied an official memory. The ubiquity of visual manifestations of classicism throughout England suggests that what had been created was also a national memory, a collective anima that would define England, and Britain, for centuries to come.54 National memory is a repercussion of nationalism, the latter of which is generally considered to have matured in the era of the French Revolution with the greater interplay of public in the state.55 Yet the tightly woven fabric of classicism that emerged in Britain prior to the French Revolution can be seen as a nascent form of national memory, when the natural aristocracy, the king, the untitled, and the parvenu all engaged a variety of audiences to varying degrees and for varying reasons. On a very broad plain, this fabric of classicism might constitute a meta-historical representation of archetypes, yet to leave it at that is rather like calling a Whig simply a Whig without acknowledging the diversity within: Court Whigs, Old Whigs, Rockingham Whigs, Pittite Whigs, Reform Whigs, and so on. Not to explore the nuances denies the complexity that underpins the modern British, and British imperial, socio-political state.

222 | then and now

notes

abbreviations

bl Add. ms Diary Effemeridi

heh hhs hmc lwl odnb pro ra rsa wsro wwm

British Library Additional Manuscripts Diary of Thomas Hollis (4 April 1759–3 July 1770), Harvard University, Houghton Library, ms Eng 1191 Diaries of Antonio Cocchi, Biblioteca Medica di Careggi Henry E. Huntington Library, Art Gallery and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna Historical Manuscripts Commission Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Public Records Office, London Royal Academy, London Royal Society of Arts, London West Sussex Record Office, Chichester Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, Sheffield City Archives

introduction

1 The 1st Marquis of Rockingham to Malton, 18 September 1749. wwm , m 2, Correspondence Book 2, containing copies of the 1st Marquis of Rockingham’s general correspondence, 1734–50 [hereafter m 2]. 2 Robert Adam to James Adam, December 1755. Quoted in Ingamells, A Dictionary, 7. 3 Hanson, The English Virtuoso, 157–93. 4 Brewer, Party. 5 See Burke, Observations on the Late State of the Nation (1769) and Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770). See also Everett, Tory View, 93; Furniss, Edmund Burke’s. 6 Hanson, The English Virtuoso, especially 2–8. 7 For Shaftesbury’s moral and rhetorical invocation of the fine arts, see Solkin, Painting; Klein, Shaftesbury, especially 134–50; and the writings of Barrell, notably Political Theory and “The Dangerous Goddess.” 8 d’Harcanville, Antiquités, 3: 3.

9 Reynolds, “Discourse XIII ” in Discourses, 237, and quoted in Solkin, Richard Wilson, 41. 10 Chard, Pleasure, 20, 9–26. 11 Marvin, “Copying in Roman Sculpture: The Replica Series,” in Retaining the Original, 33. 12 See Schnapp, Discovery, 258ff. 13 On the Blenheim statues, see Avery, “The Duke of Marlborough as a Collector and Patron of Sculpture,” 427–64; Coltman, Fabricating, 132–4; and Honour, “English Patrons,” 222–3. On Rousham, see Coffin, “The Elysian Fields,” and Müller, “Rousham’s Arcadian Fields.” On Mead, see Hanson, The English Virtuoso, 157–93. John Cheere’s successful business in lead statuary, which included many copies after the antique, indicates that the demand for lead garden statuary was substantial, at least by midcentury. See Clifford and Friedman, eds., The Man at Hyde Park Corner; Fulton, “John Cheere.” Other examples are the Pietro Cipriani bronzes of the Venus de’Medici and Dancing Faun which George Parker, Viscount then 2nd Earl of Macclesfield (also the noted astronomer), commissioned in the 1720s for the interior of Shirburn Castle. They emulate and honour Marlborough as much as they were admired as great works of art in their own right. Coltman, Fabricating, 131–4. The Venus and the Faun were recently acquired by the Getty Museum. 14 The collection of William Fermor, 1st Baron Leominster, with thirty statues, fifty busts, and over one hundred reliefs and fragments, stands somewhat apart since it was bought in 1691 in one lot from the remains of the Earl of Arundel’s collection. Fermor, a Tory whose fortunes increased considerably following the Glorious Revolution and through a good marriage to the daughter of the Duke of Leeds, built himself a new house at Easton Neston, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor on the recommendation of Christopher Wren. The house was decorated with murals by James Thornhill. Arundel marbles – images of which Thornhill incorporated into his murals – were arrayed both inside and outside the house. Some might have complemented the themes of the murals which celebrated either the life of Cyrus or the sacrifice of Diocletian, both appropriate themes for the re-establishment of monarchy in England, but the sheer number of sculptures and the fact that Fermor did not buy the pieces specifically for such a narrative preclude a precise connection. For a discussion of the Fermor collection, see Dudley, “Henrietta Louisa Jeffreys”; Lees-Milne, English Country House, 147. 15 Richardson and Richardson, Account. See also Gibson-Wood, Jonathan Richardson, 209–29. 16 Gori’s Museum Florentinum was the product of the Society for the Work of the Florentine Museum, established in 1728. Paula Findlen, “Uffizi Gallery, Florence: The Rebirth of a Museum in the Eighteenth Century,” in Paul, ed., The First Modern Museums, 77–9. 17 Sir William Hamilton, 27 December 1787, BL , Add. ms 36495, fol. 267, quoted in Ingamells, Dictionary, 608–9. Joseph Farington, 1 November 1810, in Garlick and Macintyre, eds., Diary, 10: 3781. 18 Coltman, Fabricating, 141–8; Harris, Robert Adam; de Bolla, Education, 151–217; Christie, British, 197. The casts for Kedleston Hall were supplied by Joseph Wilton, Matthew

224 | notes to pages 7–10

19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

Brettingham the younger, and Richard Hayward. Kedleston Hall, 15. See chapters 2 and 6. On the rise of societies and the connection with nationalism, see Colley, Britons – Forging the Nation, 55–100. The membership was at 104 in 1755 and by 1760 it had burgeoned to an astonishing 1350. Appendix 2, “Memberships and Subscriptions, 1755–1800,” in Allan and Abbott, eds., Virtuoso Tribe. On the value of drawing skills in polite society, see Peacham in Hanson, The English Virtuoso, 4. See chapter 6 for a more detailed discussion. Harland-Jacobs, in Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, positions Freemasonry at the heart of colonial America and the British empire. On Cocchi’s tenure as the keeper of the Medici collection, see Findlen, “Uffizi Gallery, Florence,” 73–111 and especially 82–9. On Cocchi’s visit to England, see Dorris, Paolo Rolli, 240–68; Pacini, “Antonio Cocchi”; Valenti, “Il viaggio europeo.” Cocchi remained a life-long anglophile. In 1732 Cocchi was instrumental in setting up a Masonic lodge in Florence. Some of the English members of that lodge included a Mr Shirley (probably of the Leicestershire Shirleys), the earl of Middlesex and the Duke of Montagu, Charles Sackville, Martin Folkes, Joseph Spence, and Sir Hugh Smithson (later Earl of Northumberland), all of whom would be prominent Freemasons after their return to England. Baron Stosch was also a member. After 1738 one of the lodge members, Tommaso Crudeli, was hauled up before the Inquisition and thrown into prison. Cocchi tried valiantly to free Crudeli. For sources on the Tuscan lodge, see Pellizzi, “The English Lodge”; Hans, “The Masonic Lodge”; Lepper, “The Earl of Middlesex.” These, and more recent sources, use Cocchi’s diaries, called the Effemeridi (a term to note the astronomical positions of the sun, moon, and planets), as a primary source. Cocchi kept up a voluminous correspondence with many people in England. Some of these include the physicians John Clephane, Richard Mead, and Anthony Askew. Mead and Askew were also keen classical scholars and in this regard Cocchi also kept up a regular correspondence that began in the early 1730s with Joseph Spence. Significant amounts of Cocchi’s correspondence have survived; one particularly rich source, which contains correspondence with Clephane, Mead, Askew, Spence, and many other British and Italian correspondents, is the Archivo Baldasseroni, still in private hands in Florence. A microfilm copy of the Baldasseroni archive is in the library at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Although perfunctory, the Effemeridi is also an excellent source on the movements of Cocchi and many of the grand tourists. Cocchi wrote each date in Greek and then noted the people he met or with whom he communicated. The Effemeridi are in the Biblioteca Medica di Careggi. Knoop and Jones, Genesis, 129–30; Sheeran, “The Hoober Stand,” 31, 40. To borrow Frank O’Gorman’s portrayal of the pre-Namierian Whig interpretation of the eighteenth century: “[It was] a period of unalloyed success … Alone among the European powers, Britain combined steady constitutional progress with unparalleled

notes to pages 11–13 | 225

29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36

37 38

religious toleration and incomparable levels of freedom of thought and expression. On these secure foundations Britain was to expand her economy, undertake an ‘industrial revolution’ and acquire a worldwide empire. It was a dazzling vision” (O’Gorman, Long, x). In contrast, Namier played down party, principles, and ideology in favour of individuals’ personal ambitions and the impact of material and practical principles. (For our purposes here, see especially Namier, Structure. O’Gorman provides an assessment of the impact of Namier’s scholarship in Long, xv.) Namier’s influence was profound, but one of the ultimate responses to him has been a reassertion of the importance of party and principles and the exploration of the multiplicities of Whig ideologies in the eighteenth century. Initiated by J.H. Plumb and Caroline Robbins in the 1950s, the subsequent scholarship includes such luminaries as J.G.A. Pocock and Isaac Kramnick (methodologically at odds with one another), John Brewer, Frank O’Gorman, Linda Colley on the resiliency of the Tory party, and Leslie Mitchell. (Plumb, England and Growth; Robbins, Eighteenth-Century; Pocock, Machiavellian and Virtue; Kramnick, Bolingbroke; Brewer, Party; O’Gorman, Long; Colley, In Defiance; Mitchell, Whig World.) In addition, studies on individual types of Whiggism – Court Whigs, Opposition Whigs, Country Party Whigs, Broad Bottom Whigs, Pittite Whigs, Grenvillite Whigs, Chathamite Whigs, Bedford Whigs, Rockingham Whigs, Reform Whigs, and so on – have informed my study, as has much of the scholarship on the varieties of Whiggery that were evident in eighteenth-century literature. Some of these include: Hill, British Parliamentary and Sir Robert; Gerrard, Patriot Opposition; Dickinson, Walpole; O’Gorman, Rise; and Womersley, Cultures of Whiggism. Brewer, Pleasures, 627. Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. I have used a 2008 English translation: Benjamin, “The Work of Art.” Coltman, Classical, 7–48. Rockingham’s remained intact into the twentieth century. Much of it was sold in the 1980s but the copies remain in the Great Hall. Huntingdon’s was reconfigured at the end of the eighteenth century by his heir when he rebuilt the house in his country estate Donington Park. Richmond’s, which was in Richmond House in Whitehall, was dispersed after a fire destroyed much of the house in 1791. Hollis gave most of his collection away during his life. Michaelis, Ancient, 665. Ibid., 159; see also Coltman, Classical, 34. Haskell and Penny, Taste. Some of the many relevant studies include: Retaining the Original; Hughes and Ranfft, ed., Sculpture; Kurtz, ed., Reception of Classical Art in Britain; special edition of Art History 29 (2006), especially Trimble and Elsner, “Introduction,” and Coltman, “Representation”; Coltman, “Eighteenth-Century Laocoöns”; Frederiksen and Marchand, eds., Plaster Casts; Bartsch, Becker, Bredekamp, and Schreiter, eds., Das Originale; Coltman, Fabricating. Coltman, Fabricating, 123–63. Honour, “English Patrons,” 223–5; Howard, Bartolomeo; Howard, Antiquity; Nancy H. Ramage, “Restorer and Collector: Notes on Eighteenth-Century Recreations of Roman Statues,” in Gazda, ed., Ancient, 61–78.

226 | notes to pages 14–16

39 Coutu, Persuasion, 135–42; Myrone, Bodybuilding; Fordham, British Art. chapter one

1 19 September 1667, in Evelyn, Diary, 3: 495–6. For a discussion of the inscriptions, see Dudley, “Henrietta Louisa Jeffreys,” 77–81. 2 Dalloway, Anecdotes, 236; Haynes, Arundel Marbles, 13. 3 For a chronology of the building of the house, see Bold with Reeves, Wilton House. For early discussions of the sculpture at Wilton, see Michaelis, Ancient Marbles, 42–7, 665–715; and Stukeley, Itinerarium, 177. All of the sculptures were installed at Wilton by 1720. 4 For the most recent discussion of the sculpture at Wilton, with a particular emphasis on the display, see Baker, “For Pembroke.” See also Ayres, Classical, 133–4. 5 Michaelis, Ancient Marbles, 46. 6 Walpole to Mann, 23 August 1781, in Walpole’s Corr., 25: 178. 7 Quoted in Cowdry, Description, 2. See also Cowdry, Description, passim; Ayres, Classical, 134; Stukeley, Itinerarium, 126–31. 8 See Stukeley, Itinerarium, 128; Ayres, Classical, 98. 9 A description of Wilton written in 1759, quoted in Smiles, Image, 203. See also Rorschach, Early, 48–9. 10 Jones, Most Notable, and Stukeley, Stonehenge. See also Smiles, Image, 203. 11 Anderson, New Book, 97–9. 12 Ibid. Thomas Arundel was grand master when Jones was deputy grand master. Ibid., 100. 13 For Folkes, see Mackey, An Encyclopædia, 280–1. For Stukeley, see Haycock, William Stukeley, 174–80. For both men, see Wright, England’s Masonic Pioneers, 97–125. 14 Fountaine’s association with Freemasonry is suggested by the nature of his collection and by the painted ceiling in the library at Narford Hall which shows, among other ancient sites, the Temple of Solomon. This scheme also presumably alludes, as Ingrid Roscoe had stated, to the appointment of Fountaine as deputy warden of the Mint following Sir Isaac Newton, whose Chronology of the Ancients focused on the Temple of Solomon. Worsley, Classical Architecture, 169, and Roscoe, “Andien de Clermont.” I am grateful to Ricky Pound for pointing out the reference. 15 Jacob, Radical, 112–13. 16 For a thorough discussion of the Easton Neston collection and its owners, especially Henrietta Jeffreys, Lady Pomfret, the daughter-in-law of Leominster, see Dudley, “Henrietta Louisa Jeffreys,” 92ff. 17 Quoted in Hanson, The English Virtuoso, 6. 18 Ibid., 2–8. 19 On the Society of Roman Knights, see Ayres, Classical, 91–105. 20 For a discussion of Stukeley’s Itinerarium, see ibid., 95–8. 21 Malcolm Baker has posited that Creed’s publication was for private circulation. Baker, “For Pembroke,” 389–90. See also Baker, “The Cult.” 22 This list is from London and Its Environs Described, 2: 117, published in 1761. The list also refers to a twelfth bust that by that date had an unknown subject.

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23 The four sculptures were by Guelfi and maybe Peter Scheemakers. 24 Pound, “The Master Mason.” 25 Jane Clark offers a much stronger Masonic interpretation of Chiswick. See Clark, “Lord Burlington,” in Barnard and Clark, eds., Lord Burlington, 251–310. See also Clark, “Palladianism,” 225; and Barry Martin, The ‘G’ Spot: An Explanation of Its Function and Location within the Context of Chiswick House and Grounds, in Corp, ed., Lord Burlington, 71–90. 26 I am grateful to Matthew Scanlan for the reference. On Langley being a Freemason, see Gould, History, 1: 62, 155. 27 See Baker, “For Pembroke,” 388. 28 Clark, “Lord Burlington,” in Barnard and Clark, eds., Lord Burlington, 251–310; and Corp, ed., Lord Burlington. 29 Malcolm Kelsall has countered the interpretations of Kenneth Woodbridge, Ronald Paulson, and Max F. Schulz of the garden as a strict manifestation of Virgil’s Æneid. Kelsall also explores the Ovidian, Christian, and Anglo-Saxon references. Kelsall, “The Iconography of Stourhead,” 133–43. For the Jacobite/Masonic references, see Clark, “Lord Burlington,” in Barnard and Clark, eds., Lord Burlington, passim. 30 It was at this time that he presided over the raising of Francis, Duke of Lorraine, and the Duke of Newcastle to master Masons at an occasional lodge at Walpole’s Houghton Hall. Poole, Gould’s History, 2: 222. Coke, as “Lord Lovel,” was also listed among the list of subscribers to Langley’s Ancient Masonry. 31 Angelicoussis, Holkham Collection. Angelicoussis does not offer a Masonic interpretation. For that, see Clark’s controversial assessment of Leicester as a Jacobite in “Palladianism.” See also Lees-Milne, Earls, 247–61. 32 This discussion is derived from Angelicoussis, Holkham Collection, 46–9. 33 Ibid., 60–4. 34 Ibid., 68–70. 35 Ibid., 23–4. Leicester had some difficulty exporting the statue of Diana, presumably because he ignored the papal law on transporting statues without a licence. Over the years, the tale became more and more embellished, to the point that Brettingham wrote in The Plans (1773), 4, that Leicester was reputedly briefly imprisoned in Rome until Cosimo III, grand duke of Tuscany, intervened. The tale was also related in Joseph Spence’s Polymetis, 103, for which Leicester may have been the source. 36 Joseph Spence was tutor to Charles Sackville, Earl of Middlesex, on his grand tour in 1731–33. Both were involved in the Masonic lodge in Florence that included Antonio Cocchi and Phillip von Stosch as members. Kelly, Society, 17–18; Hans, “The Masonic Lodge”; Lepper, “The Earl of Middlesex”; and Pellizzi, “The English Lodge.” 37 For a further discussion of Spence and Polymetis, see Wright, Joseph Spence, 84–112. 38 Spence, Polymetis, iv. 39 Potter, Holkham. 40 Angelicoussis, Holkham Collection, 60. 41 Brettingham, Plans (1773), 19. The two busts of Leicester were executed by Roubiliac; one shows him in modern dress and the other in classical garb. 42 The painting collection rivalled not only in size (457 works, according to an inventory of 1736) but also in quality the extant collections of the earls of Pembroke or the dukes

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43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64

65

of Devonshire, both of which had been built up over the course of more than a century. The collection has been the subject of scholarly interest since the time of its inception, most recently in the detailed book and exhibition, A Capital Collection, edited and curated by Dukelskaya and Moore. On the house, see Worsley, Classical Architecture, 108–9. Poole, Gould’s History, 2: 222. Moore cites Horace Walpole’s appreciation of Marcus Aurelius and Trajan. Dukelskaya and Moore, eds., Capital Collection, 329. Septimus Severus restored his memory after eradicating Commodus’s enemies. Moore in Dukelskaya and Moore, eds., Capital Collection, 330. Moore in ibid., 340. Busts of Homer and Hesiod were appropriately common features in many country houses. See Baker, “‘No Cap.’” See also Baker, Harrison, and Laing, “Bouchardon’s British Sitters.” Coltman, “Eighteenth-Century Laocoöns,” 33. On the acquisition of the Laocoön, see Moore, in Dukelskaya and Moore, eds., Capital Collection, 336. Richardson and Richardson, An Account, 277. Whaley, On the Statue of the Laocoön. Cornforth, Houghton Hall, 13. Price and Kearns, eds., Oxford Dictionary, 341–2. Dukelskaya and Moore, eds., Capital Collection, 334–5. Richardson and Richardson, An Account, 298. The plates in Ware’s book were engraved by P. Foudrinier. See Clayton, “Publishing Houses,” 50. Walpole, Ædes Walpolianæ, in Dukelskaya and Moore, eds., Capital Collection, 356–66. Ibid., 356. On Houghton Hall as Pope’s Timon’s villa, see Mahaffey, “Timon’s Villa,” and Noggle, “Taste and Temporality,” 117. On critics of the collection, see Moore, “Ædes Walpolianæ: The Collection as Edifice,” in Dukelskaya and Moore, eds., Capital Collection, 3–8, especially 6–7. Cruickshanks, “The Political Career of the Third Earl of Burlington,” in Barnard and Clark, eds., Lord Burlington, 210–11. The political relevance of this part of the garden is discussed in Sicca, “Lord Burlington,” 64–5. Pitt would become Cobham’s nephew-in-law posthumously, when he married Harriet Grenville in 1754. The articles published by George Clarke and Michael Gibbon in The Stoic, 1967–77, constitute the seminal scholarship on Stowe. See also other articles and books by Clarke; Bevington; Robinson, Temples; Coutu, Persuasion, 146–78. Scholars regularly refer to both sides of the River Styx as the Elysian Fields but this is incorrect. The inscription under Mercury’s bust says “To the Elysian Fields,” which indicates that only the other side of the river with the Temple of Ancient Virtue was the Elysian Fields. Cobham’s eight British worthies of action consist of King Alfred; Edward, Prince of Wales; Queen Elizabeth; William III; Sir Walter Raleigh; Sir Francis

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67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

Drake; John Hampden, defender of Parliament; and Sir John Barnard. The eight contemplative worthies are: Alexander Pope, Sir Thomas Gresham, Inigo Jones, John Milton, William Shakespeare, John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, and Sir Francis Bacon. For the inscription on the back of the Temple of British Worthies, see [Seeley], A Description of the Gardens of Lord Viscount Cobham, at Stow in Buckinghamshire (1744), in Clarke, ed., Descriptions, 139–40. Clarke, “Signior Fido and the Stowe Patriots.” Stanyan, Grecian History. See also Robinson, Temples, 90. Stanyan, Grecian History, dedication. The Gothic Temple was designed by James Gibbs. See Robinson, Temples, 98–103. Bevington, “The Temple of Friendship.” The land beyond the bridge was acquired by Cobham’s heir, Richard Grenville, and he subsequently removed the solid wall in the early 1760s. The relief of Britannia was reconfigured into a triangular form to fit the pediment of the Temple of Concord and Victory where it remains to this day. Coutu, Persuasion, 151. The Imperial Closet no longer survives. Seeley, A Description, in Clarke, ed., Descriptions, 141. For reproductions of many of these descriptions, see Clarke, ed., Descriptions. The model for Seeley’s guide was Samuel Richardson’s description of Stowe that appeared in the appendix of the third edition of Daniel Defoe’s popular A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, published in 1742. Seeley, A Description, in Clarke, ed., Descriptions, 124. A pirated guidebook by George Bickham was published in many editions, beginning in 1750. MacKey, An Encyclopædia, 375. For comprehensive discussions of Frederick, Prince of Wales, as a collector and patron, see Rorschach, “Frederick” (1993); Rorschach, “Frederick” (1991); Jones, Frederick. The inscription below Alfred’s bust read: Alfredo Magno, Angloum Reipublicæ libertatisque Fondatori Justo, forti, bono, Legislatori, Duci, Regi, Artium Musarumque Fautori, emditissimo Patræ Patri, posuit, f .w .p . 1735. The inscription below Edward’s bust reads: Edwardo Edward Fertii Regis filio, optimo, piisrimo, Galliæ Debellatori, qui partio stresmè victoriis, modestè et clementer usus laudem; anicuri alti, benevoti. verecundi, lauru omni triumphali, potiorem honestioremque merito sibi vindicavit, Principi prædarissimo antecessori et exemplari suo posuit, f .w .p . 1735. The inscriptions were recorded by Joseph Nightingale in London & Middlesex, 3, pt. 2, 341–2. Rorschach, “Frederick” (1993), 27. See also Vivian, A Life. Vertue, “Notebooks,” 1 (1930): 13–14. Windsor Castle, Royal Archives 55240, in Rorschach, “Frederick” (1993), 29. bl, Add. ms 19,027, fol. 80, in Rorschach, “Frederick” (1993), 29. Rorschach, “Frederick” (1993), 29. Corneille with Sophocles, Racine with Euripides, Congreve with Aristophanes, Jonson with Plautus, Molière with Terence, and others. Rorschach, “Frederick” (1993), 31. See chapter 4 for a discussion of Cobham and Lucullus. The quote is from William Chambers. See Rorschach, “Frederick” (1993), 28. Worsley, Classical Architecture, 220.

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90 Wolfe and Gandon, Vitruvius Britannicus, 4: 5. Giovanni Niccolo Servadoni and Gianbattista Cipirani executed much of the decoration. On Dodington’s character, see Lord, Hell-Fire Clubs, 140–3 and passim. 91 In 1748 Dodington renewed his acquaintance with Cardinal Albani, whom he had met in 1732, by sending him a case of Dresden china and some English silver. Albani was very pleased with the gifts, and, when Dodington wrote in early 1750 requesting four antique marble statues, he acted on the request with alacrity. The correspondence about the gallery and sculpture between Dodington, Mann, and Albani survives in the Albani papers in Vienna in the hhs , Rom-Vatikan I. See also Lewis, Connoisseurs, 156–7. For the architecture of the sculpture gallery, see Hornsby, “Antiquarian Extravagance in Hammersmith,” 400–14. The ground floor was a series of pillared halls with a grand staircase. Along the riverfront on the piano nobile was the Saloon with an immense fireplace “hung about with ironic icicles.” The house and some of the more distinguished visitors are recounted in Carswell, Old Cause, 213–16. 92 Williams, The Whig Supremacy, 431, 10. The Duke of Cumberland remarked on Dodington’s character in his description of La Trappe. Near the gallery was the master bedroom which had a “bed, hung in purple lined with orange, crowned with a sheaf of peacock’s feathers, and surrounded by a brocaded floor-covering in which more than one observant visitor traced the outlines of cast-off dress waistcoats, for Dodington was well known for making ‘more display at less cost, than any man in the Kingdom.’” Carswell, Old Cause, 214. 93 In Dodington’s reply to Albani in which he agreed to buy the five statues, dated October 1750, he appended a request for “quelque Chose à la Connoissance de Vre. Eminence, qui soit veritablement digné de la Curiosité d’un Grand Prince, (et vendible) en Fait de Colonne, Vase, Buste, Statüe, Tableau, &ca, Je Supplie Vre. Eminence de vouloir m’enformer: Je croy qu’elle m’entendra” (“something known to His Eminence that would appeal to the curiosity and dignity of a great prince: a column, bust, statue, table, etc. I believe Your Eminence understands and will inform me.”) The wording of the request suggests that it did not come at the instigation of the Prince of Wales. Albani replied in turn, again stating that he would do his best in spite of the rarity of such objects and the difficulties imposed by the papal export laws. Dodington to Albani, 11 October 1750, hhs , Rom-Vatikan I, F. 145, and Albani to Dodington, 14 November 1750, ibid. 94 Mann to Walpole, 17 February 1761, in Walpole’s Corr., 21: 480–1. The statues had been in the collection of the Villa Bracci at Rovezzano since they were made in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, yet at various times over the next century and half various people had tried to purchase them. A decade after Mann acquired them for Frederick, Mann sent original letters to Horace Walpole that showed the Duchess of Sforza had tried to get twelve of the statues for the queen of France for “16 or 18 thousand crowns” in the early seventeenth century. Mann proudly stated that, on behalf of Dodington and the prince, he had paid a third of that sum for the statues, which also included a colossal Venus with two attendants. The statues were available again in the early eighteenth century, perhaps for sale by the Abbé Bracci’s descendants to offset the financial woes that plagued so many of the Italian gentry. Mann went on to say in the same letter to Walpole that the “great Duke of Marlborough was to have bought them but he squabbled about a few hundred crowns. The late Lord Hervey offered a large price for

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97 98

99

four of them. Then by my means Mr Doddington [sic] wanted them for his great room (which would have sank under their weight), but the owners were then too unreasonable. In short, I found them in a good humour many years after, and bought them by his order for the King’s father [i.e., Frederick, Prince of Wales].” Mann to Walpole, 17 February 1761, in Walpole’s Corr., 21: 480–1. On Marlborough’s interest in the sculpture, see Charles Avery, “The Duke of Marlborough as a Collector and Patron of Sculpture,” in Chaney, ed., Evolution, 430–7. Dodington proceeded to act as intermediary between the prince and Mann and Albani, settling on the price and working out the details about transportation. Mann to Walpole, 14 May 1751; Mann to Walpole, 1 April 1751; Mann to Walpole, 4 June 1751; Mann to Walpole, 2 July 1751. All in Walpole’s Corr., 20: 251, 241, 253, 263. Rorschach, “Frederick” (1993), 31. A bill for the shipment of the statues is in the Duchy of Cornwall Office, Household Accounts of Frederick, Prince of Wales, xxxiv (i), 353. See Rorschach, “Frederick” (1993), 46n109. A.H. Scott-Elliot tracks the statues once they arrived in England. Scott-Elliot, “Statues by Francavilla.” On Dodington’s disconsolation at the loss of his patron, see Mann to Walpole, 4 June 1751; Mann to Walpole, 2 July 1751. Both in Walpole’s Corr., 20: 253, 263. See John Harris, “Sir William Chambers and Kew Gardens,” in Harris and Snodin, William Chambers, 55–67. Unfortunately, no documentation survives for the building of the gallery and the gallery itself was destroyed in the late eighteenth century. In Chambers’s Plans, Elevations and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Buildings at Kew, 6, he included plates of two elevations of the gallery but did not describe it in the text beyond stating that it “was designed by me, and executed in the year 1757.” The present location of the surviving statues is unknown. chapter two

1 Burke, Public, 99. 2 The statue and busts currently in the mausoleum are copies of the originals. 3 “I must look and ever shall upon you and your connections as the solid foundations on which every good, which has happened to this country since the Revolution, have been erected.” Rockingham to Newcastle, 9 May 1762, bl , Add. ms 32938, fol. 123, quoted in S.M. Farrell, “Charles Watson-Wentworth, Second Marquess of Rockingham,” odnb . The Duke of Newcastle had also been in Hanover when Malton attended the king’s birthday in 1750 on the way home from Italy and Newcastle had insisted the young man dine with him each day for the first few days. Guttridge, Early Career, 9. Unsuited to opposition or retirement, the Duke of Newcastle was active in politics until his death in 1768 at the age of seventy-five. 4 For comprehensive analyses of the Rockingham Whigs, see: O’Gorman, Rise and Long, 176–232; Brewer, Party, especially 77–95; Elofson, Rockingham; Langford, First Rockingham; Guttridge, Early Career. 5 Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. The pamphlet is a document in support of party rule. Burke does not actually name Bute until page 20 but blames the destruction of party on the court system rather than Bute alone. He charges that

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6 7

8 9

10

11 12 13 14

15 16

the court sought to attack the Whig party because of its deep-rooted strengths. He acknowledges that William Pitt the elder was also an object of attack by the king but he was not as powerful since his power was personal, rather than of a party. See also the assessment of the Thoughts by the Whig-Liberal historian John Morley, written in the early twentieth century, in O’Brien, Great Melody, xxxviii–ix. The Order of the Bath was created on 18 May 1725 and the 1st marquis was invested on 27 May. Strafford had gained the unenviable position of being made the king’s primary councillor at the height of the discontent in 1639, this despite having exhibited considerable distrust about the royal prerogative, almost to the point of being radical, in the late 1620s. He had been one of the supporters of the Petition of Right in 1628 that sought to curb the king’s prerogative but a year later he gave his support to the king when it became clear that the monarchy itself was under threat. His subsequent autocratic, often ruthless, behaviour as lord president of the north, lord deputy of Ireland, and ultimately member of the king’s war council succeeded in alienating peers in England, Ireland, and Scotland. Despite Charles’s assurance to Strafford that “upon the word of a king, you shall not suffer in life, honour or fortune,” he was impeached by Parliament in 1640–41, and, when it became clear that the impeachment might fail, Parliament issued a bill of attainder calling for his execution. Upon hearing his fate, Strafford made the prescient and resounding remark: “Put not your trust in princes.” For a recent assessment of the career of the 1st Earl of Strafford, see Ronald G. Asch’s entry in the odnb. See also Wedgwood, Thomas Wentworth. For the quote, see ibid., 380. Knowler, The Earl of Strafforde’s Letters and Dispatches. Although the earl’s reputation was not completely restored, the publication had some impact; Hume later assessed the death of the earl as an act of judicial murder. Hume, History of England. He was appointed lord lieutenant and custos rotulorum of the West Riding of Yorkshire and of the county of the city of York and custos rotulorum of the North Riding on 18 July 1751. He was also appointed a lord of the bedchamber to George II on the same day. See Farrell, “Charles Watson-Wentworth,” odnb, and Guttridge, Early Career, 10–22. In a further petulant and rare gesture, the king struck the Duke of Devonshire’s name from the list of privy councillors. Karl Wolfgang Schweizer, “William Cavendish, Fourth Duke of Devonshire,” odnb, and Guttridge, Early Career, 17–29. See Lees-Milne, English, 292–3. See also Charlesworth, “The Wentworths” (1986), 126; Pevsner, Yorkshire, 539–41. The house was designed by Henry Flitcroft. The attic storey was built by the Earl Fitzwilliam in 1806 after Flitcroft’s designs. O.B., “Wentworth Woodhouse,” 461. For more detail on the east front, see Worsley, Classical Architecture, 127; Pevsner, Yorkshire, 541; and Charlesworth, “The Wentworths” (1986), 126. Worsley tracks the move of the Palladian style from the suburban villa to the country house. Worsley, Classical Architecture, 127–9. The interiors of the two parts of the house are likewise utterly different. Nikolaus Pevsner, who was disconcerted by the thought that two such different styles could have been commissioned by the same patron, described them thus: “The interiors … are

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17 18

19

20

21

22 23 24

25

26

of a quite exceptional value. They represent, with few exceptions, the style of no more than one generation, but they represent it in a variety of shades, from the Viennese or Venetian gaiety of the West Entrance Hall to the Palladian purity of the Grand Saloon. Between these two extremes is some Rococo and much of the ornate Venetian style at its most splendid.” Pevsner, Yorkshire, 539, 544. Charlesworth, “The Wentworths” (1986), 126–7. The rivalry between Strafford and the Watson-Wentworths is well documented. On the architecture and landscape of each estate, see especially the writings of Charlesworth and Eyres. The Duke of Argyll resigned his offices in 1742 after failing to convince the king to bring Tories as well as Whigs into the administration after Walpole’s defeat in 1741. Quote from Strafford to William Cadogan, 16 February 1709, bl , Add. ms 22196, fol. 184, quoted in Linda Frey and Marsha Frey, “Thomas Wentworth,” odnb . The Court Whigs had done much to amplify Strafford’s already acknowledged vulgarity. For good Walpolian Whigs, Strafford became an object of ridicule. Lord John Hervey virulently assaulted his character in 1735: “loquacious, rich, illiterate, cold, tedious, constant haranguer in the House of Lords, who neither spoke sense nor English … went upon the trite topic of the danger of standing armies to a free state, and knew as little how to adapt his arguments to the particular circumstances, or the times, or the particular temper of his audience, as he did how to give a proper pronunciation to the few words he was master of, or proper words to the few things that came within the narrow limits of his Lordship’s knowledge. In short there was nothing so low as his dialect except his understanding, nor anything so tiresome as his public harangues except his private conversation.” Hervey, Some Materials, 2: 435. Years before Jonathan Swift had called Strafford “proud as hell!” and “wholly illiterate.” Swift, 13 February 1711/12 (letter 41), in Williams, ed., Jonathan Swift, 2: 489. The Duke of Cumberland erected a similar tower, also by Flitcroft, in Windsor Great Park. This is presumably the Belvedere Tower, now at the heart of Fort Belvedere. Colvin, Biographical Dictionary, 312. By contrast, see, for example, Lord Cobham’s and Richard Temple’s aborted plans at Stowe to commemorate a more emphatic British victory that never came. Coutu, Persuasion, 156–9. Charlesworth, “The Wentworths” (1986), 130; Sheeran, “The Hoober Stand.” Sheeran, “The Hoober Stand,” 33. Pevsner, Yorkshire, 547. The Antinous is a copy of the Capitoline Antinous; the Ceres is after the Ceres, or Juno, in the Uffizi; the Isis is after the one in the Pamphili collection; and the Apollo is untraced. The four statues were sold when the contents of the house were auctioned in 1948. See Honour, “English Patrons,” 223, 226n.15. In contrast to Thomas Coke’s near contemporaneous sojourn, Strafford’s was hardly an erudite tour; he was in Italy just two months and of those he spent six weeks in bed in Rome with a fever owing to the “excessive heats in travelling thither in the dog days.” Strafford to Lady Bathurst, January 1710, quoted in Cartwright, Wentworth Papers, 25–6, and in Ingamells, Dictionary, 793. In 1714 Strafford asked Christopher Crowe, the British consul at Livorno, to procure four marble columns for the gallery as well as four marble pedestals for the statues:

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27

28

29

30 31

“These are some statues casting for me at Florence, which I have desired may be addrest to you … I have built a pretty large house in which I have a large Gallery which will have a pavilion at each end, & which Pavillion I would have seperated by two colones & two piedestals for Statues wherefore I should think myself much obliged to you if you could get me four marble columns of the dimentions here enclosed, as likewise enough of the same marble for the piedestals & capitals of the Pillasters after the composite order, and likewise as much as will make four piedestals for the 4 statues.” Strafford to Christopher Crowe, 10 August 1714, quoted in Honour, “English Patrons,” 223. This and other correspondence between Crowe and Strafford is located in the Strafford Papers in the bl , Add. ms 22,221, fol. 259, 261, 263, 265. See Honour, “English Patrons,” 226n.14. The columns (variegated) and pedestals were installed by 1725 at each end of the gallery to break the vista, in the manner of the Palazzo Calonna in Rome. Lord Bathurst, Strafford’s cousin, found the gallery in 1725 to be “a very magnificent room, now that the pillars are up.” Lord Bathurst to Strafford, 26 October 1725, quoted in Cartwright, Wentworth Papers, 456. Horace Walpole cited the connection to the Palazzo Calonna. Walpole to Bentley, August 1756, in Walpole’s Corr., 35: 267. James Gibbs seems to have been responsible for the interior of the gallery. Geoffrey Beard found a contract dated 28 July 1724 drawn up with a London joiner, Charles Griffiths, “to wainscoat ye Gallery att Staineborough as Desined by Mr Gibbs in manner following for £225 inc. Carriage.” Quoted in Beard, Georgian Craftsmen, 50. On Soldani’s anger, see Massimiliano Soldani to Christopher Crowe, 19 November 1714, bl , Add. ms 22,221, fol. 11 in Honour, “English Patrons,” 223. Ingamells, Dictionary, 902–3. Strafford was barely nineteen when he made a short, three-month tour of Italy in 1741. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu noticed that he behaved “very modestly and genteelly, and has lost his pertness he acquired in his mother’s assembly,” and in Florence Lady Pomfret wrote that he “talks well, and is well bred” but looks “extremely young to be married.” He married Lady Anne Campbell, daughter of the Duke of Argyll, in April 1741 at the age of nineteen. See Ingamells, Dictionary, 903, and Honour, “English Patrons,” 224, 226n24. The 1st Marquis of Rockingham to Malton, 18 September 1749, wwm , m 2. For a full description of the house and its rooms and a list of the paintings, see Pevsner and LeesMilne, English, 236–42, and Young, A Six Months’ Tour, 1: 127–32. “Lay out 4 or 500 £ [in Rome] in Marble Tables, Statues, as you shall Judge agreeable to you I will answer your Bills to that Summ for that Purpose. There are eight Niches in the Hall, the Statues should be about six Foot high.” The 1st Marquis of Rockingham to Lord Malton, 5 July 1749, wwm , m 2. The floor was installed in the mid-nineteenth century, after designs by the 2nd Marquis of Rockingham. O.B., “Wentworth Woodhouse,” 461. “I shall order here two tables of the famous yellow Sienna Marble wch is by many preferred to the Giallo antiquo, I can have them hewn all of one piece and solid for the same money as I can have them at Rome fineered. I think of having them 7 Foot long as they will be properer than any others from them being stronger to be put in the Great Hall between the niches. The Space between the niches is 8 foot.” He went on to say that, if the tables were too long at seven feet, they could be cut down in England; the price he paid for them was “but a trifle [and thus the trimming] will not be any great loss.” Malton to the 1st Marquis of Rockingham, 19 August 1749, wwm , m 2.

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32 “As I hear it will be impossible to have antique statues, and as the models made from them in plaister of paris are so easily broke and at best but have a mean look, and will never be proper for so fine a Room as the Great Hall, I [intend] to get copies done in marble of the best antique statues.” Malton to the 1st Marquis of Rockingham, 19 August 1749, wwm , m 2. 33 Malton to the 1st Marquis of Rockingham, 1 September 1749, Florence, wwm , m 2. In the inventory prepared after the 2nd marquis’s death, these works are referred to as plaster casts, although Malton specifically refers to them as marble copies in his communication with his father. “An Inventory of All the Household Goods, Plate, Pictures, Statues and Furniture Which Were in the Late Charles Marquis of Rockingham’s Capital Messauge or Mansion Called Wentworth and the Buildings Thereunto Belonging. And Also in the Said Late Marquis’s House in Grosvenor Square London at the Time of His Death and Which Are Deemed Heir-Looms to Be Enjoyed According to the Direction of His Will,” prepared 1782. wwm , a 1204. 34 1st Marquis of Rockingham to Malton, 18 September 1749; Malton to the 1st Marquis of Rockingham, Rome, 14 March 1750; Malton to the 1st Marquis of Rockingham, Rome, 15 April 1750. All in wwm , m 2. 35 Malton to the 1st Marquis of Rockingham, 19 August 1749, Siena, ibid. 36 The 1st Marquis of Rockingham to Malton, 18 September 1749, ibid. 37 The copy of the Antinous was by Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, the Callipygian Venus was by Giovanni Battista Maini, the Capitoline Flora and the Germanicus were both by Andrea delle Valle, the Apollino and the Dancing Faun were by Simon Vierpyl, and the queen of Sweden’s Faun and the Venus de’Medici were by Joseph Wilton. 38 Malton to the 1st Marquis of Rockingham, 15 April 1750, wwm , m 2. 39 Small bronze reproductions of both were most likely available to Foggini in Florence. Honour, “English Patrons,” 225. The date on the sculpture is 1749, shortly after Malton had arrived in Florence. The Rockingham correspondence and Wentworth Woodhouse manuscripts are silent on the commissioning of the sculpture; there are only notes about its shipment and arrival in England. Malton to the 1st Marquis of Rockingham, 14 March 1750; the 1st Marquis of Rockingham to Malton, 15 May 1750. It arrived safely at Wentworth Woodhouse on 23 June 1750 (the 1st Marquis of Rockingham to Malton, that date). All in wwm , m2 . The inscription on the base of the statue reads: vinVS. foggini/sculpsit flo/rentiae/1749. See also Penny, “Lord Rockingham’s,” 6. 40 wwm , r 170/18. 41 Honour, “English Patrons,” 224–5. 42 Ingamells, Dictionary, 632–3, and the 1st Marquis of Rockingham to Malton, 23 June 1750, wwm , m 2. The harpsichord was of “a new invention … and as yet there is but two made one the Queen of Spain has and the other the Cardinal Stewart. The inventor is an English Abbey [sic] who is here and who is a most surprising genius … He happening to have that of the Cardinals at his house to do something at, invited me to come and here [sic] it, of all the instruments I ever heard it is the most sweet and as I testified to be much pleased [with] it, he told me he had one begun and he would immediately finish it and in a most genteel manner insisted on my taking it, it was impos-

236 | notes to pages 60–3

43 44 45

46

47 48

49

50

sible to get off and indeed it immediately struck me it would be a proper thing for me to have as I hear Miss Bright [his future wife] is no small proficient in musick.” Quoted in Guttridge, Early Career, 7. The 1st marquis evidently expressed concern about the purchase and was satisfied only after Malton had provided an explanation. The 1st Marquis of Rockingham to Malton, 17 May 1750, wwm , m 2. On his travel commentaries, see wwm , r 170/18. On the acquisition of books, see the 1st Marquis of Rockingham to Malton, 23 June 1750, wwm , m 2. Ibid.; Guttridge, Early Career, 6, 8. He goes on: “Your Lordship will allow me to add that the most harmonious musick in Italy, is not so pleasing to my ear, as the voice of the well judging men who with sincerity daily congratulate my happiness in having the honor to accompany one, whose heart [unreadable: “makes him as?”] amiable as his head may make him usefull in the world.” James Forrester to the 1st Marquis of Rockingham, 3 January 1750 wwm , m 2. “As all strangers of distinction keep house in this place, my Lord Malton has got the best that was to be received here & the company he frequents & who come to him are such only as I flatter myself, your Lordship & my Lady Marchioness would chuse for him.” James Forrester to the 1st Marquis of Rockingham, 3 January 1750, wwm , m 2. A “bear-leader” was a tutor or guardian. The 1st Marquis of Rockingham to Forrester, 15 February 1749, ibid. Guttridge, Early Career, 6, 8. See Hopper, “The Second Marquis of Rockingham as a Coin Collector,” 316–17. Malton to the 1st Marquis of Rockingham, 26 April 1750, wwm , m 2, quoted in Penny, “Lord Rockingham’s,” 8. Cocchi recorded in his diary specific meetings with Malton between 15 and 18 May 1749 as well as 7 July 1749. Effemeridi, 81. See also Fileti Mazza and Tomasello, Antonio Cocchi, 89, wwm , r 170/4 [1748–50], and r 170/2–3, 17 March 1750. Agustín’s Dialogos was published in Tarragona in 1587. A new edition was published in Madrid in 1744. De Obelisco Caesari Augusti was dedicated to Malton. For this and Malton’s other early involvement with “Athenian” Stuart, see Bristol, “The Social World of James ‘Athenian’ Stuart,” in Weber Soros, ed. James “Athenian” Stuart, 150–1; Bristol, “A Newly Discovered,” 43; and Lawrence, “Stuart and Revett,” 129–30. On De Obelisco Caesari Augusti, see Frank Salmon, “Stuart as Antiquary and Archaeologist in Italy and Greece,” in Weber Soros, ed., James “Athenian” Stuart, 113–17; Bristol, “The Social World,” in ibid., 150–1; and Penny, “Lord Rockingham’s,” 11. Rockingham also subscribed to ten copies of the Antiquities of Athens. James “Athenian” Stuart, “Sketchbook … of Buildings in N. Italy,” riba Library Drawings Collection skb /336/2 [L 3/4]: 2, in Bristol, “The Social World,” and Weber Soros, ed. James “Athenian” Stuart, 182–3n.17. As well, Rockingham would acquire the much coveted volumes of Le Antichità di Ercolano esposte, the account of the paintings, sculptures, and bronzes unearthed at Herculaneum and Pompeii that was authorized by King Charles VII of Naples and that began publication for a limited audience in 1757. Arthur Young commented on several of the plates of Le Antichità di Ercolano esposte in a footnote that spans four pages. Young, A Six Months’ Tour, 1: 254–8. On the importance and significance of Le Antichità di Ercolano esposte, see Coltman, Fabricating, 52–5, 97–121. Copies were usually acquired on the black market.

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51 Charlemont has been the subject of much scholarship. With respect to his grand tour, see especially O’Connor, Pleasing Hours, and McCarthy, ed., Lord Charlemont. See also O’Rafferty and Cunningham, Charlemont 1728–99, and Ingamells, Dictionary, 196–9. Much of Charlemont’s correspondence has been published in hmc , Charlemont Mss. 52 The episode is recounted in O’Connor, Pleasing Hours, 111–12. See also John Coleman, “A Lost Portrait of Lord Charlemont by Sir Joshua Reynolds,” in McCarthy, ed., Lord Charlemont, 40; O’Connor, “The Parody.” 53 On Rockingham’s friendship with Charlemont, see Kelly, “A ‘Genuine’ Whig and Patriot,” in McCarthy, ed., Lord Charlemont, 7–37. 54 Kelly, Society, 113–15. 55 Charlemont also commissioned four views of Tivoli from Patch and sat for two portraits by Pompeo Batoni. Ingamells, Dictionary, 198–9, 967; see as well O’Connor, Pleasing Hours, passim. 56 Winckelmann, Gedanken. 57 For a more elaborate discussion of the glance and the gaze, see de Bolla, The Education, 151–234. 58 Richmond to Henry Fox, 3 May 1755, quoted in Reese, Goodwood’s Oak, 53. 59 Walpole to Mann, 18 March 1756, in Walpole’s Corr., 20: 539. 60 Mann to Walpole, 16 April 1756, in ibid., 20: 547. 61 A Complete Companion, 75. 62 The Raphaels, for instance, had been damaged by copyists in the past. Albani to Mann, 21 April 1753, pro , sp 105/310, f.64v, in Wood, “Raphael Copies,” 411. In another, farcical, example, Cardinal Albani intervened on Wilton’s behalf to allow him access to make a copy of a bust of Julius Caesar that the Marquis Casali jealously guarded in a wooden box in the private part of his house. Casali acquiesced only if Wilton copied the original without touching it or removing it from the box. Mann to Albani, 3 February 1752; Albani to Mann, 19 February 1752; Mann to Albani, 22 February 1752; Albani to Mann, 26 February 1752; Albani to Mann, 4 March 1752; all in hhs , Rom-Vatikan I , F. 150. The episode is also recounted in Lewis, Connoisseurs, 169–70. 63 It took one man five days to make a mould of the bust of Plato in the Capitoline collection. Kenworthy-Browne, “Matthew Brettingham’s,” 43. 64 Montaiglon, Correspondance, 7: 333–8; Haskell and Penny, Taste, 62–3. Nicolas Vleughels initially signed an eight-year lease on the Palazzo Mancini in 1725 for the French Academy. It was purchased twelve years later. 65 Haskell and Penny, Taste, 219–20. 66 Mann makes this point in his reply to Walpole about the Lyttelton commission. Mann to Walpole, 16 April 1756, in Walpole’s Corr., 20: 547. 67 Ibid. 68 Coltman, Fabricating, 144–8. 69 This last configuration was installed when the grand stair was built in the mid-1770s. 70 This episode is recounted in Lewis, Connoisseurs, 174. Albani to Mann, 25 November 1751; Mann to Albani, 21 November 1751 and 28 November 1751. All in hhs , RomVatikan I , F . 148. 71 Farrell, “Charles Watson-Wentworth,” odnb . 72 Rockingham to Edmund Burke, 15 October 1769, in Sutherland, ed., Correspondence, 2: 94. See also Allan and Abbott, Virtuoso, xvii, xxii, and passim.

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73 The 2nd marquis investigated various manners of extraction with typical vigour. See Armytage, “Charles Watson Wentworth,” 65–9, and Young, A Six Months’ Tour, 1: 271–316. 74 The Guercino was bought through Mann. On the Guercino acquisition, see Mann to Walpole, 2 July 1751; Mann to Walpole, 30 July 1751; Walpole to Mann, 31 August 1751; Mann to Walpole, 5 May 1752, in Walpole’s Corr., 20: 263, 268, 272–3, 313–14; and Mann to Rockingham, with a bill of lading for his pictures, 30 July 1751, pro , sp 105/290. 75 An ancient Order of Ishmael, which Freemasonry claimed as a parallel rite, also existed, although it seems to have passed nearly into extinction by the eighteenth century. Mackey, An Encyclopædia, 326. Mackenize, Royal Masonic, 1: 344. 76 “An Inventory,” 1782, wwm , a 1204. On the Giambologna statuettes, see Penny, “Lord Rockingham’s,” 14–15, where they are also illustrated. Although there is not an exact tally for the number of sculptures that Rockingham acquired, two very precise inventories (one done immediately after the marquis’s death and the other in 1834), commentaries on the house and its contents (such as Arthur Young’s, see below), and surviving bills and vouchers in the Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments indicate a collection that numbers in the hundreds. Much of the collection was sold at auction in 1949. “An Inventory,” 1782, wwm , a 1204. 77 In 1773 Rockingham also bought from Wilton an oval plaster cast of a sacrifice, two oval plaster casts of Spring and Winter, and six semi-circular bas-reliefs of other undisclosed subjects (16 June 1773), wwm , a 314/2. It is unclear whether these came from Wilton’s workshop or if Wilton was acting as agent for Rockingham. 78 On the bronze statuette of Venus, see Hayward to Rockingham, 7 June 1771, wwm , a314/45, and Hayward to Rockingham, 22 April 1773, wwm, a 314/40. On Shackleton and Verschaffelt, see Shackleton to Rockingham, 15 March 1762, wwm , a 314/58. Shackleton also did a portrait of the 1st Marquis of Rockingham, Catalogue of Pictures and Statues in Wentworth Woodhouse, 1834m, wwm, Add. Misc. 230. 79 Stuart to Rockingham, 28 March 1763, wwm , a 314/12; Stuart to Rockingham, 1763, wwm, a314/32; Stuart to Rockingham, 28 December 1764, wwm, a314/97. See also Bristol, “The Social World,” in Weber Soros, ed., James “Athenian” Stuart, 158; Penny, “Lord Rockingham’s,” 11–12; Kelly, The Society, 152–4. 80 Walpole to Richard Bentley, 27 March 1755, in Walpole’s Corr., 35 (1973): 216–17. Michaelis, who did not visit Wentworth Woodhouse, called this the only piece of note in Rockingham’s collection. Michaelis, Ancient Marbles, 665. 81 In 1762 he bought two marble statuettes from Lyde Browne via Wilton: 13 March 1762, wwm, a314/57. See also Browne to Rockingham, 10 July 1767, wwm, a314/27. 82 The story has been recounted many times. See Drawing, passim, and Ingamells, Dictionary, 555. 83 For a discussion of Hamilton and Jenkins and their procurement of sculpture for clients, see Coltman, Classical, 58 and passim. 84 “An Inventory,” wwm , a 1204. 85 Davy and Pincot soon separated and Mrs Coade ultimately bought out Pincot. Davy continued on his own in Whitechapel before selling all of his moulds to a “Mr. Smith” of Knightsbridge. See Nicholas Penny’s review of Alison Kelly, Mrs. Coade’s Stone, 879; Penny, “Lord Rockingham’s,” 14; and George Davy to Rockingham, 30 July 1773, wwm , a314.

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86 30 July 1773, wwm , a 314/1; 28 July 1770, wwm , a 314/54; 9 March 1773, wwm , a 314/66; 18 June 1768, wwm , a 314/77; 21 March 1771, wwm , a 314/93; and n.d. [before 1773], wwm, a314/36. 87 Penny, “Lord Rockingham’s,” 9. 88 Armytage, “Charles Watson Wentworth.” 89 “An Inventory,” wwm , a 1204. Sometime in the 1780s or 1790s, Rockingham’s heir, the Earl Fitzwilliam, installed many of these and other sculptures in emulation of his uncle’s plans. Penny, “Lord Rockingham’s,” 27. 90 Wright to Rockingham, 28 February 1774, wwm , a 314/81. For Wright, see Ingamells, Dictionary, 1022–3. 91 See Kelly, The Society, for the evolution. 92 Coltman, Classical. The split is most pronounced with Townley and Blundell, who were both Roman Catholics and so could not hold office, but Coltman also indicates that the split was also evident among those who could hold office, such as Shelburne, who devoted more of his attention to his political ambitions than to his collection for many years. Ibid., 210. 93 Rockingham acquired several gems and pastes through James Tassie: 20 June 1774, wwm, a 314/3; 20 June 1776, wwm , a314/11; 13 August 1779, wwm, a314/39; 1773, wwm, a314/67; 22 June 1773, wwm, a314/74; and 9 March 1775, wwm, a314/129. 94 Visconti was the first director of the Museo Pio-Clementium and oversaw the building of the octagonal loggia to showcase the greatest antique works in the Vatican collection. Haskell and Penny, Taste, 71. 95 Ingamells, Dictionary, 169–72. 96 Rockingham to Byres, n.d. [before August 1774], quoted in Hopper, “The Second,” 321. 97 The correspondence, which is located in the Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, is transcribed in full in Hopper, “The Second Marquis of Rockingham.” 98 Rockingham to Byres, in Hopper, “The Second,” 323. Rockingham questioned the accuracy of the catalogue of the Visconti collection in the case of a medal of Matidia which was more likely to have Pietas Augusta on the reverse than Fides as stated in the catalogue. Rockingham also gave Byres extremely precise instructions on wrapping each medal in a separate paper, binding it with packing thread, and then double-boxing it to ensure safe voyage to England. Rockingham to Byres, n.d. [before August 1774], in Hopper, “The Second,” 321. 99 Byres to Rockingham, 6 February 1773, in ibid., 318. 100 Rockingham to Byres, n.d. [1774], in ibid., 324. 101 Rockingham to Byres, n.d. [1774], in ibid. 102 Byres to Rockingham, 5 August 1774, in ibid., 325–6. 103 Stuart to Rockingham, n.d. [1760s], wwm , a 314/42. See also Christopher Eimer, “Stuart and the Design and Making of Medals,” in Weber Soros, ed., James “Athenian” Stuart, 498, 511nn22–3. See also chapter 5. 104 One of these is now in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Penny, “Lord Rockingham’s,” 8. Arthur Young noted the medal collection in the library. Young, A Six Months’ Tour, 254–5. 105 Thomas Hollis was quite flattered when the 4th Duke of Devonshire personally showed him his collection: Harvard University, Houghton Library, Diaries of Thomas Hollis, 2 June 1761, ms Eng 1191. 240 | notes to pages 71–5

106 Quoted in Hopper, “The Second,” 341. 107 Rockingham to Byres, n.d. [before August 1774], quoted in Hopper, “The Second,” 322. 108 The Devonshire collection had been begun by the 2nd Duke of Devonshire. See Pagan, “Andreas Fountaine,” 119–20; and Scarisbrick, “Gem Connoisseurship,” 90–104. 109 Bristol, “The Social World,” in Weber Soros, ed., James “Athenian” Stuart, 158, 185n85; and Hopkinson, “A Portrait by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart,” 794–5. 110 The Van Dyck in turn was modelled on Titian’s portrait of George d’Armagnac and Guillaume Philandrier (Duke of Northumberland). For more on the Burke-Rockingham portrait and Joshua Reynolds’s connections with the Old Whigs, see Postle, “Sir Joshua Reynolds,” 106–24. 111 Watkin, Architect King, 81–2, 102–6; and Jane Roberts, “Sir William Chambers and George III,” in Harris and Snodin, eds., William Chambers, 48–52. 112 Roberts, ed., George III; Andrew Burnett, “‘The King Loves Medals’: The Study of Coins in Europe and Britain,” in Sloan, ed. with Burnett, Enlightenment, 122–31. 113 Pevsner, Yorkshire, 544. 114 See Landry, Noble Brutes; Landry, “The Bloody Shouldered”; Fordham, “George Stubbs’ Zoon Politikon”; and Deuchar, Sporting. 115 Farrell, “Charles Watson-Wentworth,” odnb . 116 Egerton, George Stubbs, 168. 117 Ibid., 164–5. 118 Ibid., 170. Horace Walpole either initiated or recounted the apocryphal tale. Toynbee, ed., “Horace Walpole’s,” 71. 119 Egerton, George Stubbs, 168–71. 120 Chard, “Effeminacy,” 150. Thomas Broderick, whose writings may have been a compilation of other sources (Ingamells, ed., A Dictionary, 131), provides a succinct source. On the difference between the Antinous and the Apollo Belvedere, he wrote: “We hear the writer of taste say, that there is something of an air more than mortal in the figures of the deities by the old sculptors; and indeed one sees it: in all other respects I think the Antinous is equal to the Apollo; but in the latter, there is an air of majesty and command in the face, and a lightness in the whole figure, that makes you forget that it is marble. It is the attitude that does this; but ’tis so finely done, that you seem to see the figure treading on the air, or scarce weighing down some light cloud, as he stands upon it.” Broderick, Travels, 2: 83. 121 See Fordham, “George Stubbs,” especially 21–3; Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic. 122 Fordham, “George Stubbs,” 22. 123 Ibid. 124 Schlarman, “The Social Geography.” 125 Browne, Catalogus Veteris, 16. All four statues are now in the Getty Museum. 126 Nicholas Penny cites two drawings of the statue that were made in the eighteenth century, one by Giovanni Battista Cipriani. On this and the restorations to the sculpture, see Penny, “Lord Rockingham’s,” 22–3, 34nn111–12. 127 Penny, “Lord Rockingham’s,” 23–7. 128 “An Inventory,” wwm , a 1204. 129 Fordham, “George Stubbs,” 14. 130 On Shelburne’s collection, see Smith, ed., Catalogue; Coltman, Fabricating, 174–8. 131 The evolution of the gallery is discussed by Stillman, “The Gallery.”

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132 G. Hamilton to Shelburne, 18 January 1772, quoted in Bignamini and Hornsby, Digging and Dealing, 2: 22. See also Stillman, “The Gallery,” and Smith, ed., Catalogue. 133 Coltman, Classical, 210–11. 134 Penny, “Lord Rockingham’s,” 30. 135 Nollekens had bought twenty-two wax figures by Giambologna from William Lock’s sale of Norbury Park in 1785. Avery, Giambologna, 241; Bilbey with Trusted, British Sculpture, 106; Penny, “Lord Rockingham’s,” 30–1. See also Kenworthy-Browne, “Terracotta Models by Joseph Nollekens.” 136 “Catalogue of Pictures and Statues,” wwm , Add. Misc. 230. Rockingham’s heir ultimately inserted Diana and the Venus, Minerva, Juno, and Paris in the museum at Wentworth Woodhouse, although it is unclear whether they were arranged in a narrative format. 137 The sculptors had completed the statues quite quickly and all seem to have been at Wentworth Woodhouse by the mid-1750s where they were presumably stored or set up temporarily in another room. 138 Young, A Six Months’ Tour, 1: 265. 139 Ibid., 1: 245–316. 140 Ibid., 1: 248. 141 Ibid., 1: 247. Emphasis in original. 142 Ibid., 1: 269–71. 143 Ibid., 1: 271–2. 144 Ibid. 145 Horace Walpole to Richard Bentley, August 1756, in Walpole’s Corr., 35: 267–8. 146 Toynbee, ed., “Horace Walpole’s,” 71. 147 Walpole to Bentley, August 1756, in Walpole’s Corr., 35: 266. 148 Toynbee, ed., “Horace Walpole’s,” 71. The facade was built by Charles Ross of London. Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary, 707. Arthur Young was also impressed; he called the facade “one of the most beautiful in the world: It is surprisingly light and elegant; the portico, supported by six pillars of the Corinthian order, is exceedingly elegant; the triangular cornice inclosing the arms [carved by John Platt, Colvin (1978), 641], as light as possible; the ballustrade gives a fine effect to the whole building, which is exceeded by few in lightness, in unity of parts, and that pleasing simplicity which must strike every beholder.” Young, A Six Months’ Tour, 1: 127n. 149 Walpole to Mary Berry, 4 September 1789, in Walpole’s Corr., 11: 66. See also Charlesworth, “The Wentworths” (1986), 130–1. 150 The 2nd earl had also been active in the garden. In addition to “naturalizing” his father’s geometrical layout, he had built a Chinese temple, laid out a bowling green, erected a statue of Ceres in the hollow of a dark grove (Young said it was “one of the few instances of statues being employed in gardens with real taste”), and constructed a mock medieval fortification that wittily ran along the Wentworth Woodhouse side of the estate. See Young’s description, A Six Months’ Tour, 1: 132–8, and Charlesworth, “The Wentworths” (1986), 131–2. Charlesworth has posited the assistance of Lord Bathurst in the loosening up of the garden design, given Bathurst’s design for serpentine canals at Riskings and Cirencester. As Charlesworth has explored, Strafford’s garden is not quite “natural” enough for Capability Brown. Charlesworth, “The Wentworths” (1986), 129.

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151 Another great builder who was close to Weddell was his kinsman and Freemason Thomas Robinson, 1st Baron Grantham, an old Court Whig. The most comprehensive scholarship on Weddell is the 2004 exhibition in Leeds, Drawing. 152 The pieces were supplied by Matthew Brettingham the younger. 153 Winckelmann, Reflections. 154 Girouard in Harris, Robert Adam, 8. See also de Bolla, Education, 151–217; Christie, British, 197. 155 Brewer, Party, 92–5. 156 The Cavendishes, by the way, were loyal Rockinghamites. 157 On the evolution away from Baroque planning, see Worsley, Classical Architecture, 232–5. 158 Young, A Six Months’ Tour, 1: 270–1. 159 On time and the use of the past, see Assmann and Assmann, “Das Gestern im Haute,” and chapter 6. 160 Lady Rockingham to Benjamin Hall, 26 February 1779, in Woods, ed., Correspondence, 4: 43. 161 Keppel, for his part, refused to become the new Wilkes, unsuccessfully trying to avoid the public spotlight. The trial and the social and political maelstrom that it created is discussed in detail by Rogers, Crowds, 122–51. See also Wilson, Sense, 255–9. 162 In support of his friend, Rockingham had also commissioned several paste medallions of Keppel from James Tassie. James Tassie to Rockingham, 13 August 1779, wwm , a314/39, Vouchers for Works of Art. Rockingham also had a marble bust of Keppel in the Green Drawing Room. “An Inventory,” wwm , a 1204. 163 In its design, the mausoleum is richly redolent of Masonic allusion, suggesting both Carr’s and Fitzwilliam’s allegiance to the Craft. chapter three

1 London Chronicle, 25 February 1758; Daily Advertiser, 28 February 1758; Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1758, 141. The statement of account for advertising in the Chronicle three times (£1.1.0, dated 25 February 1758) is in wsro , 3rd Duke of Richmond, Accounts and Other Records Relating to Finance [hereafter Accounts] / Portage & Carriage, 1756–1760, 232. I have discussed the Duke of Richmond’s academy in another context: Coutu, “‘A Very Grand,’” 47–54. See also Kenworthy-Browne’s 2009 article, “The Duke of Richmond’s.” 2 Baird, “Richmond House … Part I ,” 11, 13. 3 Walpole, Anecdotes, 1: xiii. 4 Edwards, Anecdotes, xvi–xix. Dossie’s is the more comprehensive account. Dossie, Memoirs, 3: 444–6. Bills for at least two-thirds of the entire collection of casts also exist, in the Goodwood Estate Papers at the wsro , Accounts, Personal and Household Bills Paid between 4 March 1754: 24 January 1756 and 23 January 1760 [hereafter Accounts, Personal], 230/(38, 113, 131, 139, 178, 221); wsro , Letters, Accounts & Other Papers Relating to Paintings Purchased by or Belonging to Charles, 3rd Duke of Richmond, 13 November 1756–57: June 1804 [hereafter Paintings], 168/(20/2).

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5 The drawings are in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and in the Sir John Soane Museum. The Soane Museum drawing is inscribed with a date of 1760. It is a finished drawing which Chambers made after the ceiling was completed for an unrealized book of designs (information from Stephen Astley). See also Baird, “Richmond House … Part II ,” 8, 10; Harris, Sir William Chambers, 235 (105). 6 Dossie, Memoirs, 3: 444–6. 7 Edwards, Anecdotes, xvi–xix. 8 Dossie, Memoirs, 3: 444–6. 9 Edwards did not mention the hands but there are bills for the hands and for casts of the feet of Michelangelo’s David. wsro , Accounts, Personal, 230/(113, 131). Dossie recorded both. 10 The marble copy was commissioned in 1758 and Walpole recorded that Wilton was still working on it in 1761 and that he had received £300 for it. It now stands at Sledmere House in Yorkshire. lwl , Horace Walpole’s Books of Materials, Hazen 2615, I : 121. 11 On Hogarth’s increasing isolation, see Fordham, British Art, passim. 12 These initiatives have recently come under significant scrutiny and need not be discussed in detail here. See, for example, Bignamini, “The Accompaniment,” 176–208, 291–359; Bignamini, “The Artist’s Model from Lely to Hogarth,” in Postle and Bignamini, The Artist’s, 8–15, passim; Solkin, Painting, passim; Hargraves, Candidates, 5–19. 13 Webster, “Taste of an Augustan Collector,” 249–50; Anita Guerrini, “Richard Mead,” odnb; Hanson, The English Virtuoso, 157–93. 14 Gwynn, An Essay. 15 Vertue, “Notebooks,” 1: 10; Vertue, “Notebooks,” 2: 150; Bignamini, “The Accompaniment,” 404–18. See also Monod, “Painters,” 377 and passim. 16 Quote from 2nd Duke of Richmond to the Duke of Newcastle, 29 June 1743, bl , Add. ms 32700, fol. 264. The whole letter is transcribed in McCann, ed., The Correspondence, 103–4. 17 Monod, Jacobitism, 300. 18 At this point, the grand masters served only for a year. The Jacobite Duke of Wharton was grand master in 1722–23. He was succeeded first by Lord Dalkeith, a pro-Hanoverian, and then by Wharton, who left abruptly “without any ceremony.” James Anderson’s Constitutions was published in 1723, partly to further assuage any concerns about Jacobite subterfuge within the Freemasons’ ranks. See Baigent and Leigh, Temple, 177–80. On the 2nd Duke of Richmond as grand master, see Anderson, New Book, 107. Through Louise de Kéroualle, the Richmond line also inherited the Duchy of Aubigny, where the 2nd duke established a Lodge in 1735. Baird, Goodwood, 30. 19 Most of the paintings are about 221 × 140 cm. Knox, “The Tombs,” 231–4. 20 Knox outlines the various hangings. Knox, “The Tombs,” 230–1. 21 The painting of William III is 241.5 × 170 cm and that of George I is 179 × 237.5 cm. Ibid., 231–4. 22 Baird, Goodwood, 31. 23 Knox, “The Tombs,” 228. 24 McSwiny, To the Ladies, 1. The scheme is discussed in detail by Knox, “The Tombs”; Haskell, Patrons, 287–92; Baird, Goodwood, 22–3. 25 Knox, “The Tombs,” 234.

244 | notes to pages 94–100

26 Canaletto arrived in 1746 with a letter from Consul Joseph Smith in Venice to McSwiny suggesting that McSwiny write a letter of introduction on his behalf to the Duke of Richmond. Jane Farrington in Liversidge and Farrington, eds., Canaletto, 68. 27 True to form, the entrepreneurial McSwiny sought out other patrons for his scheme, both for paintings and for a series of prints. In 1741 he published Tombeaux des Princes grands capitaines et autres illustres, qui ont fleuri dans la Grande-Bretagne vers la fin du XVII et le commencement du XVIII siècle as an advertisement for the prints. Although he envisioned a much bigger publication with plates of all the tombs, the 1741 publication contains only nine plates and three pages of text extolling the project. The scheme ultimately amounted to little. Haskell, Patrons, 288–90. 28 The second stanza reads: “In Paint each Hero’s Glory shewn, / To the same Glory does aspire; / But, ’till to theirs you add your own, / Richmond, your List is not entire.” An Ode to His Grace, 3. 29 Ibid., 16. 30 He had purchased the fireworks left over from the rain-soaked misadventures of the king’s celebration a few weeks earlier. Baird, Goodwood, 46–7; Baird, “Richmond House … Part I ,” 14; Tillyard, Aristocrats, 79–80. After the war, he was appointed special ambassador to Paris and was ultimately made colonel in the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards just before his death in 1750. 31 Baird, Goodwood, 61–73. For biographies of the 2nd duke, see Baird, Goodwood, passim, and the entry for the duke by Timothy McCann in the odnb . On the menagerie, see Fordham, “George Stubbs,” 11–13. 32 Jacob, The Radical, 200. 33 See Baird, Goodwood, 11–12, 24–5, 76–7. 34 Ibid., 30. 35 See Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus, vol. 3; Baird, Goodwood, 19–22; Worsley, Classical Architecture, 101, 108, 109. 36 Baird, Goodwood, 32–41; Baird, “Richmond House … Part I ”; Baird, “Richmond House … Part II .” 37 Baird, “Richmond House … Part II,” passim. 38 The painting is attributed to Charles Phillips. 39 Quoted in Ingamells, Dictionary, 639–40. 40 Baker, Abraham Trembley, 138–46. 41 For the hunt and the stables, see Baird, Goodwood, 98–102. 42 Egerton, George Stubbs, 130–6, 140–3; Baird, Goodwood, 100–7. 43 Baird, Goodwood, 104. 44 Richmond to Henry Fox, 3 May 1755, quoted in Reese, Goodwood’s Oak, 53. 45 Trembley noted that Richmond “loves dogs prodigiously. He loves also the human race and the feminine race.” Quoted in Reese, Goodwood’s Oak, 51, and in Baker, Abraham Trembley, 138. See also Reese, Goodwood’s Oak, 52–3. 46 Russel, Letters, 2: 361. See also Sutton, An Italian Sketchbook, 2. 47 Daily Advertiser, 8 June 1752. See also O’Connor, Pleasing Hours, 124. 48 John Parker to Edward Murphy, 5 April 1758, in hmc , Charlemont Mss., 1: 246; Waterhouse, “The British Contribution,” 66–7; and Craig, Volunteer Earl, 90. 49 It is not clear when in 1755 Charlemont decided to close the academy. Richmond was in Rome in the first third of the year.

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50 For Wilton, see Smith, Nollekens, 2: 167–8; for Chambers, see Janine Barrier, “Chambers in France and Italy,” in Harris and Snodin, eds., Sir William Chambers, 19–20. 51 Wilton’s was broken up for auction in the early 1990s. Photographs of the drawings are kept in the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art. Chambers’s is in the Victoria and Albert Museum. 52 See Barrier, “Chambers in France and Italy,” in Harris and Snodin, eds., Sir William Chambers, 19–33. 53 Harris, Sir William Chambers, Knight, 24–5; John Harris, “A Franco-Romano Triumph,” in Harris and Snodin, eds., Sir William Chambers, 36–7. 54 Wynne, “Members,” 537–8; Ingamells, Dictionary, 1009. Mann spoke glowingly of Wilton. Mann to Walpole, 7 September 1753 and 9 November 1753, Walpole’s Corr., 20: 391–2, 397–8. Wilton’s name also appears regularly in Cocchi’s diaries. Effemeridi, r 207/24 vvi. 55 ra , Jupp grangerized 3rd ra catalogue [hereafter Jupp], ju /2/84–5. 56 Fleming, Robert Adam, 161. 57 Leicester paid for the younger Brettingham’s keep in Rome. On Brettingham’s stay in Rome, see Angelicoussis, Holkham Collection, 30–42; Kenworthy-Browne, “Matthew Brettingham’s.” 58 The letter is transcribed in Kenworthy-Browne, “Matthew Brettingham’s,” 102–6. 59 See draft of a letter from Brettingham the younger to Ralph Howard, 10 January 1755, transcribed in ibid., 102. 60 Ibid., 103. 61 Ibid., 103, 117; Montaiglon, Correspondance, 10: 434, 438, 442. 62 Haskell and Penny, Taste, 85; Kenworthy-Browne, “Matthew Brettingham’s,” 103. 63 Kenworthy-Browne, “Matthew Brettingham’s,” 103. 64 Ibid., 105. 65 Ibid., 106. 66 Baird, Goodwood, 37–8, 78–9; Baird, “Richmond House … Part I ,” 12; Baird, “Richmond House … Part II ,” passim. 67 wsro , Accounts, Paintings, 168/(20/2), 13 November 1756; wsro , Accounts, Personal, 168/20/2; 230/(178), 9 February 1759. 68 19 February 1755, rsa Minutes, vol. 1. On Cheere’s career, see Matthew Craske, “Contacts and Contracts: Sir Henry Cheere and the Formation of a New Commercial World of Sculpture in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London,” in Sicca and Yarrington, eds., The Lustrous Trade, 94–113. 69 The minutes of the Society show that he was nominated for membership in 1758: 15 February 1758, rsa Minutes, vol. 2; 31 March 1761, ibid., vol. 6. For the history of the Society, see Allan and Abbott, eds., The Virtuoso. 70 Walpole to Mann, 9 February 1758, in Walpole’s Corr., 21. 71 15 February 1758, rsa Minutes, vol. 2. 72 22 January 1754, ibid., vol. 1, quoted in Bignamini, “The Accompaniment,” 424–5. 73 Oppé, “Memoirs of Thomas Jones,” 8. 74 Edward Edwards’s certificate survives in the Royal Academy. It is a pro forma certificate in which Edwards’s name was inserted. It was signed by Joseph Wilton and is dated March 1759, ra , Jupp, ju /2/84–5:

246 | notes to pages 109–13

75

76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86

87

This is to certify that the bearer Edward Edwards is above twelve years old. That he is recommended by Mr. Wilton as a sober Deliquent Person who is desirous of Drawing from the Gess, and has promised to observe the rules of the Room. He is therefore to be admitted. To the Porter of the Statue Room at Richmond House. Josh Wilton Edwards stated the aim of the school was for young men to acquire “a purer taste in the knowledge of the human form, than had before been cultivated by the artists in England.” Edwards, Anecdotes, xvi. Wilton was paid £300 by the duke for the marble Apollo Belvedere. For payment, see lwl, Horace Walpole’s Books of Materials, Hazan 2615, I: 122, “Other Artists, 1761 (written after Aug. 29).” See also wsro , Accounts, Personal, 230/(139), 13 November 1758, Wilton’s bill for £100. London Chronicle, 25 February 1758. For assessments of the Wrestlers, see Haskell and Penny, Taste, 337–9. For Charles LeBrun, the French Academy, and expression, see Montagu, Expression. The bill for the cast of the head of one of the Laocoön’s sons is in wsro , Accounts, Personal, 230/(131), March 1758. Richardson, Account, 276–80. Winckelmann, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks. Trans. by Henry Fuseli (London, 1765), 30–1. Moore, View, 2: 127–9. Moore also dedicated his Medical Sketches, published in 1786, to Lock. Sir William Hamilton, 27 December 1787, bl , Add. ms 36495, fol. 267, quoted in Ingamells, Dictionary, 608–9. Farington continued: “No gentleman of his time had acquired a more marked distinction than Mr. Lock. His classical attainments, his taste for the arts, the refinement of his manners & the propriety of his conduct obtained for him general respect.” Farington, 1 November 1810, in Garlick and Macintyre, eds., Diary, 10: 3781. In Lock’s obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine, admittedly puffed, Lock was described as “one of the most zealous protectors of the arts, and … perhaps their most enlightened judge. He distinguished himself in early life by his choice collection of pictures, models, and fine works in sculpture; and still more by his liberality and taste. He, of all the lovers of Art, was considered by its professors as their arbiter, their advocate, and common friend.” Gentleman’s Magazine, 30, pt. 2 (October 1810): 393. Sutton, Italian Sketchbook, 3–4; Garlick and Macintyre, ed., Diary, 7: 2597. On Richard Wilson’s career, see Solkin, Landscape. Smith, Nollekens, 2: 165n. Lock probably travelled with James Russel under the pseudonym of Fitzhugh. Notes and Queries, 188 (1945): 272. He used the same pseudonym at the sale of his collection in 1785. For Jenkins, see previous note. Latterly, his collection could be easily seen; he was one of the earliest residents in Robert Adam’s Portman Square and in 1774 he purchased Norbury Park in nearby Surrey where he and his wife were generous hosts. His wife, Frederica Augusta, was the daughter of Sir Luke Schaub, an intimate in the circle of Frederick, Prince of Wales. See Sermoneta, Locks, 1–23. The St. Ursula was ultimately a foundation piece of the National Gallery, through Lock’s son-in-law J.J. Angerstein. Smith, Nollekens, 2: 166,

notes to pages 113–17 | 247

88

89

90 91 92

93

94 95 96 97

98 99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106 107

and Ingamells, Dictionary, 608–9. Dossie, Memoirs, 3: 444. A Catalogue of a Valuable Collection; Avery, Giambologna, 239–41; and Vasari, Vite, 8 (1772): 171. Reynolds, Discourses, 180. Contemporaneously to Reynolds, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing used the Laocoön to explore the age-old debate about the ability of painting or poetry to present most effectively a narrative. He comes down heavily in favour of poetry. Lessing, Laokoon. He does not distinguish between painting and sculpture. For Beckford, see Beckford, Familiar Letters, 2: 273. There is also a drawn sketch by Nollekens in the Ashmolean Museum that deals with the same story. Avery, Giambologna, 241; Bilbey with Trusted, British Sculpture, 106; Penny, “Lord Rockingham’s,” 30–1. See also Kenworthy-Browne, “Terracotta Models by Joseph Nollekens.” On the god-like magisterial concept of the sublime, see Chard, “Effeminacy,” particularly 150. Moore, View, 2: 11–12. See also Haskell and Penny, Taste, 230. Thomas Broderick described the Hercules as having “strength without softness.” Broderick, Travels, 2: 96. Although entirely speculative on my part, Thomas Broderick was possibly recounting Lock’s thoughts in his Travels, given Ingamells’s suggestion that the Travels may have been a compilation of other sources. Ingamells, A Dictionary, 131. Dossie, Memoirs, 3: 444–6; Avery, Giambologna, 239, 241. Walpole offered his antique eagle for casting but the offer was not taken up. Walpole to Mann, 9 February 1758, in Walpole’s Corr., 21: 173–4. See Allan and Abbott, eds., The Virtuoso, passim. 15 March 1758, rsa Minutes, vol. 3. 3 April 1759, rsa , pr /ar /103/10/219. For the best model after Michelangelo’s Bacchus, 3 April 1758, rsa Minutes, vol. 3; for the best model in clay after the Dancing Faun, 2 May 1759, ibid., vol. 4; for the best cameo engraved in onyx after the Meleager, 16 April 1760, ibid., vol. 5; and other examples. For example, 2 May 1759, ibid., vol. 4. Smith, Nollekens, 2: 168. Oppé, “Memoirs of Thomas Jones,” 8. Note in Joseph Wilton’s hand in Joseph Farington’s scrapbook, ra , n.p. Farington refers to the note in his diary, 4 January 1796. Garlick and Macintyre, eds., Diary, 2: 466. Hargraves, Candidates, 16. Minutes of Exhibition Committee Meeting, 26 February 1760, sa /1, quoted in Hargraves, Candidates, 22. Hargraves, Candidates, 28. The details of the break, the formation of the Society of Artists, and the Spring Gardens exhibition are recounted in ibid., 5–41. Oppé, “Memoirs of Thomas Jones,” 8. ra, Society of Artists papers, sa/34/22. On Paine’s ascendancy and character, see Hargraves, Candidates, 104–7 and passim. Minutes of Directors Meeting, 1 August 1770, sa /10. See Hargraves, Candidates, 107. For Mortimer’s connection with the duke’s gallery, see 21 March 1759, rsa Minutes, vol. 4, and John Sunderland’s entry for Mortimer in the odnb .

248 | notes to pages 117–21

108 The king’s relationship with Sarah Lennox and the political manoeuvrings are discussed in Reese, Goodwood’s Oak, 72–3, and Tillyard, Aristocrats, 122–34. 109 Olson, Radical Duke, 4. 110 Walpole, Anecdotes, 1: xiii. 111 For Chambers’s relationship with George III, see Jane Roberts, “Sir William Chambers and George III,” in Harris and Snodin, eds., Sir William Chambers, 41–54. For the Kew projects, see Harris, “Sir William Chambers and Kew Gardens,” and Coutu, “William Chambers and Joseph Wilton,” in Harris and Snodin, eds., Sir William Chambers, 55–67, 176–8. 112 Harris, Sir William Chambers, 77; Rykwert, Brothers Adam, 60; Smart, Allan Ramsay, 11. 113 Marsden and Hardy, “‘O Fair Britannia Hail!’”; Marsden, “George III’s State Coach,” in Marsden, ed., Wisdom, 43–59; Coutu, “William Chambers and Joseph Wilton,” in Harris and Snodin, eds., Sir William Chambers, 179–81. 114 Among these was a cabal within the Modern Order of Freemasons, but, after a ten-year period characterized by internal feuding and saccharine and toadyish leadership, plans for royal approbation were abandoned. Clark, British Clubs, 340–2. See also Preston, Illustrations, 266–73. 115 Olson, Radical Duke, 16–22. 116 See Richmond to Newcastle, 3 April 1768, bl, Add. ms. 32,989 fol. 294, transcribed in Olson, Radical Duke, 127–8, and Olson’s commentary, also 127–8. 117 Hargraves, Candidates, 108–9; see Reese, Goodwood’s Oak, 90ff. 118 Solkin, Painting, 242. 119 Stubbs remained loyal to the Society of Artists at least until the mid-1770s. Egerton, George Stubbs, 41–3. 120 Hargraves, Candidates, 117–18. On the design of the Great Room, see Hargraves, Candidates, 118–25. 121 Hargraves, Candidates, 126. Walpole reported that Richmond and Northumberland had given their patronage. lwl , Horace Walpole’s Books of Materials, Hazen 2615, II : 18. 122 Ozias Humphry and Robert Edge Pine, two of the most prominent artists who had stayed with the Society of Artists at the rupture that precipitated the Royal Academy, ultimately went over to the academy because of Paine. Humphry had proposed to Paine’s daughter. When Paine heard the news he was furious, calling Humphry “the most abandoned profligate.” Pine was affronted by Paine’s verbal abuse of himself and other members of the Society. Hargraves, Candidates, 128–33. 123 Ibid., 140. 124 Ibid., 141. 125 It is unclear exactly when this occurred. The quote is from a newspaper article dated 1791 which is about the life of John Mortimer. It was reproduced by Whitley, Artists, 1: 237–8. 126 Hargraves, Candidates, 145. 127 Kidson, George Romney, 28–9; Cross, Striking Likeness, 67, 69. 128 Reese, Goodwood’s Oak, 18. See also A. Anderson to the Duke of Richmond, August 1801, wsro , Accounts, Paintings, 168/(20/9).

notes to pages 121–4 | 249

129 “Fire at Richmond House,” London Chronicle, 20–22 December 1791; “Fire at Richmond House,” Morning Chronicle, 22 December 1791. 130 Hargraves, Candidates, 163. 131 17 January 1799, Garlick and Macintyre, eds., Diary, 4: 1137. 132 Sir William Hamilton made continuing efforts to get the British Museum to acquire the Warwick Vase in the 1770s: Jenkins and Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes, 81, 220–2. I am grateful to Kim Sloan for her assistance. See Robert G.W. Anderson, “British Museum, London: Institutionalizing Enlightenment,” in Paul, ed., The First Modern Museums, 47–72. 133 A Catalogue of the Capital, lot 108 (acquired by a Mr Lee). 134 Smith, Nollekens, 2: 168; Baird, Goodwood, 220n16. 135 Reeve, ed., Greville Memoirs, 129. 136 On the Ordnance, see Olson, Radical Duke, 64–75; Reese, Goodwood’s Oak, 189–207; Baird, Goodwood, 140–2. 137 Russell, ed., Memorials and Correspondence of Charles James Fox, quoted in Baird, Goodwood, 140. 138 The Egyptian Dining Room dates from this era. James Wyatt also built new kennels at Goodwood for £6,000. Baird, Goodwood, 133–6, 147–55. 139 Hardcastle, ed., Somerset, 1: 40. Another student, John Hakewell, “quitted the arts, and established a thriving concern as a house-painter, at the well-known premises in Wigmore Street.” 140 Transcribed in Smith, Nollekens, 2: 168. chapter four

1 Chesterfield to Huntingdon, 2 August 1757, heh, Hastings ms , ha 13756. Chesterfield’s letters to the Earl of Huntingdon have been published by Steuart, ed., Letters, 118. 2 Oliver, Antiquities, xiv. 3 The Huntingdon earldom (7th creation) began with George Hastings (1486/87–1544). On the 3rd earl, see Cross, The Puritan Earl; on the 7th earl’s political career, see Walker, “The Political Career.” 4 The wing might have been designed by either William Kent or Roger Morris. Their names appear in the 9th earl’s bank accounts. Willis, “William Kent’s,” 161. 5 On the Huntingdons’ Jacobite sympathies, see Schlenther, Queen, 27–33. 6 Schlenther, “Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon,” odnb . 7 Schlenther, Queen, 27–33. According to Leslie Mitchell, for Whigs, Methodists were worse than Catholics. Mitchell, Whig World, 127–9. 8 Henry Hastings to Theophilus, Earl of Huntingdon (hereafter Theophilus), 22 July 1746; Francis Hastings to Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, 29 July 1746; Francis Hastings to the Countess of Huntingdon, 31 July 1746; Henry Hastings to Theophilus, 31 July 1746; the Countess of Hastings to Theophilus, August 1746; the Countess of Hastings to Theophilus, 8 August 1746; Henry Hastings to Theophilus, 19 August 1746. All in hmc , Hastings, 3: 57–62. 9 Schlenther, Queen, 30.

250 | notes to pages 124–9

10 From a transcription in heh, Hastings ms , hap box 31 (6). The epitaph is also transcribed in Life and Times, 1: 75. The monument was designed by William Kent and Michael Rysbrack. See also Willis, “William Kent’s,” 158, 160. 11 On Bolingbroke’s authorship of the inscription, see Life and Times, 1: 9. For another discussion of the monument to the 9th earl, see Craske, Silent Rhetoric, 304–6. 12 While he was lord lieutenant of Ireland, Chesterfield had successfully kept the Jacobite cause at bay. On the countess’s concerns for her son’s spiritual well-being, see Schlenther, Queen, 57. See also Life and Times, 1: 459. Also, Bolingbroke to Huntingdon, 24 October 1748; Bolingbroke to Huntingdon, 10 November 1748; Bolingbroke to Huntingdon, 1 December 1748. All in hmc , Hastings, 65–9. 13 Chesterfield to the Countess of Huntingdon, 8 August 1746, hmc , Hastings, 3: 61–2. 14 Chesterfield, as secretary of state, also disagreed with Newcastle over foreign policy and particularly the Dutch war effort, which greatly affected England’s prosecution of the War of the Austrian Succession. He resigned his portfolio in 1748 but reassured the king of his continued support. 15 Akenside, “Ode XVIII ,” IV .3.1–9, in Akenside, Poetical Works, 256. 16 Ibid., V .1.6–10, V .2.1–10, in ibid., 257. 17 The trope of Grecian oligarchical democracy over Roman imperial rule was invoked by other Whig Patriots in opposition to Walpole. See, for example, Cobham’s contemporaneous work in the Grecian Valley at Stowe. For an assessment of Akenside’s politics, see Griffin, “Akenside’s Political Muse.” 18 Akenside, “Ode XVIII ,” VI .2.1–10, in Akenside, Poetical Works, 258–9. 19 Huntingdon was descended from a royal duke, the Duke of Clarence, who was a brother of Edward IV and thus of higher standing than Chesterfield. Many of the Chesterfield-Huntingdon letters are housed in the Hastings manuscripts in the Henry E. Huntington Library in California. (There is no relation between the Huntingdons and the Huntingtons.) Some of these and others are published in Steuart, ed., Letters. The Chesterfield-Stanhope letters, numbering 448, were never meant for publication but were published in 1774 after both father and son had died. The letters, ironically, have proven to be one of Chesterfield’s greatest legacies. Stanhope, Letters. Philip Stanhope and Huntingdon knew each other. 20 Chesterfield to Huntingdon, 31 August 1749 and 9 October 1756, in Steuart, ed., Letters, 7, 109. See also Schlenther, Queen, 57. Huntingdon’s sister Elizabeth married in 1752 Lord John Rawdon, later the first Earl of Moira, and promptly moved to Ireland, out of reach of her mother. Schlenther, Queen, 60–1. 21 Chesterfield to Huntingdon, 16 May 1750, heh, Hastings ms , ha 13719; Steuart, ed., Letters, 12. 22 Chesterfield quoted in Asleson, British Paintings, 348. 23 Huntingdon arrived at Turin in September 1754 and then went to Florence, Bologna, Rome, and Naples. He stopped at Milan on the way home in the spring of 1756 and then journeyed to Austria, Germany, Flanders, and Holland before arriving in England in October of that year. Ingamells, Dictionary, 537–8. 24 Schlenther, Queen, 57. 25 Chesterfield to Huntingdon, 15 November 1750, in Steuart, ed., Letters, 31.

notes to pages 131–4 | 251

26 Chesterfield to Huntingdon, 29 September 1750, in ibid., 26. 27 Quoted in Schlenther, Queen, 58. Huntingdon was also quite enamoured with the Marchesa Capponi in Florence. Fleming, Robert Adam, 130. 28 “He came to me very French; I have shewn him it was not his way to make a fortune in this land.” Keene to Abraham Castres, 23 February 1753, and Keene to Castres, 7 June 1753, in Lodge, ed., The Private, 323, 329. See also Asleson, British Paintings, 348. 29 Walpole to George Montagu, 6 December 1753, in Walpole’s Corr., 9: 158. 30 On Russian male fashion, see Ribeiro, Dress, 101–3. 31 The Russian ambassador was Count Petr Grigor’evich Chernyshev. For a fuller discussion of Reynolds’s portrait and Huntingdon’s letters concerning the coat, see Asleson, British Paintings, 348–51, and Mannings, “Reynolds’s,” 233–4. 32 Walpole to George Montagu, 6 December 1753, in Walpole’s Corr., 9: 158. 33 Mann to Horace Walpole, 13 December 1754, in ibid., 20: 457. 34 Walpole to Mann, 9 January 1755, in ibid., 20: 461. 35 Chesterfield to Huntingdon, 21 February 1755, heh, Hastings ms , ha 13744; Steuart, ed., Letters, 88. 36 Chesterfield to Philip Stanhope, 17 October 1749, in Strachey, ed., Letters, 381, quoted in Harris, The Palladian Revival, 19. 37 The Earl of Chesterfield to Francis, Lord Huntingdon, 3 March 1751, heh, Hastings ms, ha 13727. Transcribed in Steuart, ed., Letters, 40. For the letter of introduction, see O’Connor, Pleasing Hours, 3. 38 Chesterfield to Huntingdon, 25 October 1755, in Steuart, ed., Letters, 91. 39 Many of the young earl’s exercise books for Greek, Latin, French, and Italian survive in the Hastings collection at the Huntington Library. See also Chesterfield to Huntingdon, 25 October 1755, in Steuart, ed., Letters, 91: “You have made a long stay at Florence, and I dare say a very useful one; it is both the school of Virtu and of the purity of the Italian language, which I am sure you are by this time critically master of. You are now going to put your Lingua Toscana into Bocca Romana, which makes the perfection of the whole.” The paintings were commissioned on Huntingdon’s return visit to Florence on his way home in early 1756. Thomas Patch to Huntingdon, March 1756, heh, Hastings ms , ha 9878; John Parker to Charlemont, 22 May 1756, in hmc , Charlemont ms, 228; Ingamells, A Dictionary, 537; Russell, “Thomas Patch,” 117–18. Thomas Steavens, a friend of Charlemont, recommended Patch to Huntingdon whom, Steavens maintained, “Lord Charlemont had the highest value for.” Thomas Steavens to Huntingdon, 31 January 1756, heh, Hastings ms , ha 12696. These, plus the portrait of Galileo, seem to have been the only paintings that Huntingdon commissioned while on his travels. According to the several inventories of Donington Park that date from after the earl’s return until just after his death in 1789, there were very few paintings other than portraits, of which many were family portraits or portraits of royalty or other English peers. When Walpole visited Donington Park in 1768, he noted there were “a few family pictures, but the best are in town.” Toynbee, ed., “Horace Walpole’s,” 64. Despite the fawning entreaties of a number of other people seeking the earl’s patronage, Robert Adam foremost among them, the earl seems to have bought or commissioned little. On Adam, see Ingamells, A Dictionary, 537; Fleming, Robert Adam, 132, 195. 40 Robert Hennington to Huntingdon, 18 March 1755, heh, Hastings ms , ha 6318.

252 | notes to pages 134–8

41 Wilton would have made the copies from casts or moulds rather than the originals, perhaps from those made by Paolo Posi for the Abbé Farsetti. Lewis, Connoisseurs, 170; Haskell and Penny, Taste, 83, 85. 42 Wilton was paid 120 zecchinis for the lot but this was probably only the shipping cost. heh, Hastings ms, Misc., box 2 (4). 43 See Coltman, Fabricating, 17–96, 168–70, for an incisive discussion of the neo-classical library and the relationship between sculpture and classical texts within the library setting. 44 Angelicoussis, “The Holkham Collection,” 67–8; Thorsten Opper, “Ancient Glory and Modern Learning: The Sculpture-Decorated Library,” in Sloan, ed., with Burnett, Enlightenment, 59–61; Baker, “The Portrait Sculpture”; Baker, “The Making of Portrait Busts.” Another precedent of which Huntingdon may have been aware was Edward Murphy’s commission of seventy-eight terra cotta copies of Roman imperial busts for his library in Dublin. Murphy was Lord Charlemont’s tutor and he had given the commission to Vierpyl in 1751. Vierpyl shipped the lot in 1755. Murphy’s interest was of an historical sort; he was evidently anxious to have a complete set that told the chronology of the Roman empire rather than be surrounded by a selection of busts that might have personal meaning for him. For accounts of the Murphy collection, see Helen Byrne, “Simon Vierpyl: Busts, c. 1751–55,” in O’Rafferty and Cunningham, Charlemont 1728– 1799, 19–22; Helen Byrne, “Simon Vierpyl (c. 1725–1810), Sculptor and Stonemason,” in McCarthy, ed., Lord Charlemont, 179–80; Duffy, “The Collection of Busts.” 45 Dobrée, “Introduction” to Letters, 1: 173; Ayres, Classical Culture, 138, 179n96; Russell, “Canaletto and Joli,” 630. Roubiliac presented Chesterfield as far more handsome than contemporary accounts suggest. Lord Hervey described Chesterfield as a “stunted giant,” short, with a large head and bad teeth. Quoted in John Cannon’s entry for Chesterfield in the odnb . 46 Wilton’s packing list is in Italian. The first seven cases contain the full-length statues. Case 8 contained Tiberius, “Antino” (probably Antoninus Pius), Agrippa, Claudius, Cicero, and the young Nero; case 9 contained Hadrian, Vespasian, Augustus, Galba, Plautilla, and Pan; case 10 contained Nero, Vitellius, Titus, Otho, (unreadable), and the young Marcus Aurelius; case 11 contained Trajan(?), Caligula, Julius Caesar, and Domitian; and case 12 contained Marcus Aurelius, Geta, and Seneca. heh, Hastings ms, Misc., box 2 (4). “A Partial List of Donington House Furniture, Paintings &c.,” n.d. [post-1793], heh, Hastings ms , ha Inventories, box 3 (19). The bust of Plautilla may have been one of the female busts listed in the front gallery and best staircase. Other sculpture listed in the 10th earl’s house had been moved to the drawing room in the new house, including busts of Fox and the Duke of Albuquerke [sic]. “A Partial List,” heh, Hastings ms, ha Inventories, box 3 (19). 47 There are numerous appointments with Wilton in the first half of 1755 in Cocchi’s diaries which presumably correspond to sittings for the bust. Effemeridi, r 207/24 vvi . Although extant correspondence refers explicitly only to the bust of Pythagoras, it also mentions two other unidentified busts also executed by Vierpyl. A process of elimination suggests that these were the busts of Epicurus and Augustus. See notes below and John Parker to Charlemont, 24 December 1755, in hmc , Charlemont ms, 223; Parker to Charlemont, 22 May 1756, in ibid., 228. Vierpyl received the order in 1755 and,

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48 49

50 51

52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59

through Thomas Steavens, a friend of Charlemont’s who seemed to have been working for Cardinal Albani in a secretarial capacity, quickly secured permission to copy the busts. Steavens to Huntingdon, 31 January 1756, heh, Hastings ms , ha 12696; Ingamells, Dictionary, 892. Vierpyl finished the busts within a matter of months but they were not actually shipped to England until April 1757. Steavens to Huntingdon, 31 January 1756, heh, Hastings ms , ha 12696; Vierpyl wrote to Huntingdon on 8 July 1756 saying that the “the Busts have been done sometime, [but he did] not [know] where to forward them.” heh, Hastings ms , ha 12990; William Wilkins to Huntingdon, 23 April 1757, heh , Hastings ms , ha 13303. On the Capitoline Museum, see Paul, ed., The First Modern Museums, 21–45. Chesterfield to Huntingdon, 21 February 1755, in Steuart, ed., Letters, 89. Cocchi had lived with the 9th earl when he first arrived in London but soon obtained other accommodations, having found the earl rather mean with his money. The two men remained, however, on amicable terms. There are several extant letters between them in the Cocchi correspondence in the Archivo Baldasseroni. See also Dorris, Paolo Rolli, 241–3; Ingamells, Dictionary, 538. Effemeridi, r 207/24 vvi . Huntingdon’s grant of admission is dated 11 April 1755 and is in the heh, Hastings ms , hap box 32 (1). For the Academy of Apatisti, see the brief entry at http://brunelleschi. imss.fi.it/genscheda.asp?appl=LST&xsl=luogo&lingua= ENG&chiave=700036. For its existence in the seventeenth century, see Lazzeri, Intellettuali, and Haan, “From Academia,” 29–37. Haan, “From Academia,” 29–37. Clorinda Donato has explored male friendship in relation to such academies and other groups in eighteenth-century Florence. Donato, “Where Reason.” Another project that Huntingdon and Cocchi may have worked on together was the formation of a collection of imperial Roman medals for which Domenico Bracci offered his assistance in 1755. It is unclear if Huntingdon pursued this project. Domenico Bracci to Huntingdon, 1 February 1755, in hmc , Hastings ms , 91; Ingamells, Dictionary, 537. Years before, Sebastiano Bianchi, the antiquary and steward of the grand duke’s collection, had prepared notes on the collecting of Roman coins for Cocchi and Huntingdon’s father, the 9th earl. The notes ended up in the collection of the scientist and jeweller William Dugood at Burton Constable Hall. Dugood was a Freemason and the main source of information within the pretender’s court for Stosch. See Connell, “Recently Identified,” 36. I am grateful to David Connell for the reference. Pythagoras was the first to suggest the movement of the planets, including the Earth, around a central fire. Cocchi, Pythagorean Diet, 34–5. Albala, “Insensible Perspiration”; Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe, 227–8. Cocchi, Pythagorean Diet, 56–7. Ibid., 35–6, 55–63. Cocchi continued with his interest in ancient medicine, compiling in his latter years a biography of the famed Greek physician Asklepiades. His son published it posthumously as Discorso primo sopra Asclepiade (Florence, 1758); translated and published in English in 1762 as The Life of Aschelepiades, the Celebrated Founder of the Aschlepiadic Sect in Physic, Compiled from Testimonials of Twenty-Seven Antient Authors.

254 | notes to pages 141–3

60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67

68 69

70

71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79

Quoted in Stuart, Bloodless, 166. For a discussion of Cheyne, see ibid., 163–80. Ibid., 167. Ibid., 168, 175. Ibid., 221. Cocchi paraphrases Pythagoras. Cocchi, Pythagorean Diet, 14. For a further discussion of hair, or lack thereof, on male portrait busts in the eighteenth century, see Baker, “‘No cap,’” especially 70–2 for the Cocchi and Huntingdon busts. A bronze cast of the bust sits on Cocchi’s tomb in Santa Croce, Florence. It was presumably made shortly after Cocchi’s death in 1758. Another bronze cast, perhaps made at the same time, is now in the collection of the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut. Baker also discusses the veristic aspect of the bust of Cocchi. Baker, “A Genre of Copies and Copying? The Eighteenth-Century Portrait Bust and Eighteenth-Century Responses to Antique Sculpture,” in Bartsch, Becker, Bredekamp, and Schreiter, eds., Das Originale, 292–3. The most famous bust of Epicurus in the Capitoline is the double bust with Metrodorus, but the more likely source for Vierpyl’s bust was probably the single portrait of Epicurus whose shoulders are covered in a swag of drapery which corresponds to the drapery on Wilton’s bust of Huntingdon. Cocchi, Pythagorean Diet, 27. Ingamells, Dictionary, 537. Although the bust was identified as being of Epicurus, it was not until well into the nineteenth century that scholars realized that the library in which it was discovered was the Epicurean library of Philodemus. On Epicureanism and European thought in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries especially, see: Barbour, English Epicures; Jones, The Epicurean, 166–213; Lennon, The Battle; Osler, ed., Atoms. Temple, Upon. Ibid., 243. The pillar acts in lieu of a funeral monument in a church. On the connection with an antique lighthouse, see Coutu, Persuasion, 166–7. heh, stg Accounts (Repairs), box 112 (4), 4 August 1762, bill for cutting letters at the Cobham Pillar; Clarke, “The History of Stowe X ,” 120. Mosaics from Lucullus’s Roman gardens, part of which lie below the Spanish Steps and a section of the Borghese Gardens, were unearthed in early 2007. “Rome’s Ancient Gardens Revealed”; Owen, “Builders Dig up Lost Pleasure Garden of Ancient Romans.” For a modern maquette of the garden, see “The Gardens of Lucullus,” http://www.maquettes-historiques.net/P43.html. For a list of the intended busts, see bl, Add. ms 19,027, fol. 80, in Rorschach, “Frederick” (1993), 31. See also chapter 1. Dobrée, “Introduction” to Letters, 1: 173–4; several relevant references in Cannon in odnb. Cocchi to Huntingdon, 17 July 1756, heh , Hastings ms , ha 1528. Solon, who would have been readily known to anyone trained in the classics in the eighteenth century, was an Athenian lawmaker and poet whose lifespan overlapped with that of Pythagoras. He repealed many of Draco’s laws and secured liberties and rights of Athenian citizens to some share of government within an oligarchical framework. The citizens’ rights were determined by property class, four categories of which

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80 81

82

83 84 85

86 87

88 89 90 91

92 93

were defined by Solon. The motto inscribed is an abbreviated quotation from “As I grow old I am always learning many things.” I am grateful to George Robertson and Sheila Ager for the Greek translations and identifying the potential sources for the mottos. I am grateful to Gabriel Niccoli for the Italian translation. Mann to Walpole, 30 May 1755, Walpole’s Corr., 20: 480. The phrase also appears in fragments of the playwright Menander, but, while it carries a philosophical element in Huntingdon’s motto, it lacks the political implication and allusion to liberty found in the Aeschines-Demosthenes context. Ayres, Classical, 23, 74. Sir Thomas Robinson presented the bust to the British Museum in 1777. Aileen Dawson, “Collectors and Commemoration: Portrait Sculpture and Paintings in the British Museum,” in Sloan, ed., with Burnett, Enlightenment, 35. See also Baker “‘No Cap’”; Baker, Harrison, and Laing, “Bouchardon’s British Sitters.” For the prominence of Cato in the eighteenth century and another Cato-focused trope, see Coltman, Fabricating, 157. For example, the Anno Lucis (the Year of Light) is determined by the Julian Calendar. Thomas Patch referred to Harwood’s bust of Julius Caesar in Patch to Huntingdon, March 1756, heh, Hastings ms , ha 9878. The countess had altered all of the windows of the old house to “Gothick” and “tho [the new Palladian part of the house] touched the old it seemed no part of it: a marriage of a girl of sixteen with an old man of four-score seemed to have as much union in it.” Quoted in Schlenther, Queen, 59; Throsby, Select Views, 1: 173. Walpole referred to the countess’s work as “two tawdry rooms like assemblie rooms at Blackheath.” Toynbee, ed., “Horace Walpole’s,” 64. The order of progression through the rooms has been assumed based upon the order of the listing of the rooms in the 1788 inventory. heh, Hastings ms , ha Inventories, box 3 (8). heh, Hastings ms, ha Inventories, box 3 (13); Throsby, Select Views, 1: 173–4. George Vertue recorded, at second- or third-hand, the anecdote about Cromwell wanting to be portrayed with “warts & everything as you see me,” in contrast to the dandified portraits of the Royalists. Vertue, Notebooks, 18: 71. See also Piper, “Contemporary Portraits”; Lunger Knoppers, “The Politics.” John Throsby said that the bust was “brought by the late Earl from abroad” but this does not preclude it being made by an English sculptor. Throsby, Select Views, 1: 174. Ibid. See Cross, Peter the Great, especially “Consolidation of a Myth, 1725–61,” 60–78; Cross, “Petrus Britannicus.” Cross, “Cultural Relations,” 16. Cross discusses in detail the many accounts of Peter the Great published in England in the eighteenth century. Of particular note for this study is John Bancks (or Banks), The History of the Life and Reign of the Czar Peter the Great, Emperor of All Russia, and Father of His Country (1740, with editions in 1755 and 1756); and W.H. Dilworth, The Father of His Country: Or, the History of the Life and Glorious Exploits of Peter the Great (London, 1758). There was also a significant increase in flattering publications with the rise of Catherine the Great. Bancks published his Of Masonry, an Ode in 1738. For a discussion of Peter the Great and Freemasonry, see Collis, “Hewing.”

256 | notes to pages 147–50

94 Kimber, The Life of Oliver Cromwell. 95 Hollis’s manuscript diaries are full of references to Cromwell and to objects associated with him. Houghton Library, Harvard, ms Eng 1191; Harris, An Historical and Critical Account of the Life of Oliver Cromwell. 96 Voucher from James Tassie to the 2nd Marquis of Rockingham, wwm , a 314, Vouchers for Works of Art 74, 22 June 1773. 97 Francis Harwood made two, perhaps also using Cromwell’s death mask in the Bargello as a model. One of Harwood’s busts was acquired by Sir Wyndham Knatchbull, whose family had been Royalists. Louis-François Roubiliac, John Michael Rysbrack, Joseph Nollekens, and Thomas Banks also all made busts of Cromwell. Gunnis, Dictionary, passim, and Marsden, “George III’s State Coach,” in Marsden, ed., Wisdom, 59n35. Wilton made at least three copies of the Donington Park Cromwell bust. Marble and terra cotta versions are in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (the marble is dated 1762), and another marble is in the collection of the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon. The Donington Park bust is currently in the Government Art Collection. 98 Quote from Royal Archives, Windsor Castle geo , Add. ms 32, quoted in Marsden, “George III’s State Coach,” in Marsden, ed., Wisdom, 55. Throsby said that the king had seen the bust. Throsby, Select Views, 1: 173–4. Marsden has posited that the king probably saw the bust in the 1761 Society of Artists Exhibition. Marsden, “George III’s State Coach,” in Marsden, ed., Wisdom, 55; Graves, Society, 283. 99 Larudan, Les Francs-Maçons Ecrasés. Larudan was considered one of the greatest enemies of Freemasonry but Albert Mackey, one of the standard authorities on Freemasonry and author of An Encyclopædia of Freemasonry, states that Larudan wrote “with seeming fairness and mildness.” Mackey, An Encyclopædia, 194. 100 Walpole recorded the inscription when he saw the Cromwell bust at Donington Park in 1768. Toynbee, ed., “Horace Walpole’s,” 64. I am grateful to Craig Hardiman and David Porreca for confirming my translation. 101 “An Inventory,” heh, Hastings ms , ha Inventories, box 3 (8). 102 Mackey, An Encyclopædia, 315. 103 heh, Hastings ms , ha Inventories, box 3 (13). 104 The speculation that Galileo was associated with an early form of the Illuminati, which has many interesting parallels to Freemasonry, has been fuelled in the popular imagination by Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, published in 2000. 105 Such an auspicious burial was a flagrantly audacious act and may well have spurred Clement XII to issue his papal bull against Freemasonry the following year and haul Cocchi’s Masonic colleague Tommaso Crudeli up before the Inquisition. For a detailed account of Clement’s papal bull, the closure of the Florentine lodge, and the arrest and imprisonment of Crudeli, see Lepper, “The Earl of Middlesex”; Fahie, Galileo, 405–7. Galileo’s digits and tooth are now on display in the Galileo Museum in Florence. Donadio, “A Museum,” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/world/europe/ 23galileo.html?page wanted=1&tntemail0=y&_r=2&emc=tnt. 106 Chesterfield to Huntingdon, 2 August 1757, heh, Hastings ms , ha 13756; Steuart, ed., Letters, 118. 107 bl, Add. ms 51439, fol. 10, quoted in Black, George III, 55. 108 Black, George III, 54–5.

notes to pages 150–2 | 257

109 Actually, he carried the lord mayor’s sword because the sword of state had been mislaid. Marsden, “George III’s State Coach,” in Marsden, ed., Wisdom, 59n27. 110 For detailed accounts of the state coach, see Marsden and Hardy, “‘O Fair Britannia Hail!’”; Marsden, “George III’s State Coach,” in Marsden, ed., Wisdom, 43–59; Coutu, “William Chambers and Joseph Wilton,” in Harris and Snodin, eds., Sir William Chambers, 179–81. Thomas Hollis was also likely involved; see chapter 5. 111 In addition to his over-the-top taste in clothing, Huntingdon would also commission a 10,000-ounce silver wine cooler in 1764 for Donington Park. The cooler is now in the Dallas Museum of Art. It was made by Abraham Portal but the design suggests Chambers’s involvement. Marsden, “George III’s State Coach,” in Marsden, ed., Wisdom, 49. 112 For the cost of the state coach, see “An Account of the Expences of His Present Majesty’s State-Coach, Made in the Year 1762,” Annual Register, 1768, 138. 113 “We hear that several rooms in and near Parliament-Street are taken, at Two Guineas each, by Gentlemen and Ladies, to see his Majesty pass to the House in his new State Coach, which is thought to be the finest that was ever built.” Daily Advertiser, 25 November 1762. A long description of the coach, written by Thomas Hollis, and a report of the crowds was published the next day in the Daily Advertiser, 26 November 1762. See chapter 5. 114 The prince had “not spoken to” Huntingdon. Walpole to Mann, 4 November 1756, in Walpole’s Corr., 21: 13. This may have been the incident that Mann referred to in a letter to Huntingdon in early February 1757 as “the little arts of court intrigue.” Mann to Huntingdon, 26 February 1757, heh, Hastings ms , photostat consulted at the lwl , May 2004. 115 Greig, Diaries, 27; Asleson, British Paintings, 348. Quote from Rev. John Young in Anson, ed., Autobiography, 33; Asleson, British Paintings, 351n9. 116 Asleson, British Paintings, 348. There was an award to the person who announced the birth, £1,000 if it was a boy and £500 if was a girl. Huntingdon did not receive any money. 117 Marsden, “George III’s State Coach,” in Marsden, ed., Wisdom, 57. 118 Asleson, British Paintings, 348; Marsden, “George III’s State Coach,” in Marsden, ed., Wisdom, 57. 119 Walpole to Mann, 18 January 1770, in Walpole’s Corr., 23: 173. 120 Toynbee, ed., “Horace Walpole’s,” 64; lwl , Horace Walpole’s Books of Materials, Hazen 2615, 1: 249. chapter five

1 Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 1–4; Caroline Robbins, “Thomas Hollis in His Dorsetshire Retirement,” in Taft, ed., Absolute Liberty, 235. 2 Diary; Blackburne, Memoirs. There have been a number of modern essays written on Hollis. The seminal works are by Caroline Robbins, “The Strenuous Whig,” and William Bond, Thomas Hollis. Several more deal with aspects of his collection: Wilson, “A Bust”; Eyres, “The Invisible Pantheons”; Eyres, “‘Patriotizing, Strenuously’”; Eyres, “Celebration and Dissent”; Robbins, “Library of Liberty,” in Taft, ed., Absolute Liberty; Hobson, “Leasure with Decorum.”

258 | notes to pages 152–6

3 Diary, 16 April 1759. 4 In the Preface to the Memoirs, Blackburne wrote: “In vain did Mr. Hollis profess the warmest affections for the Princes of the House of Hanover; in vain was he studious and active in promoting their true honour and dignity.” Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: iv. See also Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 210–11 and passim. 5 Ibid., 1: 210. 6 Diary, 14 April 1767, 14 April 1769. 7 Quoted in Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 54. 8 Molesworth outlined his position in the introduction to his translation of François Hotoman’s Franco-Gallia. The introduction was included in the second edition in 1721; that year, the political climate for such an exegesis was more amenable than it would have been during the reign of Queen Anne, when the work was originally written (1711). [Molesworth], Franco-Gallia. See also Molesworth, Principles; Bond, Thomas Hollis, 28; Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, 88–133. 9 Robbins, “The Strenuous Whig,” 420. Hollis provided William Harris with considerable information about Cromwell for Harris’s book, An Historical and Critical Account of the Life of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which was published in 1762. Diary, 15 July 1759. 10 Quoted in Bond, Thomas Hollis, 1. 11 Hollis was conscientious in stating in his diary where he dined each day. 12 In 1748, on his return to England from his first grand tour, he witnessed the fireworks display in Paris marking the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. Blackburne recounted that a French nobleman fell into conversation with Hollis and asked him “if he had ever served in the army? To which he answered, No; Are you a member of parliament? No; Are you a free-mason? No. Upon receiving these short answers, which were given on purpose (the tendency and consequences being suspected [of discerning if he was a Jacobite]), the Frenchman turned away short, and spake no more to him.” Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 25. 13 The Horne Tavern appears frequently in Gould, History. See also Evans, “The Society.” 14 Reprinted in Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 60. 15 See Hollis’s Diary, passim. 16 Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 111–12; Disney, A Catalogue, 32–5. 17 Blackburne underscores this in his preface. Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: iii. 18 Roberts, History, 165. 19 For a detailed discussion of the bindings, see Bond, Thomas Hollis, 34–77. 20 Diary, 30 June 1762. 21 In February 1769 he made reference in his diary to Wilkes’s expulsion from the House: “This morning early Mr. Wlks [sic] was expelled the H. of C. [sic], by a Majority there less specious & more profligate than himself!” Diary, 4 February 1769. There are at least thirteen other references to Wilkes in Hollis’s diaries, all in support of his actions, except Hollis was disturbed by the mobs, having had several of his windows broken after Wilkes’s election in March 1768. Diary, 27 March 1768 and passim. 22 On the significance of the object as gift and the act of gift giving, see Baird and Ionescu, eds., Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory, passim.

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23 Some of the pseudonyms include: Patina Antiquarior, “One of the People,” “Obsta Principiis,” and “Roast Beef of Old England,” the latter in reference to Hogarth’s satirical painting. Wilson, “A Bust,” 6. 24 Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 59–60. He went on: “to render tyranny and its abettors odious, to extend science and art, to keep alive the honour and estimation of their patrons and protectors, and to make the whole as useful as possible; abhorring all monopoly,” and “if such should be the fitness of things, to propagate the same benevolent spirit to posterity.” 25 Robbins, “The Strenuous Whig,” 411–12. 26 He said in his diary that he had resolved to “avoid all public distinctive characters.” Diary, 23 April, 5 November 1759. See also Bond, Thomas Hollis, 9. 27 On the professorships and scholarships, see Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 1. 28 On the Hollis family’s long-standing connections to Harvard, see Bond, Thomas Hollis, 3–5. 29 See ibid.; Robbins, “Library of Liberty,” in Taft, ed., Absolute Liberty. 30 Goldgar, “The British Museum,” 199. On Hollis’s appreciation for the British Museum, see Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 82. 31 Haskell and Penny, Taste, 68. The German visitor was August von Kotzebue. Erinnerungen, 3: 23. 32 For the Laocoön statuette, see Kim Sloan, “‘Aimed at Universality and Belonging to the Nation’: The Enlightenment and the British Museum,” in Sloan, ed., with Burnett, Enlightenment, 24–5; on the Wilson painting, see Diary, 26 October 1761, and Ford, “Richard Wilson,” 311; for the Seneca bust, see Diary, 12 December 1763; for the Milton medal, see Diary, 30 July 1759, and Bond, Thomas Hollis, 60; for the anti-Jesuit print, see Walpole to William Mason, 13 April 1780, in Walpole’s Corr., 29: 24; for the Milton collection, see Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 112. 33 For the most recent work on Hanway, see Taylor, Jonas Hanway. 34 For a detailed account of Hollis’s participation in the Society of Arts, see Abbott, “Thomas Hollis and the Society,” in Abbott and Allan, eds., The Virtuoso, 38–55. Abbott’s essays on Hollis were first published in 1971 in the Royal Society of Arts Journal. 35 For a discussion of the role of these patriotic societies, see Colley, Britons, 85–98. For Hollis’s involvement, see Robbins, “The Strenuous Whig,” 422–3, and Bond, Thomas Hollis, 24. 36 See Abbott, “Thomas Hollis and the Society,” in Abbott and Allan, eds., The Virtuoso, passim, and numerous references in Hollis’s diary. Hollis sent the Duke of Richmond one of the plaster busts of Seneca that he had received from the British consul at Livorno in late 1763. Diary, 13 December 1763. 37 There are several references in his diary to visits to Ranelagh. 38 On the social prestige of both Vauxhall and Ranelagh, see Beddington, Canaletto, 119. 39 There are references to all in his diary. See also Bond, Thomas Hollis, 24–6. 40 Hollis recorded in his diary regular visits from Cipriani, Wilton, and Stuart, as well as his own visits to these men. 41 The letters are transcribed in Blackburne, Memoirs, 2: 708–9. 42 Hollis mentions the Duke of Devonshire several times in his diary from 1761 to 1763 and records several visits to the duke’s London home to discuss and view medals and

260 | notes to pages 160–4

43

44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

gems. After the 4th duke’s death in 1764, his son continued with the tradition of sending Hollis an annual side of venison. Diary, 16 July 1765, 7 August 1768. Rockingham’s name also occurs frequently in the diary between 2 December 1762 and 31 January 1764. In addition to some other coins and medals, Hollis also presented Rockingham with a gold medal by Varin of Rockingham’s ancestor, the Earl of Strafford. See also Eyres, “‘Patriotizing, Strenuously,’” 17. For Hollis’s distribution of LeFroy’s Catalogus Numismaticus, see the Diary, 31 January 1764. On Akenside and Huntingdon, see chapter 4. Lindsey was a family friend of the Hastings and the Earl of Huntingdon communicated regularly with him and secured for him the parsonage of Piddletown. See hmc , Hastings ms , passim. Lindsey was also a friend of the Earl of Northumberland and kept Huntingdon apprised of the progress of the gallery at Northumberland House. See Lindsey to Huntingdon, 3 July 1755, heh, Hastings ms , ha 8309; Lindsey to Huntingdon, 10 October 1755, heh, Hastings ms, ha 8310; Lindsey to Huntingdon, 16 November 1755, heh, Hastings ms, ha 8311. Hollis and Lindsey were regular correspondents, particularly on matters of religious philosophy. Robbins, “The Strenuous Whig,” 443. There are frequent references to both Akenside and Lindsey in Hollis’s diary. Blackburne transcribed Akenside’s poem “Brutus” from Pleasures of Imagination in the Memoirs, 2: 785. Mitchell, The Whig World, 99–116, 135–56. Robbins, “The Strenuous Whig,” 418. Bond, Thomas Hollis, 7. Robbins, “The Strenuous Whig,” 418. The Hyde burned to the ground in 1965. However, the great collection of classical sculpture and other antiquities that had been acquired by Hollis and Brand had been deposited in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, in 1850. The two men’s itineraries are summarized in Ingamells, Dictionary, 117–18, 512–13, largely derived from Blackburne’s Memoirs. Bond, Thomas Hollis, 12. For Venuti, see Ridley, “To Protect the Monuments,” 138–40; Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 109, 169; and Eyres, “‘Patriotizing, Strenuously,’” 13. For Algarotti and Hollis, see George Trent Hollis, “Count Francesco Algarotti,” in Allan and Abbott, eds., The Virtuoso, 253–64. Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 222, and Diary, 13 March 1764. See Wilson, “A Bust,” 16. Blackburne, Memoirs, 2: 807. Ibid., 1: 32–4. Hollis to William Taylor Howe, September 1760, bl, Add. ms 26,899, quoted in Bond, Thomas Hollis, 16. See also Diary, 10, 12, 14, 18, 24, and 27 September 1760. bl, Add. ms 6210, fol. 130, 139, 141, 143, 147–9, and bl, Add. ms 6210, fol. 135. Cited in Bond, Thomas Hollis, 7n2. See also Camille Paderni, “Extracts.” Bond, Thomas Hollis, 103, 106–7; and Wilson, “A Bust,” 9. Ford, “Richard Wilson,” 308. See Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 503, for the original Italian, and Bond, Thomas Hollis, 20, for the English translation.

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61 The Jenkins portrait of Brand was sold at Sotheby-Parke Bernet, New York, on 16 June 1977 and is now untraced. The Jenkins portrait is not listed in Disney’s Catalogue, suggesting that Brand did not own it. 62 Disney, Catalogue, 23. See also Ford, “Richard Wilson,” 308. The Wilson portrait is also discussed in Bond, Thomas Hollis, 12–13, 20; and Wilson, “A Bust,” 8. 63 Ford, “Richard Wilson,” 309, 311. 64 Constable, Richard Wilson, 32. 65 Bond provides a useful chronology of Hollis’s lodgings. Bond, Thomas Hollis, 8n1. 66 Francis Russell, “Patterns of Patronage,” in Beddington, Canaletto, 46. 67 The servant, Francesco Giovannini, was a Roman whom Hollis had met in Venice. Disney, Catalogue, 13. 68 The most recent discussion of these paintings is in Beddington, Canaletto, 58–9, 80–1, although Beddington does not recognize them as pendants. 69 Daily Advertiser, 3 March 1747. The side arches spanned forty-four feet. See Beddington, Canaletto, 130. 70 Beddington, Canaletto, 119–21. 71 For a discussion of Canaletto’s many views of Westminster Bridge, see Beddington, Canaletto, 100–14; for Hollis’s view specifically, 21, 112. 72 Disney, Catalogue, 12. 73 Each of the paintings was relined in 1850 but John Disney carefully transcribed Canaletto’s inscription onto the new lining, with the exception of the Banqueting House view. Beddington, Canaletto, 81, 112, 120. My gratitude to Gabriel Niccoli for the precise translation. 74 He refers many times in his diary to evenings spent at home examining, rearranging, and dusting his collection. Many of the objects are itemized in Disney, Catalogue, when they were at The Hyde. 75 Blackburne, Memoirs, 2: 808. 76 Some of Hollis’s gift giving corresponds to times when he rearranged his collection. For example, Hollis gave a painting by Wilson – a View of Lake Ariccia which he had acquired from “Captn. Hamilton’s sale” – to the British Museum in 1761, shortly after he had to move owing to a fire in the rear of Mrs Mott’s house. Diary, 26 October 1761. The fire did not damage Hollis’s possessions but it was enough to frighten him. He left Mrs Mott’s rooms on 23 January 1761, stayed briefly at the Old Hummums in Covent Garden (a combination Turkish bath, coffee house, and hotel), and moved into a house leased from Mrs Leighton in Piccadilly at the corner of John Street on 1 February 1761. Bond, Thomas Hollis, 8n1. 77 Diary, 19 March 1760, 1 July 1760, 26 November 1767, 2 April 1762, 29 April 1762, 22 May 1762, 24 May 1762, 9 March 1770. These and other bronzes are listed in Disney, Catalogue, 15–16, 40–2, 48, 50–2. 78 Sloan, “‘Aimed at Universality,’” in Sloan, ed., with Burnett, Enlightenment, 24–5. 79 Blackburne, Memoirs, 2: 808. 80 Gill, “‘Ancient Fictile Vases,” 227; Disney, Catalogue, 14, 23, 31, 55; Diary, 1 October 1759. 81 Diary, 4, 6, 9, and 10 April 1770; Young, ed., The Genius, 64; Wilson, “A Bust,” 9. At least three of Wedgwood’s designs were executed by Cipriani, probably on the advice of Hollis.

262 | notes to pages 167–75

82 Several of the antique gems are listed in Disney, Catalogue, 59–63. See also Buttrey, “Natter on Gem Collecting,” passim. 83 Diary, 26, 28 July 1765. See also Ingamells, Dictionary, 555, 986–7. 84 Hollis bought many of the sculptures at sales in London; several came from Dr Richard Mead’s sale in 1755 or from William Lloyd in 1761. Brand also bought several pieces from Mead’s sale in 1755. See Disney, Catalogue, passim; Diary, 4 July, 15 August 1761. 85 Harris, Knight, 55, plate 91. 86 These both came from Lloyd’s sale. Disney, Catalogue, 1–2, 5–6; Diary, 27 June 1761. 87 The bust was acquired for Hollis by Jenkins in 1766 from the Barberini sale. Blackburne said of the emperor: “This emperor, though absolute lord of the Romans, was guilty of no one vice or meanness, and wrote for the improvement of his own mind, one of the best books.” Blackburne, Memoirs, 2: 835; and Disney, Catalogue, 5. 88 Disney lists a great many busts at The Hyde, although it is not always clear which came from Hollis. Disney, Catalogue, passim; Gill, “‘Ancient Fictile Vases,’” 227. 89 Disney, Catalogue, 3. Michaelis found the attribution laughable. Michaelis, Ancient Marbles, 260. 90 For a comprehensive discussion of the bust, see Wilson, “A Bust.” 91 Butterfield, ed., Diary, 196, and for a description of The Hyde, 196–8; Wilson, “A Bust,” 19. 92 In 1768 Wilton inherited a substantial fortune from his father, who had been a successful plasterer. With that, Wilton seems to have left the running of his business to assistants while he concentrated on living the life of a gentleman. From 1768 onward he designed only the occasional piece which would garner him prestige. For biographies of Wilton, see Smith, Nollekens, 2: 167–85; Joan Coutu, “Joseph Wilton,” odnb ; Wilson, “A Bust,” passim; Roscoe, Hardy, and Sullivan, A Biographical Dictionary, 1385–93. 93 For a discussion of the pileus, see Bond, Thomas Hollis, 64–5 and passim. 94 On Hogarth’s print, see Rauser, “Embodied Liberty.” 95 Bond, Thomas Hollis, 64–5. 96 On Hollis’s bibliophile interests, see Bond, Thomas Hollis, 34–107. 97 Ibid., 91. 98 From Blackburne’s Memoirs, 2: 603; Bond, Thomas Hollis, 35. 99 Bond, Thomas Hollis, 60, 68, 81; Buttrey, “Natter on Gem Collecting.” Buttrey also discusses the correlation between Hollis’s antique gems and his commissions from Natter. 100 Sir Thomas Roe to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, 1621, quoted in Hopper, “The Second,” 340. Hollis had several books about ancient inscriptions in his library. See Bond, Thomas Hollis, 88. 101 Bond, Thomas Hollis, 93, 96. 102 The portrait was included at the wishes of Macaulay’s husband. Bond, Thomas Hollis, 99–100. 103 The primary sources on the medals are Eyres, “‘Patriotizing, Strenuously’”; Eyres, “Celebration and Dissent”; Eimer, The Pingo Family, passim. 104 In addition to the sources listed above, see many entries in the Diary mentioning the Pingos, including ones on 1 June 1759, 8 October 1759, and 18 October 1762. 105 Diary, 24 May 1759, 29 February 1760.

notes to pages 175–81 | 263

106 For example, on 9 September 1760, Hollis sent Pitt a book on the proceedings of the committee for clothing French prisoners of war; on 28 September 1761, a copy of Harris’s An Historical and Critical Account of the Life of Oliver Cromwell (which was returned because Pitt’s servant was instructed to accept gifts only when the sender was known); on 25 September 1762, Toland’s Life of Milton and Venuti’s De dea libertate; on 15 April 1763, the works of Algernon Sydney; on 26 April 1765, Plato Redivous. All citations from the Diary. Wilton also carved two busts of Hollis’s idol, Pitt the elder, one in 1759 and the other about 1766, after Pitt accepted his peerage. Neither was for Hollis although today the latter shares a room with the bust of Hollis in the National Portrait Gallery. 107 Diary, 25 October 1760; Marsden and Hardy, “George III’s State Coach,” in Marsden, ed., Wisdom, 53–5; Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 98. 108 Diary, 22 November, 7 December 1760. On 20 September 1761 Natter showed Hollis the coronation medals of George III and Queen Charlotte, which were something different from the coronation guinea with which he was involved. Hollis admired the profiles but found “the reverse are very indifferent, both for the ideas & execution.” See also Eimer, The Pingo Family, 24, 49, 50. 109 Diary, 12 August, 24 August, 5 September, 22 September 1761. He woke at 3:00 a.m. to make his way to Stubbs’s house before the mob descended. 110 Bond, Thomas Hollis, 107. 111 Marsden and Hardy, “George III’s State Coach,” in Marsden, ed., Wisdom, 55. 112 See Hollis’s letter to the Chronicle, 20 December 1763, reprinted in Blackburne, Memoirs, 2: 717–8; also Diary, 4 April 1762, 15 November 1763; and Robbins, “The Strenuous Whig,” 424. 113 For two recent comprehensive discussions of the state coach, see Marsden and Hardy, “‘O Fair Britannia Hail!’,” and Marsden, ed., Wisdom, 43–59. 114 Diary entries for 29 March 1761, 24 June 1762, 25 June 1762, 27 June 1762, 14 July 1762, 15 July 1762, 16 July 1762, 10 August 1762, 12 September 1762, 28 October 1762, and 17 November 1762. 115 “Mr. Chambers with me at breakfast. Shewed him much Virtu, & recommended him to apply the designs of some of it, nobly, to the Coronation Coach of our ingenuous young monarch; which he seem’d inclined to.” Diary, 2 April 1761. 116 London Chronicle, 25–27 November 1762. Preliminary, briefer descriptions were reported earlier: Daily Advertiser, 25 November 1762; Lloyd’s Evening Post, 24 November 1762; London Chronicle, 20–23 November 1762. 117 See, for example, the Daily Advertiser, 26 November 1762; Gentleman’s Magazine, November 1760. Marsden has pointed out the error in the description of the one sidedoor panel, which does not show “Industry and Ingenuity giving a Cornucopia to the Genius of England.” The allegory is considerably more obscure. Marsden and Hardy, “George III’s State Coach,” in Marsden, ed., Wisdom, 52–3. 118 Eyres has written at length on this topic. Eyres, “Celebration and Dissent.” See also Coutu, Persuasion, 163–78, “Stowe: A Whig Training Ground,” and “Setting.” 119 pro, Chatham ms , 30/8/61 ff.54–5, Temple to Pitt, 11 June 1761. 120 For Temple’s work at Stowe, see Coutu, “Setting.” 121 Diary, 24 June 1761, 1 July 1761, 10 June 1762, 24 June 1762. Eyres, “Celebration,” 43. On the Frederick the Great medal, see also Eimer, The Pingo Family, 46–7.

264 | notes to pages 181–5

122 He went to a weekly meeting of the Society of Arts in January 1770, “after an absence of many years from those meetings.” Diary, 10 January 1770. 123 Ibid., 14 June 1763. 124 Robbins, “The Strenuous Whig,” 432, 434ff. 125 Diary, 14 April 1767, 14 April 1769. 126 Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 302. 127 Robbins, “The Strenuous Whig,” 430. Adams’s Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law (1765) was enclosed in Hollis’s True Sentiments of America, 1768. 128 Diary, 23 October 1765. Eyres, “‘Patriotizing, Strenuously,’” 17–18. 129 Eyres, “‘Patriotizing, Strenuously,’” 18–19; Coutu, Persuasion, 197–8; Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 301. 130 Diary, 18 March 1766; also cited in Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 300. 131 A wooden bust immediately went up in Boston while much more grand marble statues were erected in New York and Charleston. There was a call for a statue in Maryland but nothing came of it. In Virginia, befitting that colony’s more aristocratic bearing, a call was placed for a statue of the king, which was also not erected. New York erected an equestrian statue of the king, more to do with internal political factionalism than patriotism and gratitude. For a discussion of these initiatives, see Coutu, Persuasion, 195–234. 132 Diary, 4 March 1769. 133 Coutu, Persuasion, 199–202, 210, 213, 335. 134 Diary, 23 January 1766. 135 Eyres, “‘Patriotizing, Strenuously,’” 19. See also Diary, 4, 10 November 1765. 136 Diary, 8 October 1766. “Parchment” refers to his acceptance of a peerage. See also Eyres, “‘Patriotizing, Strenuously,’” 19–20. 137 Hollis to Edmund Quincy Jr, 1 October 1766, quoted in Bond, “Letters from Thomas Hollis,” 94. 138 Diary, 17 October 1766. 139 There are many amicable references to Chatham and his wife, Hester Grenville, in the latter years of Hollis’s diary. 140 Blackburne, Memoirs, 1: 292; Wilson, “A Bust,” 11–13; Bond, Thomas Hollis, 23, 25. 141 Bond, “Letters from Thomas Hollis,” 111, 132; and Wilson, “A Bust,” 25n61. 142 Diary, 24 May 1768. 143 Bond, Thomas Hollis, 118–19. 144 Ibid., 119. 145 Quoted in ibid., 120. 146 The quote is from his diary entry for 14 April 1767 when he was considering retirement although that would mean his business in London would be left undone. 147 Several studies have been done on his retirement activities in Dorset. See Robbins, “Thomas Hollis in His Dorsetshire Retirement,” in Taft, ed., Absolute Liberty; Eyres, “The Invisible Pantheons”; and Hobson, “‘Leasure with Decorum.’” 148 Hollis was convinced he was being spied upon by Jacobites. His diary contains many references suggesting paranoia. If he was indeed being spied upon, it probably was by agents employed by the king and Bute. 149 In J. Nichols, Illustrations of Literary History (London, 1831), 4: 157, quoted in Robbins, “The Strenuous Whig,” 407.

notes to pages 185–91 | 265

150 Walpole to William Mason, 17 April 1780, in Walpole’s Corr., 29: 18–19. 151 Ibid. 152 Quoted in Robbins, “The Strenuous Whig,” 407n1. conclusion

1 Northumberland hired Adam to renovate Syon in the early 1760s. Kedleston Hall was initially designed by James Paine and Matthew Brettingham, whom Curzon then replaced with Robert Adam. Harris, Robert Adam. 2 This scheme provides an interesting precedent for Northumberland’s work at Syon and also a parallel discussion of the aesthetic canon vis-à-vis painting. The commission of the paintings was entrusted to Horace Mann, who enlisted the assistance of Cardinal Albani and, for a brief time, Matthew Brettingham the younger, until Mann found him to be a “little insinuating fellow.” Mann to Walpole, 22 December 1752, Walpole’s Corr., 20: 352. By contrast, Albani was a great help, not only in assisting with the selection of the works to be copied but also in securing permissions for the artists to gain access to the original frescoes to make precise copies using tracings made on thin voiles of fabric. The project would occupy much of Mann’s attention, causing him considerable frustration until February 1756 when the last of the copies was ready for shipment. The final group consisted of Raphael’s School of Athens in the Vatican, copied by Anton Raphael Mengs; Raphael’s Council of the Gods and Marriage of Cupid and Psyche from the Villa Farnesina, copied by Pompeo Batoni; Annibale Carracci’s Bacchus and Ariadne from the Farnese Palace, by Placido Costanzi; and Guido Reni’s Aurora from the Villa Rospigliosi, by Agostino Masucci. The two most comprehensive scholarly sources on Northumberland’s scheme are Wood, “Raphael Copies,” and Lewis, Connoisseurs, 161–7. The primary archival resource for the commission is the relevant exchange of letters between Mann and Albani in the hhs, Vienna, and the pro , London. See also Mann to Hanbury Williams, 28 September 1753, lwl , Williams ms , 57, fol.107, quoted in Walpole’s Corr., 20: 330–1n6. 3 Marvin, “Copying in Roman Sculpture: The Replica Series,” in Retaining the Original, 33. 4 Alex Potts suggests in his seminal study of Winckelmann that there is a place for narrative since it offers a patterning, a coherent ordering of history. Potts, Flesh, 47. 5 Chloe Chard examines the position of the philological versus empiricism in her study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English travel writing. Chard, Pleasure. 6 The scholarship on Shaftesbury is, of course, enormous but David Solkin’s discussion vis-à-vis painting, commerce, and the public is seminal. Solkin, Painting, 1–26. 7 Gibson-Wood, Jonathan Richardson. 8 Schnapp discusses the confluence of the philological and the empirical at mid-century in his analysis of Wincklemann in Discovery, 258–66ff. 9 Sweet, Cities, 110–11. 10 [Russel], 2: 180, quoted in Sweet, Cities, 110. 11 Sweet, Cities, 111. 12 [Russel], “Letter LVI . to Dr R. from Rome, 2 February 1749,” in Letters, 2: 178–9. 13 Chard, Pleasure, 131.

266 | notes to pages 191–200

14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36

Quoted in ibid. Sweet, Cities, 112–15. de Caylus, Receuil; Stuart and Revett, Antiquities. Interestingly, Gibbon acknowledged that “several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could descend to a cool and minute investigation.” Gibbon, The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, edited by John Murray (London, 1896), 267, quoted in Paul, ed., The First Modern Museums, 13. Coltman, Classical, 199. Quoted in ibid., 206. For a discussion of Townley’s house and the display of his sculpture, see ibid., 191–221. Coltman, Fabricating, 165–75. Coltman, Classical, 159–90. Ibid., 210–11. Henry Blundell was also Roman Catholic. Fried, Absorption, 107 and passim. Chard, Pleasure, 164–5. Myrone, Bodybuilding; Fordham, British. Myrone, Bodybuilding, 12. Images of the death of Wolfe have been discussed by many authors recently: Solkin, Painting, 207–13; McNairn, Behold; Myrone, Bodybuilding, 105–20; Coutu, Persuasion, 103–46; Fordham, British, 107–18, 218–38; Coutu and McAleer, ‘The Immortal.’ Solkin, Painting, 190–9; Fordham, British, 119–20. Coutu, Persuasion, 140–2. Fordham, British, 65–72. Solkin, Painting, 206–10. Hayman’s Amherst painting was directly modelled on Le Brun’s Alexander as represented in a 1693 engraving by Simon Gribelin. Solkin, Painting, 195–9. Reynolds, Sir Joshua. Reynolds’s Discourse X , delivered in 1780, focuses specifically on sculpture but the notion of grace, as imparted by the Apollo Belvedere, permeates all of the discourses. For example, Thomas Broderick was ambivalent about Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: “You would hardly imagine any thing could dispute the prize with the pictures of this master [Raphael]; but if there be any thing that can, the Vatican had the honour to shew it; and it is the last judgment, in the chapel of Sextus IV. This is by Michael Angelo. I declare to you, that, while I stood before it, my blood was chilled, and I felt as if all was real, and the very sound of the painted trumpet had pierced my deafened ears. It will appear odd to mention faults in so great a composition as this, and yet it is not without them. The faces express passions of the strongest kind, and that so strongly, that they communicate them to all who look upon ’em; but the bodies are all of too strong and masculine an appearance. The strength of a Farnesian Hercules is seen in the sinews of every one of the men; and for the women, they are quite out of nature, too robust for any thing that is in that sex. The face of our Saviour carries a dignity that words cannot describe; only his pensil was formed for describing it. There is a mixture of severity and sweetness in it, that one would think he must have gone to heaven to see, who painted them.” Broderick, Travels, 2: 81–2. See Coltman, Fabricating, 137.

notes to pages 200–17 | 267

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53

54

55

Myrone, Bodybuilding; Fordham, British. Coutu, Persuasion, 142–6. Myrone, Bodybuilding, 47–74. Ibid., 48ff. Chard, Pleasure, 36; Chard, “Effeminacy”; Sweet, Cities, 29. Barrell, “The Dangerous Goddess.” Myrone, Bodybuilding, 52ff. Coltman, Classical, 158–90. These paintings are the natural heirs to the briefly flourishing mid-century genre of grand tour caricature painting (as opposed to the print genre of grand tour caricature that would continue throughout the century). Commissioned or painted on speculation but bought by members of the aristocracy, this genre is exemplified by Reynolds’s Four Learned Milordi (1751) and Thomas Patch’s Golden Asses (1761). Myrone, Bodybuilding, 48–9. Hanson, The English Virtuoso, 6. Richmond to Henry Fox, 3 May 1755, quoted in Reese, Goodwood’s Oak, 53. See Myrone, Bodybuilding, 112, and James Boulton on Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents in Boulton, The Language, 52–72. For a discussion of restitution primarily in terms of architecture, see du Prey, The Villas of Pliny, xxi–ii and passim. Du Prey emphasizes the ambiguous quality of restitution and a contributing aspect of that ambiguity is temporal distance. On memory and nostalgia, see Nora, Realms. On the archetype and the universal, see Eliade, Cosmos and History. On the Celtic and Saxon components, see Smiles, Image, 39–40. Cultural hegemony, as coined by Antonio Gramsci in the early twentieth century, counters the idea of Marxist economic determinism, positing that the cultural values of the ruling class are presented as the whole. Bocock, Hegemony. On official and national memory, see, in addition to Nora, ed., Realms: Halbwachs, On Collective Memory; Ben-Amos, “The Other World of Memory”; Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics; Assmann and Assmann, “Das Gestern im Heute.” Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, is the benchmark text in this respect. Aleida and Jan Assmann state that national memory is a nineteenth-century phenomenon: “In the framework of national movements, it became one’s duty to commit to memory one’s own history and tradition including newly revived customs. The national memory is an invention of the nineteenth century which organized itself by nation-states; with it, a new form of memorial politics was created. The national memory is not limited to ‘culture.’ At any time, it can become as political as the official memory, especially if it confronts this as counter-recollection and questions its legitimacy as founded on monuments, censure, and propaganda.” Assmann and Assmann, “Das Gestern im Heute,” 126–7. I am grateful to Dr Margot Siebel-Achenbach for the translation.

268 | notes to pages 217–22

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inde x

Note: Unless otherwise stated, “Huntingdon” refers to the 10th Earl of Huntingdon, “Richmond” refers to the 3rd Duke of Richmond, “Rockingham” refers to the 2nd Marquis of Rockingham, and “Wilton” refers to Joseph Wilton. Numbers displayed in italics indicate illustrations. Accademia degli Apatisti (Florence), 142 Accademia del Disegno (Florence), 109 Account of Some of the Statues, Bas Reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy with Remarks, 9, 32, 198 Account of the Statues, Busts, Bass-Relieves, Cinerary Urns, and Other Ancient Marbles, and Paintings, at Ince, 201 Adam, Robert, 4, 9, 10, 89, 111, 122, 164, 202, 252; Kedleston Hall, 10, 89, 90, 193, 194–6, 195, 266; Lansdowne/Shelburne House, 84; Newby Hall, 89, 194–5, 196; Portman Square, 247n87; Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro, 166, 177–8, 178; Syon House, 10, 193–4, 266 Adam, William: Kedleston Hall, 194–5, 195 Adams, John, 176; Whig tracts, 186, 265 Addison, James, 7, 75, 98 Ædes Barberinæ, 34 Ædes Giustinanæ, 34 Ædes Walpolianæ, 34–5, 41 Æschylus, bust of, 42 Agrippa, bust of, 140 Agustìn, Antonio, 65 Akenside, Mark, 164; medal inscription, 180; ode to Huntingdon, 132–3; On Leaving Holland, 164–5 Albani, Cardinal Alessandro, 31, 43, 70, 105, 108, 166; collection, 141, 200, 201; bust of

Julius Caesar, 238; busts in the Vatican, 253–4; copies for Northumberland House, 238, 266; correspondence with Dodington, 231–2 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 7 Alexander before the Tent of Darius, 215, 216 Alexander the Great: cameo, 175; medallion, 71 Alfred, King, 181; busts of, 41, 42, 229n65, 230n80 Algardi, Alessandro, 109; models, 117 Algarotti, Francesco, 165 Alhambra, at Kew, 45 All Souls College (Oxford), 138 Amherst, General Jeffrey, 207, 210, 215 Anderson, James, 19, 23, 244n18 Anecdotes of Painting (Walpole), 94, 121 Anne, Queen, 57, 98, 100, 257n8; state coach for, 153; statue of, 169 annus mirabilis, 11, 153, 183, 184 Le Antichità di Ercolano esposte, 201, 237n50 anti-Jesuit print, 162–3 “Antino” (Antoninus Pius), bust of, 140 Antinous, 4, 67, 217, 234n24, 241n120; busts of, 15, 71, 21; statues of, 26–7, 58, 62, 68, 69, 95, 193, 195, 234n24, 236n37 Antiquitíes Etruscques, Grecques et Romaines, tirées du Cabinet de M. William Hamilton, 7, 201 Apelles, bust of, 42 Apollino, 67; copies of, 62, 67, 68–9, 217, 236n37 Apollo, busts of, 18, 21, 70; portrait, 21; statues, 26, 44, 58, 70, 234n24 Apollo Belvedere, 4, 80, 117, 200, 212, 216–17, 241n120, 267n34; copy of, 28; casts of, 8, 95–6, 96, 113, 125, 193, 195, 196, 247n76 Apollo de’Medici, cast of, 67

archaeology, 5, 9, 10, 84, 137, 166, 201; Herculaneum, 144, 166; Pompeii, 166; Rockingham, 65–6; at Wilton House, 19 Archimedes, bust of, 42 Argyll, John Campbell, 2nd Duke of, 57; resignation, 234n19 Ariadne, bust of, 95; statue of, 70, 86 Arminius, bust of, 42 Arno, painting, 138, 151 Arrotino, copy of, 138 Arundel, Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of, 17, 20; Freemasonry, 227n17 Arundel collection, 17; at Easton Neston, 18, 20, 224n14; at Wilton House, 18 Ashburnham, John, 2nd Earl of, 153 Ashley-Cooper, Anthony. See Shaftesbury, 3rd Earl of Askew, Anthony, 160; Cocchi, 225n26 Astrea, 185 Asylum, 163 Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales, 44, 76 Augustus, busts of, 21, 23 140, 148, 243n46, 253n47; Freemasonry, 19, 23 Augustus, William. See Duke of Cumberland bacchanalian figure, 21 Bacchanalian Triumph, 95 Bacchus: cast of statue by Michelangelo, 95, 217; cast of statue by Sansovino, 138; casts of, 26, 67; statue of, 44 Bacchus and Ariadne, 266n2 Bancks, John, The History of the Life and Reign of the Czar Peter the Great, Emperor of All Russia, and Father of His Country, 149–50; A Short Critical Review of the Political Life of Oliver Cromwell, 150 Barberini Venus, 71, 89, 175 Bath, William Pulteney, 1st Earl of, 160 Bathurst, Allen, 1st Earl of, 6; bust of, 39; Wentworth Castle, 234–5n26, 235n36, 242n150 Batoni, Pompeo, Charles, 3rd Duke of Richmond, 106–7, 107; portraits of Lord Charlemont, 238n55 Battle of Plassey: medal, 180; Robert Clive and Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey, 207, 211 Battle of Quebec, 207 Beckford, Peter, 117

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Bedford, Francis Russell, 5th Duke of, 92, 226n28 Bedford Street, Covent Garden (Hollis’s residence), 169 Benedict XIV, Pope, 68; Vatican collection, 118 Bentley, Richard, 88, Bentley, Thomas, 175 Berne, university library, 161 Bernini, Gianlorenzo, 109, 217; bravado, 217; Charity and Fortitude, 95, 114, 217; Constantine, 80; models by, 117 Bessborough, John, 4th Earl of, 125 Blackburne, Francis, 156–7, 161, 174, 191 Blackheath, 4th Earl of Chesterfield’s estate at, 131, 147, 256n85; Chesterfield’s retirement to, 147 Blenheim Palace, 9, 20 Blondel, Jacques-François, 109 Blundell, Henry, 5, 6, 7, 10, 72, 196, 240n92, 267n22; An Account of the Statues, Busts, Bass-Relieves, Cinerary Urns, and Other Ancient Marbles, and Paintings, at Ince, 201 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, 1st Viscount, 131, 251n11 Borghese Gardens, 255n75 Borghese Gladiator, 34; copy by Le Sueur, 33–4; cast, 95; copy of, by Vierpyl, 66; drawing after, 119, 119 Boston Massacre, 190 Boswell, James, 192 Bowood Estate (Hounslow Heath), 84, 89 Boyle, Richard. See Burlington, 3rd Earl of Brand, Thomas, of The Hoo, 169 Brand, Thomas, of The Hyde, 6, 165, 168–9, 171, 175–6, 177, 179, 192, 193, 219, 263n84; portraits, 166–7, 168, 262n61 Brettingham, Matthew (the elder), 112; Richmond House, 102, 111–12 Brettingham, Matthew (the younger), 16, 68, 109, 111–12; the Earl of Leicester, 246n57; Kedleston Hall, 224–5n18, 243n152, 266n1; Northumberland House, 266n2; proposal for an academy in London, 111–12 Bristol, Earl of, 174–5 Bristol glass, 71 Britannia, 47; Hollis, 160, 177, 189–90; medals, 180; relief of, 40, 230n71; statue of, 29 Britannicus (Commodus), 37; bust of 21, 31

British Museum, 124–5, 161–2, 250n132, 256n82; Hollis, 161, 165, 175, 182, 260n30, 262n76 Broad Bottom Coalition, 5, 90 Broderick, Thomas, 241n120, 248n91, 248n92, 267n35 Browne, Lyde, 71, 160, 163, 239n81; Catalogo dei piu scelti e preziosi marmi, che si conservano nella galleria del Sigr Lyde Browne, 201; Catalogus veteris aevi carii generis monumentorum quae cimeliarchio Lyde Browne, 201; statue of Paris, 83 Brunswick, Frederick, Duke of, 106 Brutus, bust of, 66; cameo of, 175; Hollis, 166, 177, 190, 192 Buckingham, George Villiers, 1st Duke of, 20 Buckingham House, 62, 76 Burch, Edward, 126 Burke, Edmund, 6, 7, 49, 53, 81, 123, 125, 221, 222; bust of, 49; Lord Rockingham and Edmund Burke, 75–6, 76; Observations on the Late State of the Nation, 81; Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 81, 216; Reflections on the French Revolution, 81; Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 81, 123, 232–3n5 Burlington, Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of, 25, 35–6, 58, 66, 102, 137; Carlton House, 41; Chiswick House, 21–5, 22, 24, 35–6; collection, 4, 7; Freemasonry, 23–5; portrait, 21; Richmond House, 102 Burrel, Sophie, Maximian; A Tragedy Taken from Corneille, 116 Burton Constable Hall, 254n54 Burton Pynsent (Somersetshire), 188 Bute, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of, 45, 49–52, 54, 76, 121, 152, 153, 154, 182, 184, 185, 187, 188, 191–2, 232n5, 265n148 Byres, James, 73–4, 174, 240n98 Cadogan, William, Earl, 98–9 Caligula, bust of, 140 Callipygian Venus, statue of, 62, 217, 236n37 Calvinism, 129 Campbell, Colen: Goodwood House, 102; Houghton, 30–1, 30, 31; Stourhead, 25; Vitruvius Britannicus, 102 Campbell, John. See Argyll, 2nd Duke of

Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), Allegorical Tomb of Archbishop Tillotson, 99–100, 99; A Capriccio of Buildings in Whitehall, 170–1, 171, 262n73; Interior of the Rotunda at Ranelagh, 170, 173; McSwiny, 100, 245n26; Piazza del Campidoglio and Cordonata, 169–71, 170; St Paul’s Cathedral, 169, 172, 172; View of the Thames, from Richmond House, 103–4, 104; A View of Walton Bridge, 170, 172, 172; Westminster Bridge under Repair, from the North, 173; Whitehall and the Privy Garden from Richmond House, 103–4, 103 Capitoline Museum, 62, 68, 69, 95, 141, 144, 200, 217, 234n24, 236n37, 238n63, 255n67; Stanza de’Filosofi, 141 Carlisle, 54, 101 Carlisle, Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of, 75; Castle Howard, 20 Carlton House (London), 41, 76 Carneades, medallion of, 28 Caroline, Queen, 41 Carr, John: Keppel’s column, 91–2, 91; mausoleum, at Wentworth Woodhouse, 50–1, 50, 51, 92; stable block, at Wentworth Woodhouse, 78, 78 Carracci, Annibale, Bacchus and Ariadne, copy, 193, 266n2 Casina, at Chiswick House, 23 Castiglione, Baldessare, 20, 134 Castle Howard (Yorkshire), 20, 88, 90 Castor, statue of, in Rome, 169, 177 Catalogo dei piu scelti e preziosi marmi, che si conservano nella galleria del Sigr Lyde Browne, 201 Catalogue of Some Marbles, Bronzes, Pictures, and Gems, at the Hyde, Near Ingastone, Essex, 201 Catalogus numismaticus Musei Lefroyani, 164 Catalogus veteris aevi carii generis monumentorum quae cimeliarchio Lyde Browne, 201 Cavaceppi, Bartolomeo, 62; copy of Antinous, 69–70, 236n37 Cavendish, Lord John, bust of, 49 Cavendish, William. See Devonshire, 1st Duke of, 2nd Duke of, 4th Duke of Cavendish-Bentinck, William. See Portland, 3rd Duke of

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de Caylus, Comte: archaeology, 200; Recueil d’antiquites egyptiennes, etrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises, 175 Ceres, statues of, 47, 58, 234n24, 242n150 Chambers, William (architect), 16, 108, 111–12, 118, 120, 122, 160, 164; Buckingham House (London), 76; gallery at The Hyde, 175, 193; George III, 122; George III’s state coach, 76, 152, 182; Hollis, 160, 164, 182; Kew, 44–5, 44, 45, 232n98; Plans, Elevations and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Building at Kew, 44–5, 47, 232n98; Richmond’s academy/ gallery, 94, 109–12, 244n5; Richmond Park, 76; Royal Academy, 120, 122, 212; Society of Artists, 120, 122; Society of Arts, 118, 120; stable block at Goodwood House, 106; wine cooler, 258n111 Chambers, William (painter): The Townley Collection in the Dining Room at 7 Park Street, 202, 202; The Townley Marbles in the Entrance Hall at 7 Park Street, Westminster, 203, 202 Charity, by Bernini, 95 Charlemont, James Caulfeild, Viscount then 1st Earl, 4, 8–9, 65, 117, 137; academy in Rome, 108–9; archaeology, 65, 137, 200; Charlemont House, 65–7; Marino, 65–7; Murphy, 253n44; Patch, 252n39; portraits, 238n55; Rockingham, 65–6; Steavens, 252n39, 253–4n47; views of Tivoli, 238n55 Charlemont House (Dublin), 65–7 Charles I, King, 53; Charles I and his Family, 124; copy of Borghese Galdiator, 34; Freemasonry, 19; portrait, at Chiswick House, 21; statue of, 169 Charles II, King, 98, 107, 145; Freemasonry, 98 Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond and Lennox, 106–7 Charles, 3rd Duke of Richmond, 106–7 Charles Townley with a Group of Connoisseurs, 203, 205, 218 Charles Townley and His Friends in the Townley Gallery, 202, 204, 218 Charlotte, Queen, 153; coronation medal, 264n108 Chatham, 1st Earl of. See Pitt, William (the elder) Chatsworth (Derbyshire), 20, 88, 90 Cheere, Henry, 112, 118

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Cheere, John, 224n13 Chellini Madonna, 62, 67 Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of, 5, 36, 127, 143, 149, 251n12, 251n14; Akenside, 132; busts of, 39, 114, 147–8, 139–40, 176, 253n45; Freemasonry, 131; Huntingdon, 5, 127, 128, 131–37, 141, 146–7, 151, 153–4, 206, 219, 251n19 Chesterfield House (London), 138–9, 147 Cheyne, George, 143–4; English Malady; or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Distempers, 143; Essay of Health and Long Life, 143; and Freemasonry, 144 Children of Niobe, cast of, 68 Chinese House/Temple, 86, 242n150 Chiswick House (London), 21–5, 22, 24, 27, 29, 35, 55, 90; Freemasonry, 23, 25, 228n25; Red Velvet Room, 23 Christie, James, 124 Chronology of the Ancients, 227n14 Churchill, Charles, 31 Churchill, John. See Marlborough, 1st Earl of Cicero, 36, 139, 145, 147; busts of, 28, 138, 139, 140, 147, 253n46; statue of, 36 Cimaroli, Giovanni Battista, 99 Cincinnatus, cast of, 68 Cipriani, Giovanni Battista, 16, 110, 122, 152, 241n126; design for monument to Hollis, 188–90, 189; and George III’s state coach, 152, 182; Hollis, 164, 166, 178, 179, 188–90, 189, 260n40, 262n81; Richmond’s academy/gallery, 93, 111–13, 118, 121, 122; Royal Academy, 122; Society of Arts, 118, 120, 122; Society of Artists, 120; title page, John Milton, 177–8, 178 Cipriani, Pietro, bronzes, 224n13 Claude Lorrain, 7, 116; Embarkation of St. Ursula, 116 Claudius, bust of, 140, 253n46 Clement XII, Pope, 12, 68, 142, 257n105 Clephane, John, 225n26 Clive, Robert, painting of, 207, 211 Coade, Eleanor: Mrs Coade’s Artificial Stone Manufactory, 71, 239n85 Cobham, Richard Temple, 1st Viscount, 4, 7, 36, 38, 40, 41, 52, 128, 145, 183, 198; bust of, 39; Frederick, Prince of Wales, 41–3, 146;

statue of, 146; Stowe, 20, 36–41, 43, 100, 145, 183–5, 229–30n65, 230n71, 251n17 Cocchi, Antonio, 12, 108, 136, 141–4, 149, 254n49; bust of, 114, 140, 141, 144, 147, 176, 255n66; Dell Vitto Pitagorico per uso della medicina, 142–3; Discorso primo sopra Asclepiade, 254n59; Effemeridi, 166, 225n26; Freemasonry, 65, 70, 141–2, 151, 225n26, 228n36, 257n105; Hollis, 166; Huntingdon, 65, 136, 142, 148, 150, 151, 254n54; Richmond, 106, 142; Rockingham, 65, 70; tomb of, Florence, 255n66; Wilton, 109 Coke, Thomas. See Leicester, 1st Earl of Coliseum (Rome), 199 Committee of Polite Arts (Society of Arts), 163 Committee for the Relief of French Prisoners of War, 163 Commodus (Britannicus), 37; busts of, 21, 31 Commodus as Hercules, cast of, 68 compagnes de Diane, 85–6 Concordia Civium, medallion of, 185 Concordia Fædoratorum, medallion of, 185 Cosway, Richard, 126; Charles Townley with a Group of Connoisseurs, 203, 205, 218 Country Party, 90 Cours de peinture par principes avec un balance de peintres, 198 Court Whigs, 5, 90, 221, 222, 234n19; 2nd Duke of Richmond, 101; Robinson, 243n51; and 1st Marquis of Rockingham, 53, 58, 92 Cowper, William, 100 Cozens, Alexander, 108 Craft. See Freemasonry Creed, Cary, Etchings by Cary Creed with Accompanying Captions, of the Antique Marbles in the Collection of the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton House, 21, 34, 227n21 cricket, 102, 220, 221 Cromwell, Oliver, 151, 155, 157, 158; appreciation of, by George III, 182; busts of, 148, 148–50, 182, 256n87, 257n97, 257n100; death mask, 149, 257n97; Freemasonry, 150; An Historical and Critical Account of the Life of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 150, 259n9, 264n106; Hollis’s appreciation of, 150, 155, 157–9, 183; The Life of Oliver Cromwell, 150; paste medal of, 150; and popularity in eighteenth century, 150;

A Short Critical Review of the Political Life of Oliver Cromwell, 150 Crouching Venus, copy of, 138 Crudeli, Tommaso, 225n26, 257n105 Cumberland, William Augustus, Duke of, 52, 54, 231n92; belvedere tower in Windsor Great Park, 234n20 Cupid and Psyche, 95 Curzon, Nathaniel. See 1st Baron Scarsdale Dancing Faun, 4, 67; bronze cast of, 224n13; casts of, 67, 68, 94–5, 138, 248n97; copies of, 9, 28, 62, 69, 217, 236n37; grace of, 67 Dartmouth, William Legge, 1st Earl of, 111 David (Michelangelo), 95, 114, 217 Davy, George, 71, 239n85 Death of General Wolfe (Wilton), 207, 209, 214, 218 Death of General Wolfe (Penny), 214–15, 215, 218 Death of Iphigenia, 174 Decamerone, 179–80 De dea libertate, 166, 264n106 Defoe, Daniel, 230n75 Demosthenes, 147; statue of, 29 Derbyshire Fluorspar, 71 Description of the Earl of Pembroke’s Pictures, 21 A Description of the Gardens of the Lord Viscount Cobham, at Stow in Buckinghamshire, 40–1 Devonshire, dukes of, painting collection, 229n42 Devonshire, William Cavendish, 1st Duke of, 98 Devonshire, William Cavendish, 2nd Duke of, 241n108 Devonshire, William Cavendish, 4th Duke of, 21, 54, 233n11; Chatsworth, 20; Hollis, 164, 240n105, 260n42; numismatics, 75, 164, 240n105, 260n42 Dialogos de medallas, inscriciones, y otras antiquedades, 65 Dialogues on the Uses of Foreign Travel, 219 Diana, statues of, 23, 28, 44, 47, 85, 85–6, 228n35, 242n136 Diana Venetrix, 175 Diane chasseresse, 86 Dionysius, bust of, 175

index | 303

Discobolus, 175; cast of, 95; statue of, 95, 116, 117, 175 Discorso primo sopra Asclepiade, 254n59 Disney, John, A Catalogue of Some Marbles, Bronzes, Pictures, and Gems, at the Hyde, Near Ingastone, Essex, 201; collection of, 15 Dodington, George Bubb, 43–4, 231–2n91–4 Domitian, busts of, 21, 140, 175, 253n46 Donatello, Chellini Madonna, 62, 67 Donati, Vitaliano, 106 Donington Park (Leicestershire), 65, 128, 138, 147, 153, 154, 193, 226n32; as Arcadian retreat, 127–9, 146, 151, 154; “best staircase,” 151; dining room, 151; drawing room, 141, 147, 151; Freemasonry, 127, 148, 151; Gothick Hall, 149–51; library, 151; Palladian gallery, 129, 138; Stone Passage, 148 Dorset, Earl of, 98 Dorset, Hollis’s estate in, 156, 159, 191 Dossie, Robert, 94 Duclos, Charles Pinot, 134 Dugood, William, 254n54 Duquesnoy, François, casts of Santa Susanna, 26, 95, 113 Dying Alexander, busts of, 70, 95 Dying Gaul (Dying Gladiator), casts of, 8, 68, 95, 193, 194, 196; copies of 9, 69, 69, 86 Dying Gladiator. See Dying Gaul Earl of Strafford and Sir Philip Mainwaring, 75, 88 Eastbury, 43 Easton Neston (Northamptonshire), 18, 20, 224n14 Edward, the Black Prince, bust of, 41, 229n65, 230n80 Edward III, King, bust of, 42 Edward IV, King, 153, 251n19 Edwards, Edward, 94, 95, 126, 246–7n74, 247n75 Effemeridi (Cocchi’s diaries), 225n26 Egremont, Algernon Seymour, 1st Earl of, 111 Elizabeth I, Queen, 127, 128; bust of, 36, 37, 229n65; painting of, 39–40 Embarkation of St. Ursula, 116–17 English Malady; or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Distempers, 143

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Epaminondas, statue of, 36–7 Epicurean philosophy, 143–7; Freemasonry, 145 Epicurus, busts of, 141, 144, 151, 253–4n47, 255n67, 255n69 Essay on Design: Including Proposals for Erecting a Public Academy to Be Supported by Voluntary Subscription (Till a Royal Foundation Can be Obtain’d) for Educating the British Youth in Drawing, and the Several Arts Depending Theron, 97 Essay of Health and Long Life, 143 Essay on the Theory of Painting, 198 Etchings by Cary Creed with Accompanying Captions, of the Antique Marbles in the Collection of the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton House, 21 exemplum, 6–7, 25, 65, 66–7, 73, 75, 78, 81, 89, 94, 102, 159, 176 Faithorne, John, John Milton, 178 Fane, John. See Westmorland, 7th Earl of Farington, Joseph, 124; Lock, 116, 117, 247n84 Farnese Flora, cast of, 68 Farnese Hercules, 67, 117, 118, 217, 218, 248n91, 267n35; cast of, 68 Farsetti, Abbé Filippo Vincenzo, 111–12 Faun (Queen of Sweden’s), cast of, 138; copy of, 9, 62, 68, 236n37 Faun, statues of, at Holkham Hall, 27–8 Faustina, bust of, 21, 31 Felinghausen, battle of, 185 Fermor, William. See Leominster, 1st Baron Fiamingo, models, 117 Fighting Gladiator. See Borghese Gladiator Fitzwilliam, William, 4th Earl of, 49, 92, 233n14; Freemasonry, 243n163 Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge), Hollis/ Brand/Disney collection, 15, 261n 49 Flitcroft, Henry: Belvedere Tower, 234n20; Freemasonry, 58; Hoober Stand, 57, 57–8; Wentworth Woodhouse, 56, 56, 64 Flora (Capitoline), 68; copy of, 26, 62, 217, 236n37; cast of, 68, 95 Flora, statues of, 44, 70; in painting, 104–5, 105 Foggini, Gianbattista, 58, 58–60 Foggini, Vincenzo, 60; Samson and the Philistines, 16, 62, 63, 67, 69, 86, 217, 236n39; statues at Wentworth Castle, 58, 58–60

Folkes, Martin, 19, 20; bust of, 25; Freemasonry, 19, 25, 225n26 de Fontennelle, Bernard Le Bovier, 134 Foote, Samuel, 164 Forrester, Major James, 63–4 Fortitude, 95 Fortune, 72 Forum Romanum, 199–200 Foundling Hospital (London), 102, 112, 161, 163 Fountaine, Sir Andrew, 19, 35; bust of, 25; Freemasonry, 19–20, 25, 227n14; Narford Hall, 19–20, 227n14 Four Learned Milordi, 268n44 Fox, Charles James, busts of, 49, 92, 253n46 Fox, Henry, 121 Francavilla, Pietro, 43–4, 231–2n94 Les Francs-Maçons Ecrasés, 150, 257n99 Frederick, Prince of Wales, 41–4, 101, 247n87; Carlton House, 41; Freemasonry, 146; Kew, 41–3, 231–2n94; mausoleum for, 109; patron, 97, 111; royal barge, 122; Stowe, 39 Frederick the Great, of Prussia, 106, 134; arch dedicated to, 185; Freemasonry, 151; medal of, 185; portrait, 151 Free, John, 190 Freemasonry, 11–13, 25, 29, 48, 98, 142, 144, 152, 163, 244n18, 249n114; Akenside, 131; Anderson, 19, 23, 244n18; Augustus, 19, 23, 148; Bancks, 149; Burlington, 21–3; Carr, 58; Charlemont, 65; Charles I, 19; Charles II, 98; Chesterfield, 127, 131–2; Cheyne, 143–4; Chiswick House, 23, 25; banned by Clement XII, 12, 257n105; Cobham, 41; Cocchi, 12, 65, 70, 142, 143–4, 151, 225n26; Cromwell, 150; Crudeli, 257n105; Lord Dalkeith, 244n18; Dodington, 43; Donington Park, 127, 148–51, 154; Dugood, 254n54; Epicurus, 145; Folkes, 19; Fountaine, 19–20, 227n14; Frederick the Great, 151; Frederick, Prince of Wales, 146; French Freemasonry, 143; Galileo, 151, 257n104; Holkham Hall, 29; Hollis, 12, 158; Houghton Hall, 29; Huntingdon ancestry, 127; 9th Earl of Huntingdon, 127; 10th Earl of Huntingdon, 12, 128; Inigo Jones, 19, 23; Julian calendar, 148; Langley, 23; Abbé Larudan, 150, 257n99; Leicester, 25; Locke, 145; the lodge, 13; 19, 21, 23; lodge at Florence, 225n26, 228n36, 257n105; Middlesex, 228n36; Moira, 127–8, 154;

Montague, 103; numismatics, 12–13; Order of Ishmael, 239n75; Palladio, 23; Pembroke, 19, 23; Peter the Great, 149–50; Pythagoras, 142, 145; Ramsay, 143; 1st Duke of Richmond, 102; 2nd Duke of Richmond, 98, 100, 101, 102; 3rd Duke of Richmond, 12, 105–6; Robinson, 243n151; Rockingham, 12; Royal Society, 12, 20, 158; Society of Antiquaries, 12, 20, 102, 158; Spence, 28, 228n36; Stowe, 145; Stukeley, 19; Trembley, 102, 105; Robert Walpole, 29; Wentworth Woodhouse, 58, 243n163; Wharton, 244n18; Wilton House, 19–20; Wren, 149 French Academy, education en loge, 118 French Academy in Rome (Palazzo Mancini), 65, 68, 108, 109, 114 Frisi, Paolo, 106 Furmage, Charles, 118 Fuseli, Henry, translation of Gedanken über di Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, 89 Galba, bust of, 140, 253n46 Galileo: Freemasonry, 152, 257n104, 257n105; portrait of, 151, 252n39 Gallery of Antiques, at Kew, 44, 45, 46, 45–7, 122 Gamberini, Carlo, Description of the Earl of Pembroke’s Pictures, 21, 34 Ganymede, cast of, 95; statues, 28, 70 Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, 10, 66, 114–15, 201; translation of, 89 George I, King, 30, 53, 98, 100; portrait, 98 George II, King, 35, 41, 53, 100, 101, 181; medals of, 180, 181; painting of, 75; portrait, 79; Rockingham, 54, 233n10; Wentworth Woodhouse, 58 George III, King, 4, 7, 47, 54, 75, 78, 152, 157, 158, 183, 184–5, 190, 221; Cromwell, 150, 182; as “Farmer George,” 77; Hollis, 157, 158, 161, 181, 188, 192; medals of, 160, 180, 264n108; patron and collector, 76, 77, 121–2, 221; Pitt accepts peerage from, 188; portrait, 79; as Prince of Wales, 44; Richmond, 121, 122, 123, 220; Rockingham, 49–55, 75, 84; state coach, 76, 122, 152, 152–3, 164, 182–3, 192, 221 George IV, King, 153

index | 305

Germanicus (from Versailles collection, cast of, 68; copy of, 62, 236n37 Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, 201, 216 Geta, bust of, 140, 253n46 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 95 Giambologna, 43, 62, 67, 86, 217; bronzes, 62, 67, 217; cast by, of Borghese Gladiator, 34; Death of Iphigenia, 174; Francavilla statues, 43–4; Hercules and Antaeus, 70; models, 117–18, 217; Rape of the Sabines, 70; Rape of the Sabines, 95; Rape of the Sabines, basrelief, 95; Samson and the Philistines, 62; Lock, 117–18, 217 Gibbon, Edward, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 200–1 Gibbs, James: Houghton Hall, 30, 31; Lord Cobham’s Pillar, at Stowe, 146 Gilpin, William, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: to Which Is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting, 116 Girardon, François, Laocoön, 31, 31–2 Giustiniani collection, 18 Glorious Revolution, 48, 98, 224n14 Godolphin, Earl of, 98 Golden Asses, 268n44 Goodwood (Sussex), 102, 106, 193; allegorical tomb paintings, 98–100, 99; Brettingham (the elder), 112; Charles I and His Family (Van Dyck), 124; cricket, 220, 221; Egyptian dining room, 126, 250n138; horse races, 126, 220; marble copies 125; plans, in Vitruvius Britannicus, 102; stables, 106; Wootton, 102 Gothic Temple, at Stowe. See Temple of Liberty Gower, George Granville Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl of, 152 Gower, John Leveson, 1st Earl, bust of, 39 Grand Manner, 11, 16, 117, 198, 207, 212, 214, 217–19 Grand Tour, 4, 8–9, 13, 28, 198, 206–7, 217, 218–19, 221, 225n26, 268n44; Brand of The Hoo, 169; Brand of The Hyde, 165, 166–9; Burlington, 21; Chesterfield, 134–7; English grand tour, 89; grand tour writing, 7, 13; Hollis, 156, 161, 164, 165–9, 175, 259n12; Huntingdon, 134–8; Inigo Jones, 19; Leicester, 28; Lord George Lennox, 106; Lock, 10; Earl of Middlesex, 228n36; 2nd

306 | index

Duke of Richmond, 98–9, 104; 3rd Duke of Richmond, 106–7; Rockingham, 60–5, 70, 73, 78, 81; Earl of Strafford, 60 Granville Leveson-Gower, George. See Gower, 2nd Earl of Grecian Temple, at Stowe. See Temple of Concord and Victory Grecian Valley, at Stowe, 145, 183–4 Grenville, George, 187 Grenville, Captain Thomas, monument to, 184 Grenville, Richard, 40 Grenville, Richard, 1st Earl Temple. See Temple, 1st Earl Grenville brothers, 36 Grenville Cousinhood, 52 Gresham, Thomas, 229–30n65 Gresham College, 165 Gresse, Alexander, 126 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 206 Greville, Charles, 116 Gribelin, Simon, 216 Grignion, Charles, 77 Grosvenor House (London), 53, 70, 81–2, 84 Guercino, 60; Hagar, Ishmael and the Angel, 70 Guilford, 2nd Earl of. See North, Frederick, Lord Guy’s Hospital (London), 112, 163 Gwynn, John, An Essay on Design: Including Proposals for Erecting a Public Academy to Be Supported by Voluntary Subscription (Till a Royal Foundation Can Be Obtain’d) for Educating the British Youth in Drawing, and the Several Arts Depending Theron, 97 Hadrian, busts of, 21, 32, 140, 253n46; villa at Tivoli, 89 Hagar, Ishmael and the Angel, 70 Hagley Hall (Worcestershire), 67 Halifax, Earl of, 100 von Haller, Albrecht, 106 Hamilton, Captain, 262n76 Hamilton, Gavin, 9, 71; Lansdowne House, 84–5; Townley collection, 202, 218 Hamilton, William, 116, 117 Hampden, John, 158; bust of, 229–30n65 Handel, Georg Frederic, bust of, 42 Hanoverian Succession, 53, 98, 122, 157 Hanway, Jonas, 181; Magdelen House, 163; Marine Society, 163

d’Harcanville, Baron, Antiquitíes Etruscques, Grecques et Romaines, tirées du Cabinet de M. William Hamilton, 7, 201 Harrington, James, 158, 191 Harris, William, An Historical and Critical Account of the Life of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 150, 259n9, 264n106 Harvard College (Boston): Hollis, 156, 161, 165, 191; print of Hollis, for, 188 Harwood, Francis, 16, 68, 108; bust of Julius Caesar, 148; busts of Cromwell, 257n97 Hastings, Francis. See Huntingdon, 10th Earl of Hastings, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquis of, and 1st Earl of Moira. See Earl of Moira Hastings, George. See Huntingdon, 4th Earl of Hastings, Theophilus. See Huntingdon, 7th Earl of and 9th Earl of Hawksmoor, Nicholas: Easton Neston, 20, 224n14 Hayley, William, “Poetical Epistle to an Eminent Painter,” 126 Hayman, Francis, Robert Clive and Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey, 207, 211; The Humanity of General Amherst, 207, 210, 215 Hayward, Richard, 16, 70, 108 Hennington, Robert, 138 Herbert, Arthur. See Torrington, 1st Earl of Herbert, Henry. See Pembroke, 9th Earl Herbert, Thomas. See Pembroke, 8th Earl of Herbert, William. See Pembroke, 3rd Earl of Herculaneum, 9, 144, 166, 237n50 Hercules, busts of, 18, 31; Commodus as Hercules, cast of, 68; medallion of, 71 Hermaphrodite, cast of, 68 Hesiod, busts of, 31, 229n47 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 201 History of England: From the Accession of James I to the Elevation of the House of Hanover, 180; frontispiece, 177–8, 178 The History of England from the Revolution to the Accession of the Brunswick Line, 190 Hoare, Henry, 25 Hoare, Henry II, 25 Hoare, Prince, 16, 108

Hogarth, William, 76, 97, 160; frontispiece for Society of Artists catalogue, 76–7, 77, 121; John Wilkes, 177 Holkham. A Poem to the Right Honourable Earl of Leicester, 28 Holkham Hall (Norfolk), 25–9, 26, 27, 35, 55, 89, 90, 111; Kedleston Hall, 89; library, 138; Spence, 28 Hollis, Thomas, 155–92; American colonies and Harvard, 161, 188–91; books, 177–9, 180; bust of, 114, 176, 176–7, 179, 188, 219–20; Bute and George III, 185–6, 188; collecting, 174–5; gift-giving, 160–3, 165, 167; grand tour, 165–8; Huntingdon, 164; ideologue, 155–9, 190–1; lineage and status, 156, 163, 165; numismatics, 164, 180–1; patronage, 164, 169–74; Pitt, 187–8; his plan, 155, 161; portrait of, 166, 166–7; print of, 188–90, 189; prints, 160, 179; relief of, 168–9, 168, 174, 219; residences, 159, 169, 174; Rockingham, 157, 186, 191; Stamp Act, 186–7; state coach, 182–3; Stowe, 183–5 Holmes, Rear-Admiral Charles, monument to, 212–13, 213 Holt, Sir John, 100 Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, 23 Homer, 218; busts of, 31, 36, 42, 204, 218, 229n47; Illiad, 33; statue of, 37 Horace, bust of, 42 Houghton Hall (Norfolk), 14, 29–35, 36, 40, 55, 90, 114; Ædes Walpolianæ (Horace Walpole), 34–5; Freemasonry, 29; Staircase, 32–4, 33; Stone Hall, 29–32, 30, 31, 60 Howard, Charles. See Carlisle, 4th Earl of Howard, Ralph, 168 Howard, Thomas, 17 Howe, William Taylor, 166 Hume, David, 7, 233n9 Humphry, Ozias, 121, 249n122 Huntingdon, George Hastings, 4th Earl of, 127 Huntingdon, Selina, Countess of, 129, 131, 133, 143; Donington Park, 149, 256n85; monument to, 129–31, 130 Huntingdon, Theophilus Hastings, 7th Earl of, 128 Huntingdon, Theophilus Hastings, 9th Earl of, 128–31; monument to, 129–31, 130 Huntingdon, 10th Earl of, 127–54; bust of, 114, 141, 144, 147, 255n67; Chesterfield, 5, 127, 128,

index | 307

131–7, 141, 146–7, 151, 153–4, 206, 219, 251n19; Cocchi, 65, 136, 142, 148, 150, 151, 254n54; collecting, 138–40; Donington Park, 127, 140–1, 146–7, 148–9, 151; Epicurus, 144–5; grand tour, 134–8; and Hollis, 164; lineage, 127–8; portrait, 134–6, 135; state coach, 152–3; status and arrogance, 134–6, 152–4 Hurd, Richard, Dialogues on the Uses of Foreign Travel, 219 Hutcheson, Francis, 7 The Hyde (Ingatestone, Essex), 165, 175, 176, 192, 193, 219; bust of Hollis at, 176; new gallery, 175 Hyde Park: stables, 165; John Cheere’s lead statuary business, 224n13 Idol (Idolino), cast of, 95, 138; copy of, 62, 217 Imperial Closet, at Stowe, 40 Ince Blundell, 5, 7, 72, 196, 196, 201 Interior of the Rotunda at Ranelagh, 170–1, 173, 174 Iole, cameo, 175 Isis, statues, 26, 58, 234n24 Jacobitism, 5, 58, 65, 101, 129, 187; Bolingbroke, 131; Burlington, 25; Byres, 73; Chesterfield, 131, 251n12; Cheyne, 143; Christ Church, Oxford, 131; Freemasonry, 12, 19, 25, 98, 244n18; Hollis, 259n12; 265n148; 7th Earl of Huntingdon, 128; 9th Earl of Huntingdon, 129; 10th Earl of Huntingdon, 133; Marquises of Rockingham, 53, 58, 92; 2nd Duke of Richmond, 98, 101; 1745 uprising, 53, 58, 187; Strafford, 57 Jafar, Mir, painting of, 207, 211 Jeffreys, Henrietta. See Pomfret, Lady Jenkins, Thomas, 9, 71, 89, 164, 166, 174; Barberini Venus, 71; Hollis, 164, 166, 174, 263n87; Lock, 116; Newby Hall, 71, 89; portrait of Thomas Brand, 166–7 Johnson, Samuel, 158, 191 Jones, Inigo, 222: Banqueting House, 103, 169, 171; busts of, 42, 229–30n65, Freemasonry, 19, 23; Old Somerset House, 123; Pembroke, 19; Queen’s House, Greenwich, 60; statue of, 21, 23; Stonehenge, 19; Wilton House, 18, 19 Jones, Thomas, 113, 120 Judgment of Paris, 84

308 | index

Julius Caesar, 19, 47; busts, 66, 140, 148, 238n62, 253n46; statue of, 36 Juno, bust of, 95; statues of, 47, 82–4, 83, 86 Jupiter, bust of, 32; statue of, 28 Kauffman, Angelica, 124 Kedleston Hall (Derbyshire), 10, 89, 90, 193, 195, 196, 224n18, 266n1 Keene, Sir Benjamin, 134 Kent, William: Donington Park, 250n4; Holkham Hall, 26, 27; Houghton Hall, 30, 31, 33, 33–4; Kew, 42; monument to the Countess and 9th Earl of Huntingdon, 130, 129–31; Richmond House, 101, 102; Temple of Ancient Virtue, at Stowe, 37, 38; Temple of British Worthies, at Stowe, 36–7, 37 Keppel, Viscount Admiral Augustus, 91–2, 243n161; busts of, 49, 243n162; column dedicated to, 91–2, 91; medals of, 243n162; portrait of, 212, 214, 214 de Kéroualle, Louise, 98, 244n18 Kettle, Tilly, 126 Kew, 42–7, 45–7, 76, 122; Alhambra, 43; Chambers, 44–6; Francavilla statues, 43–4; Frederick, Prince of Wales, 42–4, 76, 146; Gallery of Antiques, 44, 45, 46, 45–7, 122; George III, 44–7, 122; House of Confucius, 43; Mount Parnassus, 42–3, 146; Pagoda, 45, 122; Temple of Bellona, 45, 122; Temple of the Sun, 45, 122; Theatre of Augusta, 45 Killing of the Calydonian Boar, by Kent, 33 Kimber, Isaac, The Life of Oliver Cromwell, 150 Kit-Kat Club, 21 Knatchbull, Sir Wyndham, and bust of Cromwell, 257n97 Kneller, Godfrey, academy in Great Queen Street, 97 To the Ladies and Gentlemen of Taste in Great Britain and Ireland, 99–100 Landscape of the Grotto in the Villa Madama, 167 Lansdowne, William Petty, 1st Marquis of. See Shelburne, 2nd Earl of Lansdowne House (London). See Shelburne House Lany, Louise Madeleine, 134

Laocoön, 32, 66, 70; aesthetics, 66, 114–17, 200, 217, 218, 248n88; bronze cast of, 31, 32, 34, 114; cast of, 68; cast of head of one of the sons, 70; statuette, 162, 162, 175, 220 Larudan, Abbé, Les Francs-Maçons Ecrasés, 150, 257n99 “La Trappe” (Hammersmith), 43, 231n92 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 149 Leda and the Swan, 68 Lee, John, bust of, 49 Lefroy, Anthony, Catalogus numismaticus Musei Lefroyani, 164, 260–1n42 Legge, William. See Dartmouth, 1st Earl of Legros, Pierre, cast of hands of St. Ignatius, 95, 114, 217 Leicester, Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of (5th creation), 4, 7, 25, 35, 69, 111, 198; as Allucius, 28; busts of, 28, 29, 228n41; Freemasonry, 25, 228n31; Holkham Hall, 25–9, 26, 27, 89, 198, 228n35 Lennox, Charles. See Richmond, 3rd Duke of Lennox, Lady Sarah, 121 Lennox, Lord George, 106, 121 Leominster, 1st Baron (William Fermor), 18, 20, 224n14 Lessing, Gotthold, Ephraim, 248n88 Le Sueur, Hubert: copy of Borghese Gladiator, 33, 33–4; statue of Charles I, 169, 171 Leveson, John, 1st Earl Gower. See Gower, 1st Earl of Life of Oliver Cromwell, 150 Lincoln’s Inn Fields (London), 165 Lindsey, Theophilus, 164, 261n43 Lion Attacking a Horse, 81–2 Lion Attacking a Stag, 81–2 Lion and Boar, cast of, 68 Lion and the Horse, copy of, 9 Lloyd, William, 160; 175, 263n84 Lock, William (of Norbury Park), 4, 95, 115–18, 163, 164, 168, 247n84, 247n86; aesthetics, 10, 115–18, 200, 218, 248n92; collection, 116–17, 175, 217, 242n135; Discobolus, 95, 175; Embarkation of St. Ursula (Claude), 116–17, 247n87; Laocoön, 115–18, 218; Portman Square, 247n87; as mentor to Richard Wilson, 116–17, 168 Locke, John, 7, 145, 219; bust of, 229–30n65; Hollis, 158, 159, 191; proposed portrait, 100

London Chronicle, 93, 113, 156, 175, 182, 187 Lorrain, Claude. See Claude Louis XIII, King, portrait, 21 Lucius Verus, bust of, 36 Lucullus, Lucius Licinius, 146; bust of, 43 Lycurgus, busts of, 36, 37, 42 Lysias, bust of, 28 Lyttelton, George, 40, 67–9, 160; bust of, 39 Lyttelton family, 36 Macaulay, Catherine, 157, 158; History of England: From the Accession of James I to the Elevation of the House of Hanover, 177–9, 178 Macclesfield, George Parker, 2nd Earl of, 160, 224n13 Maecenas, 121; bust of, 28 Magdelen House, 163 Maini, Giovanni Battista, 62, 66, 236n37 Mainwaring, Sir Philip, portrait of, 75, 88 Malton, Charles, Lord. See Rockingham, 2nd Marquis of Mann, Horace, 43, 108, 109, 112, 166; copies for Northumberland House, 266n2; Francavilla statues, 43–4, 231n91, 231–2n94; Hollis, 166; Huntingdon, 136, 147, 153; Lyttelton, 67–9; Wentworth Woodhouse, 70 Manningham, Dr, 113 Mansfield, 1st Earl of. See Stormont, William Murray, 7th Viscount of Marchant, Nathaniel, 126 Marchmount, 2nd Earl of, bust of, 39 Marcus Aurelius, 36; busts of, 21, 31, 140, 175, 253n46; portrait of, 40; statue of, 18 Marcus Ulpius Fortunatus, cinerarium, 175 Marino (Charlemont’s estate), 65–7 Marlborough, John Churchill, 1st Duke of, 9, 20, 21, 58, 99, 224n13, 231–2n94; portrait of, 100 Marly, 86 Marsham, Charles. See Romney, 2nd Baron Martinelli, Vincenzo, 179–80 Marvell, Andrew, 158, 191 Mary, Queen, 100 Massacre of St George’s Fields, 190 Matidia, medal of, 240n98 Maximian; A Tragedy Taken from Corneille, 116 Mayhew, Jonathan, 186 Mazarin collection, 18

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McSwiny, Owen, 98–100, 245n26, 245n27 Mead, Dr Richard, 163; collection of, 4, 9, 15, 71, 97, 263n84; correspondence with Cocchi, 225n26; house of, 138 Mecklenberg-Strelitz, Charlotte, 121 Medical Sketches, 116 Medici collection (Florence). See Uffizi Meleager, 33–4; cast of, 95, 248n97; statue of, 28 Meleager Presenting the Boar’s Head to Atalanta, by Kent, 33 Menander, bust of, 42 Mengs, Anton Raphael, Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond and Lennox, 106–7, 107; copy of the School of Athens, 266n2 Mercury, 33; bust of, 36, 229n65; cast of, 67; statues of, 23, 26, 62 Michelangelo, 62, 217; cast of Bacchus, 95, 217, 248n97; cast of feet of David, 95, 114; copies of slaves, 117, 217; copy of Evening, 174; copy of Morning, 174; Last Judgement, 267n35; and Samson and the Philistines, 62, 217; selfportrait as Pan, 176; Middlesex, Charles Sackville, Earl of: Freemasonry, 225n26, 228n36 Middlesex election crisis, 154, 190 Milton, John, 142, 178; bed, 159, 165; busts of, 42, 229–30n64; On Education, 165; Hollis, 155, 157, 158, 159, 162–3, 178–9, 180, 181, 185, 191, 264n106; medal of, 162; Toland’s Life of, 185, 264n106 Minden, battle at, 106, 118 Minerva, at Kew, 46–7; medal of, 180; in portrait of Richmond, 107; statue of, 29, 82, 82–4, 86, 176, 242n136 Moira, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquis of, 127–8, 154 Molesworth, Robert, Viscount, 157–8, 190, 192, 259n8 Montagu, Fredrick, bust of, 49 Montagu, John, 2nd Duke of, 103, 225n26 Montagu, John. See 4th Earl Sandwich Montague House (Privy Garden), 102–3 Montesquieu, 7, 106 Monumenti antichi inediti, 83 Moore, John: Lock, 115–17, 218; Medical Sketches, 116 Morrice, Sir William, 100 Morris, Roger, 250n4

310 | index

Mortimer, John, 121, 126 mosque, at Kew, 45 Mount Helicon, 45 Mount Parnassus: Kew, 42–3, 146 Murphy, Edward, 108, 253n44 Museo dei Cortosini, 73 Museo Pio-Clementium (Vatican), 73, 240n94 Museum Worsleyanum, or a Collection of Antique Basso Relievos, Bustoes, Statues and Gems, with Views of Places in the Levant Taken on the Spot in the Years 1785–7, 201 Musgrave, William, 34 Narford Hall (Norfolk), 20, 227n14 Natter, Lorenz, 179, 264n108 Neptune, statue of, 29 Nero, busts of, 140, 253n46 Newby Hall (North Yorkshire), 71, 89, 196, 196, 202 Newcastle, 1st Duke of, 52–4, 131, 152, 232n3, 251n14; Freemasonry, 228n30 Newton, Sir Isaac, 7, 158, 159; busts of, 42, 229– 30n65; Chronology of the Ancients, 227n14; portrait of, 100 Nightmare Abbey, 200 Niobe and Her Daughter, cast of, 68 Nollekens, Joseph, 177; bust of Charles James Fox, 92; bust of Cromwell, 257n97; Diana, 85, 85–6; Judgement of Paris, 248n89; Juno, 82–4, 83; and Laocoön group, 117; Minerva, 82, 82–4; statue of Rockingham, 49, 51; Venus, 82, 82–4 North, Frederick, Lord (2nd Earl of Guilford), 91, 92, 111, 125 North Briton, controversy, 185 Northcote, John, 124–5 Northumberland, Hugh Percy, Lord Smithson, 1st Earl and 1st Duke of, 123; Freemasonry, 225n26; Northumberland House, 193, 261n43, 266n2; Syon House, 10, 69, 193, 194, 196, 266n1 Northumberland House (Charing Cross), 193, 261n43 Numismata Imperatorum Romanorum praestentiora a Julio Caesare ad Postumum et Tryannos, 74 numismatics, 13, 20, 65, 137; Cocchi, 12; Hollis, 158, 164, 166; Rockingham, 73–5

De Obelisco Caesari Augusti, 65, 237n50 Observations on the Late State of the Nation, 81 Ode to His Grace the Duke of Richmond; Occasion’d by Some Fine Italian Paintings at Goodwood, Designed to Perpetuate the Memory and Actions of Several Eminent Persons in the Three Last Reigns, 100 Old Somerset House (London), 123 Old Whigs. See Rockingham Whigs On Education, 165 On Leaving Holland, 164–5 Order of the Bath, 53, 54 Order of Garter, 30, 32 Order of Ishmael, 239n75 Orford, Edward Russell, 1st Earl of, 100 Orme, Captain Robert, portrait of, 212, 214 Otho, bust of, 140 Paetus and Arria, cast of, 68, 95 Pagoda, 45, 122 Paine, James, 121, 123–4, 249n122; Kedleston Hall, 266n1 Palladio, Andrea, 66; Freemasonry, 23; statue of, 20, 23 Pallas, 32; bust of, 72; medals, 180 Palliser, Sir Hugh, 91–2 Pall Mall (London), 123 Pamphili collection, 234n24 Pan, bust of, 138, 151, 253n46; Freemasonry, 151; and Michelangelo, 176; statue of, 44 Panini, Francesco, 197 Parallel Lives, 190 Paris, 32; fireworks at, 259n12 Paris, bust of, 176; statue of, 83–4, 84, 86; Shelburne House, 84 Parker, George. See Macclesfield, 2nd Earl of Parker, John, 108, 109 Park Street (Westminster), Townley’s residence, 202, 203, 204, 202–4 Parry, William, 126 Pars, William, 119, 126 Patch, Thomas, 108, 109; Charlemont, 238n55, 252n39; formal education; 108–9; Golden Asses, 268n44; Huntingdon, 138, 151, 252n39 Peace, statues of, 30, 184, 185 Peacham, Henry, 11, 20, 134 Peacock, Thomas Love, Nightmare Abbey, 200 Pelham-Holles, Thomas. See Newcastle, 1st Duke of

Pembroke, Henry Herbert, 9th Earl of, 4, 7, 23, 25, 75, 228–9n42; narrative program, 198; Palladian Bridge, 40 Pembroke, Thomas Herbert, 8th Earl of, 4, 7, 13, 18–20, 21, 23, 25, 75, 228–9n42; Borghese Galdiator, 34; as “Carvilius Magnus,” 19; Robert Walpole, 34–5; Wilton House, 18–20, 198 Pembroke, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of: Freemasonry, 19 Penn, William, portrait of, 40 Penny, Edward, The Death of General Wolfe, 214–15, 215, 217 Percy, Hugh, Lord Smithson. See Northumberland, 1st Earl and 1st Duke of Peter the Great, 149–50; bust of, 149, 151; Freemasonry, 149–50 Petty, Sophia. See Shelburne, Countess of Petty, William, 1st Marquis of Lansdowne. See Shelburne, 2nd Earl of Philip, 4th Earl of Pembroke and His Family, 18 Philips, Charles, Charles, 2nd Duke of Richmond, 105 Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 81, 216 Phocion, bust of, in Hollis’s collection, 187 Piazza del Campidoglio and Cordonata, 169–71, 170 Piazza di Spagna (Rome), 166 Pigalle, Jean-Baptiste, 109 de Piles, Roger, Cours de peinture par principes avec un balance de peintres, 198 Pincot, Daniel, 71, 239n85 Pingo, John, 180 Pingo, Lewis, 126 Pingo, Thomas, 181, 187–8, 187 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista: Hollis, 165; vedute, 200 Pitt, Thomas, 160 Pitt, William (the elder), 1st Earl Chatham, 52, 54, 92, 184–5, 229n63; 232–3n5; bust of, 39; Hollis, 158, 180–8, 264n106; medallions of, 185, 186–8, 187; statue of Peace, 185; statues of, 186, 187; Stowe, 36, 39 Pitt, William (the younger), 125 Pittites, 52, 222 Pittoni, Giovanni Battista, 99 Plans, Elevations and Perspective Views of the Gardens and Building at Kew, 44, 45, 232n98

index | 311

Plans, Elevations and Sections, Chimney Pieces and Ceilings of Houghton at Norfolk, 34 Plans, Elevations and Sections of Holkham in Norfolk, the Seat of the Late Earl of Leicester, 228n35 Plassey. See Battle of Plato, busts of, 28, 175; mould of bust of, 238n63 Plautilla, busts of, 21, 138, 140, 253n46 Plenty, statue of, 30 “Poetical Epistle to an Eminent Painter,” 126 Pollux, bust of, 32; statue of, 169, 177 Polymetis or an Enquiry concerning the Agreement between the Works of Roman Poets, and the Remains of the Antient Artists, 28, 138, 228n35 Pomfret, Henrietta Jeffreys, Lady, 227n16, 235n27 Pompeii, 9, 166, 237n50 Pompey, bust of, 66; statue of, 36 Pope, Alexander, 40; An Epistle to Lord Burlington, 35; busts of, 42, 229–30n65 della Porta, Guglielmo, 66 Portland, William Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of, bust of, 49 Posi, Paolo, 111, 235n41 Potter, Robert, Holkham. A Poem to the Right Honourable Earl of Liecester, 28 Pozzi, Andrea: relief of Brand, 168–9, 168, 174, 219; relief of Hollis, 168–9, 168, 174, 219 Priam, bust of, 176 Privy Garden (Whitehall), 94, 102, 103, 103, 113 Ptolemy, statue of, 28 “Publick Liberty,” statue of, 185 Pythagoras, 142–5, 254n55, 255n79; busts of, 140, 141–2, 144, 151, 253n47 Queen’s House (Greenwich), 60 Queen of Sweden, collection of, 62, 68, 236n37 Queen’s Theatre (London), 98 Raccolta di statue antiche e moderne (Domenico de Rossi), 8, 9 Raleigh, Sir Walter, bust of, 42, 229–30n65; portrait of, 40 Ramsay, Chevalier Andrew Michael, 143 Ramsey, Allan, 122, 160

312 | index

Rape of the Sabines, casts of heads, 95; copy of, 118; statuette of, 70 Raphael, 267n35; bust of, 42; copies of paintings by, 193, 266n2; damage to Vatican paintings, 238n62 Rawdon-Hastings, Francis. See Moira, Earl of Recueil d’antiquites egyptiennes, etrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises, 175, 200 Reflections on the French Revolution, 81 Reni, Guido, 175; copy of painting by, 193, 266n2 Repeal, of the Funeral of Miss Ame-Stamp, print, 186, 186–7 Repton, Humphry, 128 Revett, Nicholas, 9, 65, 166, 200 Reynolds, Joshua, 7, 16, 108, 117, 118, 160, 203; Captain the Honourable Augustus Keppel, 212, 214; Captain Robert Orme, 212, 214; Discourses, 10, 117, 216; Four Learned Milordi, 268n44; Francis Hastings, 10th Earl of Huntingdon, 134–6, 135; Lord Rockingham and Edmund Burke, 75, 76; portrait of the Society of Dilettani, 203, 218 Richardson, Jonathan (elder and younger), An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas Reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy with Remarks, 9–10, 32, 34, 198, 200; An Essay on the Theory of Painting, 198; Laocoön, 114, 116 Richardson, Samuel, 230n75 Richmond, 2nd Duke of, 98, 101, 102, 106–7, 112; Freemasonry, 98, 102; Goodwood, 100, 102; McSwiny, 100; portrait, 104, 105; Richmond House, 102–5 Richmond, 3rd Duke of, 93–126; academy/ gallery, 93–8, 107, 112–14, 118–19, 120, 123, 124–5, 126; grand tour, 105–7, 107; horses, 106; lineage, 98, 107; military, 106, 118; patronage, 110–11, 124–5; politics and George III, 121–22; Rockingham, 106, 107, 122, 125, 154. See also Joseph Wilton Richmond House (Privy Garden), 93–4, 97, 101–5, 101, 103–4, 112–13, 118, 120, 124–6 della Robbia, Lucca, 117 Robert Clive and Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey (Hayman), 207, 211 Rockingham, 1st Marquis of, 3, 4, 50, 53, 54, 60, 62–3, 65, 75, 92; portrait of George II,

79; rivalry with Strafford, 56–7; Wentworth Woodhouse, 54–8, 55, 56, 57, 90, 94 Rockingham, 2nd Marquis of, 49–92; Burke, 6, 7, 49, 53, 81, 123, 221; Charlemont, 65–6; Cocchi, 65; as collector and virtù, 60–3, 66–75, 82–4, 85–6; grand tour, 60–5; Grosvenor House, 81–4; Hollis, 157, 186, 191; horses, 78–81; Lord Rockingham and Edmund Burke (Reynolds), 75, 76; mausoleum, 49–50; Nollekens, 82–4, 85–6; politics under George III, 49–54, 75–8, 90–2; Richmond, 106, 107, 122, 125, 154; societies and clubs, 70; statue of, by Nollekens, 49–50, 51; Stuart, 65, 71, 75, 86, Stubbs, 78–9, 81–2; Wentworth Woodhouse, 58, 60–2, 78–80, 81, 86–8, 90–2; Wilton, 62, 66, 70, 71 Rockingham Whigs (Old Whigs), 5, 51, 52–3, 90–1, 122–3, 125, 206, 221, 222 Rolle, Margaret, medallion, 30 Roma Antica e Moderna, 165 Romney, George, 124, 126 Rooker, Edward, and Kew, 44, 45 Ross, Charles, façade of Wentworth Castle, 242n148 de Rossi, Domenico, Raccolta di statue antiche e moderne, 8, 9 Roubiliac, Louis-François, 215; bust of Chesterfield, 139, 139–40, 147, 253n45; bust of Cromwell, 257n97; bust of Folkes, 25; bust of Fountaine, 25; busts of Leicester, 228n41 Rousham House (Oxfordshire), 9 Royal Academy of Arts, 15, 16, 109, 120–3, 158, 164, 212, 220; 249n122; at Old Somerset House, 123; in Pall Mall, 123; Richmond academy/gallery, 125 Royal Ordnance Survey, 125, 206 Royal Society, 11, 19, 20–1, 70, 106; Freemasonry, 12, 20, 158, 163; Hollis, 158; 2nd Duke of Richmond, 101; 3rd Duke of Richmond, 106; Rockingham, 70; Stukeley, 19 ruins, at Kew, 45 Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro, 166, 177–8, 178 Russel, James, 108, 116, 119, 206; Lock, 247n86 Russell, Edward. See Orford, 1st Earl of Rysbrack, John Michael: bust of Cromwell, 257n97; monument to 9th Earl of

Huntingdon, 129–30, 130; reliefs at Houghton Hall, 32; statues at Houghton Hall, 29–30 sacrifice to Diana, relief, 32 Sackville, Charles. See Middlesex, Earl of St. Ignatius, 95 St. James Chronicle, 156 St James’s Palace (London), 76 St John, Henry. See Bolingbroke, 1st Viscount, 131, 251n11 St Martin’s Lane Academy, 97, 123 St. Paul’s Cathedral, 169, 172 St Roche’s Hill (Sussex), 102 St Thomas’s Hospital, 163 Salonina, bust of, 29 Samson and the Philistines: cast of Giambologna’s, 118; by Foggini, 16, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 86, 217; by Giambologna, 62, 67; by Michelangelo, 62 Sandwich, John Montagu, 4th Earl, 91 Sansovino, Jacopo: cast of Bacchus, 67, 95, 138; cast of Fortune, 72 Santa Susanna, 113; cast of, 95; copy of, 26 Savile, Sir George, bust of, 49 Scarsdale, Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Baron, 6, 89; Kedleston Hall, 10, 89, 193, 266n1 Scheemakers, Peter: copy of Dying Gaul, 9; copy of Lion and the Horse, 9; monument to Vice-Admiral Charles Watson, 207, 212, 212; statue of Shakespeare, at Wilton House, 23, 25; statues at Chiswick House, 23, 228n23 Seeley, Benton, A Description of the Gardens of the Lord Viscount Cobham, at Stow in Buckinghamshire, 40–1, 145–6, 230n75 Seneca, busts of, 28, 95, 138, 140, 162, 253n46, 260n36 Septimus Servus, 229n45; bust of, 31 Serapis, bust of, 175 Seven Years’ War, 11, 52, 75, 90, 92, 101, 163, 188, 218; battle at Minden, 106; medallions, 184; and medals, 75, 160, 163, 180–1; Richmond, 106 Seymour, Algernon. See Egremont, 1st Earl of Shackleton, John, 70–1; portrait of George II, 79 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of, 13, 20, 157, 158, 198; and civic humanism, 3, 6, 54, 192, 205, 218–21; Hollis, 158; philoso-

index | 313

phy and virtù, 6, 20, 64, 66, 134, 137, 156, 206, 217, 218–19, 220–1; Rockingham, 206 Shakespeare, William, statue of, 23, 25 Shelburne, Sophia Petty, Countess of, 84 Shelburne, William Petty, 1st Marquis of Lansdowne, 2nd Earl of, 84–5, 125; Bowood, 89; as collector, 5, 7, 10, 72, 84–5, 204, 205, 240n92 Shelburne House (Lansdowne House, London), 84–5, 196, 197 Shipley, William, 113; school, 113, 120, 126 Shirburn Castle (Oxfordshire), bronze cast of Dancing Faun, 224n13 Shirley, Mr, and Masonic lodge in Florence, 225n26 A Short Critical Review of the Political Life of Oliver Cromwell, 150 Shorter, Catherine, medallion of, 30 A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, 190–1 Shovell, Admiral Sir Cloudsley, portrait of, 98 Silenus, statues, 70 Silenus upon a Goat, 71 Six Months’ Tour through the North of England, 87–8 Slave, copy by Soldani, 9 Slaves, copies of, 117, 217 Sledmere House (Yorkshire), Apollo Belvedere, 125 Sleter, Francis, paintings, 39–40 Smirke, Robert, 84, 196 Smith, Joseph, 166, 169 Smithson, Hugh Percy, Sir. See Northumberland, 1st Earl and 1st Duke of Smollet, Tobias, 160 Society of Antiquaries, 11, 12, 20, 21, 70, 102, 158, 161, 163; Freemasonry, 20, 158; Hollis, 158, 160, 161; 2nd Duke of Richmond, 102; Rockingham, 70 Society of Artists of Great Britain, 15, 16, 120–4, 150, 164, 182, 249n119, 249n122; bust of Cromwell, 150, 182, 257n98; catalogue, 77, 77, 121; at Exeter Exchange, 123; Richmond, 121, 220; Royal Academy, 120–4; in Spring Gardens, 120 Society of Arts (Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce), 11, 16, 112–13, 118, 120, 126, 163;

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Hollis and medals, 158, 163–4, 180–1, 184, 185; Richmond academy/gallery, 94, 112–13, 118–20, 126; Rockingham, 70; Society of Artists, 120; Stowe, 184 Society of Dilettanti, 11, 72; portrait, 203, 218 Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. See Society of Arts Socrates, busts of, 21, 36; statue of, 37 Soldani, Massimiliano, 58; copies of statues, 9 Solon, 147, 255–6n79 Somers, John, 100 Spence, Joseph, 28; Cocchi, 225n26; Freemasonry, 225n26; Polymetis or an Enquiry concerning the Agreement between the Works of Roman Poets, and the Remains of the Antient Artists, 28, 138, 228n35; Sackville, 228n36 Spinario, cast of, 68 Stamp Act crisis, and Hollis, 186–8, 90 Stanhope, Philip. See Chesterfield, 4th Earl of Stanyan, Temple, On Grecian History, 38 stage coach, for George III, 76, 122, 152, 221; Hollis, 164, 182–3, 192, Huntingdon, 152–3, 164 Statue of the Laocoön, at the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole’s Seat, at Houghtom, in Norfolk, 32 Steavens, Thomas, 252n39, 253–4n47 Stormont, David Murray, 7th Viscount of (1st Earl of Mansfield), 134, 136 von Stosch, Baron Phillip, 65, 108, 166, 254n54; Freemasonry, 225n26, 228n36; Hollis, 166; Rockingham, 65 Stourhead (Wiltshire), 25 Stowe House (Buckinghamshire), 36–41, 48, 145, 184; Chinese house, 43; Cobham Pillar, 145–6, 146; Elysian Fields, 36–40, 42, 145, 184; epicurean influence, 145; Grecian Temple/Temple of Peace/Temple of Concord and Victory, 183–5, 183; Grecian Valley, 145; Grenville column, 184; Hawkwell Field, 145; Imperial Closet, 40; Palladian Bridge, 40; public communication of, 40; Rotunda, 9, western gardens, 20, 36; Temple of Ancient Virtue, 37–8, 38; Temple of British Worthies, 36–7, 37, 39, 41, 49, 100; Temple of Friendship, 39–40, 49; Temple of

Liberty, 39; Temple of Modern Virtue, 37, 39; Venus, 9; Whig Opposition, 36. See also Cobham, Richard Temple, 1st Viscount Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of, 53, 56, 59; medal of, 260–1n42; portrait with Mainwaring, 75, 88 Strafford, William Wentworth, 2nd Earl of, 56–7, 58–9, 60, 62, 88, 233n7, 234n19, 234n25, 234–5n26; Wentworth Castle, 58–60, 88, 234–5n26, 242n150 Strafford, William Wentworth, 3rd Earl of, 57, 235n27 Strafford Hall. See Wentworth Castle Stuart, James “Athenian,” 9, 75, 108, 160, 166, 200; archaeology, 200; Hollis, 164, 166, 180, 184; De Obelisco Caesari Augusti, 65; portrait of George II, 75; and medals, 75, 180, 184; monument to Vice-Admiral Charles Watson, 11, 207, 212, 212; portrait of William III, 75, 86; Rockingham, 65, 71; and Wentworth Woodhouse, 61, 71, 75 Stubbs, George, 181; Lion Attacking a Horse, 81, 84; Lion Attacking a Stag, 81, 84; Richmond, 106, 123–4; Rockingham, 78–81, 106, 123; Society of Artists, 123–4; Whistlejacket, 78–81, 79, 80 Stukeley, William, 20, 21, 102, 203; Freemasonry, 19; Hollis, 163; Itinerarium Curiosum, 21; Pembroke, 19 Sunderland, Earl of, 100 Sweden, Queen of. See Queen of Sweden Sydenham, Thomas, 100 Sydney, Algernon, 185; Hollis, 158, 159, 185, 191, 264n106; portrait, 100 Syon House (Middlesex), 8, 10, 193, 196, 266n1, 266n2; Apollino, 69, 193; entrance hall 8, 193, 194 Temple, proposed for Kew, 42–3 Temple, Richard. See Cobham, 1st Viscount Temple, Richard Grenville, 1st Earl, 52, 145, 184–5, 187, 230n71, 234n21; bust of, 39 Temple, Sir William, Upon the Gardens of Epicurus; or, Of Gardening, 145 Temple of Ancient Worthies, at Stowe, 37, 38, 229n65 Temple of Bellona, at Kew, 45, 122 Temple of British Worthies, at Stowe, 36–7, 37, 39, 41, 49, 100, 229–30n65

Temple of Concord and Victory/Grecian Temple/Temple of Peace, at Stowe, 146, 183, 183–4, 185, 230n71 Temple of Friendship, at Stowe, 39–40, 49 Temple of Liberty, at Woburn Abbey, 92 Temple of Liberty/Gothic Temple, at Stowe, 39, 230n69 Temple of Modern Virtue, at Stowe, 37–8, 39 Temple of Peace, at Rome, 199 Temple of Peace, at Stowe. See Temple of Concord and Victory temples, at Wentworth Woodhouse, 86–7 Temple of Solomon, 23, 227n14 Temple of the Sun, at Kew, 45, 122 Theatre of Augusta, at Kew, 45 Theodore, Charles, 71 Thornhill, James, 97, 224n14 Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 53, 81, 123, 232–3n5 Three Cups Inn (Lyme Regis), 159 Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: to Which Is Added a Poem, on Landscape Painting, 116 Thucydides, bust of, 42 Tiberius, bust of, 140, 253n46 Tillotson, Archbishop John, 98, 99 Timoleon, bust of, 175 Timotheus, bust of, 42 Titon du Tillet, Evrard, 42 Titus, busts of, 28, 140, 253n46; portrait of, at Stowe, 40 Toland, John, Life of Milton, 185, 264n106 Tombeaux des Princes grands capitaines et autres illustres, qui ont fleuri dans la Grande-Bretagne vers la fin du XVII et le commencement du XVIII siècle, 245n27 Torrington, Arthur Herbert, 1st Earl of, 100 Toryism, 5, 11, 25, 58, 89, 90; Cheyne, 143; Curzon, 89; Huntingdon, 128; Kedleston Hall, 89; Leominster, 224n14; Strafford, 57 Townley Charles, 163; as collector, 5, 6, 7, 10, 72–3, 116, 125, 201–5, 202–5, 218, 240n92 Trajan, bust of, 31, 140, 253n46; portrait of, 40 Trajan’s column, casts of, 94 Treaty of Paris, 185 Trembley, Abraham, 105–6; Freemasonry, 102 Tribuna, Uffizi, 23, 62 Trinity College (Dublin), library, 138

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Triumphal Arch, at Stowe, 183–4, 185 Uffizi, 23; Cocchi lecture, 166; collections, 10, 62, 65, 234n24 Upon the Gardens of Epicurus; or, of Gardening, 145 Urban VIII, tomb of, 95 Vaillant, John, Numismata Imperatorum Romanorum praestentiora a Julio Caesare ad Postumum et Tryannos, 74 Valadier, Luigi, Dying Gaul, 193, 194, 196 della Valle, Filippo, 62 Vanbrugh, John, bust of 42; Stowe, 9, 36 Van Dyck, 107, 149; Charles I and His Family, 124; Earl of Strafford and Sir Philip Mainwaring, 75, 88, 241n110; Philip, 4th Earl of Pembroke and His Family, 18 Vasari, Giorgio, 62–3 Vatican, and collections, 68, 73–4, 111, 200, 240n94, 266n2, 267n35; Constantine (Bernini), 80 Vauxhall Gardens, (London), 163; paintings, 207, 210, 211 Venus, 218; column, dedicated to, 18; relief of, 66; statues, 47, 67, 70, 82, 82–4, 86, 174, 242n136; statuette, 70 Venus and Attendants, 44, 231n94 Venus des Belles Fesses, statue of, 25, 28 Venus de’Medici, 4, 67, 80, 175, 200; casts of, 67, 94, 138, 193, 224n13; copies, 9, 23, 62, 66, 69, 117, 217, 236n37; Richmond, 67, 106, 220 Venus Pulling a Thorn from Her Foot, 68 Venus Victrix, 117 Venuti, Abbé Filippo, De dea libertate, 166, 264n106 von Verschaffelt, Pieter Anton, 71 Vertue, George: and Cromwell, 256n87; and drawings for Kew, 42–3 Vespasian, bust of, 140, 253n46 Vierpyl, Simon, 16; bust of Augustus, 148; bust of Epicurus, 141, 144, 253–4n47, 255n67; bust of Pythagoras, 141, 144; copy of Apollino, 62, 217, 236n37; copy of Borghese Gladiator, 66; copy of Dancing Faun, 62, 69, 217, 236n37; Murphy, 253n44; Rockingham, 62; Rome, 68, 108, 109

316 | index

View of the Fire-Workes and Illuminations at His Grace the Duke of Richmond’s at Whitehall and on the River Thames, 101, 104 View of Lake Albano, 167 View of Lake Ariccia, 162, 262n76 View of the Thames, from Richmond House, 103–4, 104 View of Walton Bridge, 170–1, 172, 174 Villa Bracci (Rovezzano), 43, 231n94 Villiers, George. See Buckingham, 1st Duke of Virgil, 28; bust of, 36; Laocoön, 114–16 Virtù, 6, 14, 20, 198, 220, 221; Burlington’s virtuosity, 21; Cocchi, 142; Hollis, 156, 174, 182, 264n116; Huntingdon, 134, 136–7, 140, 142, 252n39; Rockingham, 64–7, 75, 90, 106; Richmond, 106–7 Virtus, Pitt depicted as, 185 Visconti, Giovanni Battista, 73, 240n94, 240n98 Vitellius, bust of, 140, 253n46 Vitruvius, bust of, 42 Vitruvius Britannicus, 43, 102 Dell Vitto Pitagorico per uso della medicina, 42 Voltaire, 7, 134 Walpole, Horace, Ædes Walpolianæ, 34–5; Anecdotes of Painting, 94, 121; antique eagle and Richmond academy/gallery, 248n93; bust of Cromwell, 257n100; copy of Apollo Belvedere, 244n10; Donington Park, 154, 252n39, 256n85; Hagley Hall, 67; Hollis, 191, 192; Huntingdon, 134, 136, 153, 158n114; Mann, 67, 112–13, 153, 154, 231–2n94, 238n66; Richmond, 94, 112–13, 121, 153, 154, 249n121; Wentworth Castle, 88; Wentworth Woodhouse, 71, 79, 88–9; Wilton House, 18, 67, 88, 134 Walpole, Robert (elder), 5, 25, 29–42, 67, 100, 129, 132, 143, 150, 229n44, 234n19, 251n17; bust of, 34; collection, 4, 7, 29–35, 198; Freemasonry, 29, 228n30; Houghton Hall, 29–35; 9th Earl of Huntingdon, 128; medallion portrait, 30; Order of the Garter, 30; Pembroke, 34, 35, 40 Walpole, Robert (younger), medallion portrait, 30 Walton Bridge, 170–1, 172

War of the Austrian Succession, 4, 8, 58, 65, 90, 101, 104, 165, 183, 198, 251n14 Ward, John, 165, 166 Ware, Isaac, The Plans, Elevations and Sections, Chimney Pieces and Ceilings of Houghton at Norfolk, 34 Warner, Thomas, 109 Watson, Vice-Admiral Charles, monument to, 11, 207, 212, 212, 216 Watson-Wentworth, Charles. See Rockingham, 2nd Marquis of Watson-Wentworth, Thomas. See Rockingham, 1st Marquis of Webb, John, 18, 19 Weddell, William, 243n151; Barberini Venus, 71, 89, 175; Newby Hall, 71, 72–3, 89; Rockingham, 89 Wedgwood, Josiah, 175, 262n81 Wentworth, Thomas. See Strafford, 1st Earl of Wentworth, William. See Strafford, 2nd Earl of Wentworth Castle (Strafford Hall, Yorkshire), 57, 58–60, 59, 62, 88; façade of Wentworth Castle, 242n148 Wentworth Woodhouse (Yorkshire), 15, 54–6, 70, 71–2, 86–90, 127, 193; Arthur Young, 87–8, 90; Chinese House, 86; coal seams, 70; east front, 54–6, 56; as exemplum and politics, 75, 77, 81–2, 90, 154, 193, 221; Freemasonry, 58; grand stair, 69, 86; Great Hall, 3, 60–1, 61, 66, 68–9, 71, 86, 88; Hoober Stand, 57, 57–8, 88, 92; Horace Walpole, 88; Houghton Hall, 60; Keppel celebration, 92; Keppel’s column, 91, 91; mausoleum, 49–50, 50–1, 92; medal and cameo collection, 75, 221; museum, 72–3; paintings at, 75; pietra dura medal cabinets, 74, 75; Pillar’d Hall, 62, 64, 65, 69, 86, 217; Samson and the Philistines, 16, 62, 63, 65, 67, 86, 217; statues by Nollekens, 242m146; temples, 86; stable block, 78, 78, 86; Wentworth Castle, 57, 60, 88; west front, 54–5, 55; Whistle Jacket room, 79, 80, 80, 86 Wesley, John, 129, 143 West, Benjamin, Death of General Wolfe, 209, 214–15, 218 Westminster Abbey (London), 11, 207 Westminster Bridge (London), 170–1

Westminster Bridge under Repair, from the North, 170–1, 173 Westminster School (London), 129 Westmorland, John Fane, 7th Earl of, 36; bust of, 39 Whaley, Edward, On the Statue of the Laocoön, at the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole’s Seat, at Houghtom, in Norfolk, 32, 34 Wharton, Philip, 1st Duke of, 98, 244n18 Wharton, Thomas, 1st Marquis of, 98 Whiggery, 5–6, 12, 36, 38, 50–1, 52, 53, 57–8, 65, 75, 90, 92, 100, 123, 131, 132–3, 150, 154, 222, 232–3n5; Dodington, 43; exemplum, 25; Freemasonry, 12, 19, 132; George III out-Whigging a Whig, 77; Hollis, 150, 155– 65, 180–6, 191–2; 9th Earl of Huntingdon, 128; 10th Earl of Huntingdon, 5, 154, 219; 2nd Duke of Richmond, 100, 101; 3rd Duke of Richmond, 93, 98, 107, 221. See also Court Whigs; Pittites; Old Whigs; Rockingham Whigs Whig Opposition, 36, 38–41, 52, 67, 90, 128, 251n17 Whistlejacket, portrait, 78–81, 79, 86 Whitefield, George, 129 Whitehall and the Privy Garden from Richmond House, 103–4, 103 Wilkes, John, 122, 185, 187, 190; The History of England from the Revolution to the Accession of the Brunswick Line, 190; Hollis, 157, 158, 160, 185, 190, 191, 259n21; Keppel, 243n161; print of, 177 William III, King, bust of, 229–30n65; portraits, 75, 98 Wilson, Richard, 13; Hollis, 164, 166–7; A Landscape of the Grotto in the Villa Madama (for Hollis), 167, 169, 174; Lock, 116; 117; painting of Lake Ariccia, 162, 262n76; Thomas Hollis, 166, 166–7; A View of Lake Albano (for Hollis), 167, 169, 174 Wilton, Joseph, 16, 108, 109, 111, 118, 160; Brettingham, 111–12; business, 263n92; bust of Chesterfield, 114, 141, 147; bust of Cocchi, 114, 140, 140–1, 144, 147; bust of Cromwell, 148, 149, 150, 182, 257m97; bust of Dying Alexander, 70; bust of Hollis, 114, 176, 176–7, 179, 188, 219–20; bust of Huntingdon, 114,

index | 317

141, 144, 147, 255n67; busts of Pitt, 264n106; cast of Lock’s Discobolus, 117–18; casts for Kedleston Hall, 224n19; Cocchi, 246n54, 253n47; copy of Apollo Belvedere, 95, 96, 113, 125, 244n10, 247n76; copy of bust of Julius Caesar, 238n62; copy of Venus de’Medici, for Rockingham, 66, 236n37; expression, 114, 149; in Florence, 68, 109, 136; Florentine Accademia del Disegno, 109; Franco-Italian sketchbook, 109, 110, 246n51; George III, 122; George III’s state coach, 152, 152–3, 182; Hollis, 160, 164, 175, 182; Huntingdon, 136, 138, 152, 253n41, 253n42, 253n46, 253n47; Lock, 116, 117; Mann, 246n54; monument to Major-General James Wolfe, 11, 208, 209, 215–16, 218; monument to Rear-Admiral Charles Holmes, 212, 213; Richmond academy/gallery, 93, 109, 111–14, 118, 121, 122, 246–7n74; Rockingham, 62, 70–1, 239n77; Royal Academy, 109, 120, 122, 212; sculptor in ordinary to the king, 122; Society of Artists, 120, 122; Society of Arts, 119–20; statues for Gallery of Antiques, at Kew, 45–7, 46, 122; statues of Pitt, 187 Wilton House, 7, 18–21, 23, 25, 29, 203; Arundel collection, 18; bust of Pembroke, 18; 19; Double Cube Room, 18, 23, 25; Elizabethan Great Hall, 18; Etchings by Cary Creed with Accompanying Captions, of the Antique Marbles in the Collection of the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton House, 21, 34; Freemasonry, 20; Giustiniani collection, 18; Le Sueur’s copy of Borghese Galdiator, 34;

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Mazarin collection, 18; Palladian Bridge, 40; Philip, 4th Earl of Pembroke and his Family, 18; Stonehenge, 19; as “Villa Carviliana” Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, Gedanken über di Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, 10, 66, 89, 114–16, 201; Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, 201, 216; Monumenti antichi inediti, 83; and Laocöon, 114–16 Windsor Great Park, belvedere tower in, 234n20 Woburn Abbey (Bedfordshire), 92 Wolfe, Major-General James, 92; Death of Wolfe (Penny), 207, 215, 214–15, 218; Death of Wolfe (West), 207, 209, 214, 218; monument to, 11, 207, 208, 215–16; obelisk to, at Stowe, 11, 184, 207, 209, 211, 218 Wootton, John, 102, 106 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary, 235n27 Wren, Christopher, 103, 224n14; Freemasonry, 149 Wrestlers, 217; casts of, 95, 114, 138; copy of, 9 Wright, Sir James, 72 Wyatt, James, 126, 250n138 Young, Arthur, Six Months’ Tour through the North of England, and Wentworth Woodhouse, 87–8, 90; Wentworth Castle, 242n148, 242n150 Zoffany, Johann, Charles Townley and His Friends in the Townley Gallery, 202, 204, 218 Zurich, public library, 161