William Beckford, Esq., one of the most remarkable men of modern times, was the son of the patriotic Alderman Beckford, who was Lord Mayor in the years 1762 and 1769, and whose noble and courageous remonstrance with George III. is engraved under the monument erected to his memory in Guildhall. Inheriting property amounting to £100,000 per annum, Mr. Beckford was enabled to indulge in the expensive amusement of building. Fonthill Abbey arose like a magic palace at his command, one tower alone employing 460 men, both by day and night, through an entire winter; the torches used by the nocturnal workmen being visible to the astonished traveller at miles distant. This celebrated mansion in a few years cost Mr. Beckford the sum of £273,000. Owing to the rapidity of the work the mortar had not time to consolidate, and a heavy gale of wind brought the great tower to the ground. Merely remarking that he should have been glad to witness the sublime fall of such a mass of materials, he gave orders for the erection of another tower, 276 feet in height; this also fell to the earth in the year 1825. Mr. Beckford was an excellent scholar, and possessed a fine taste in almost every branch of art. He collected, in the fantastic but costly Abbey, one of the finest and most extensive libraries in England; and his galleries of pictures and antiquities were almost unequalled. A Chancery suit,—that blessing to lawyers,—fattened upon his riches for some years, and it ended in the loss of a large West India property; this, added to his other expenses, rendered it necessary to sell the Abbey, with almost all its costly contents. In the year 1822, after Fonthill Abbey had been on view, and catalogues issued by Messrs. Christie and Manson, the day often fixed and as often postponed, it was at length announced as being sold by private contract to Mr. Farquhar, a gentleman who had amassed considerable property in India, for the sum of £340,000, Mr. Beckford only retaining his family pictures and a few books. After the sale, Mr. Beckford resided for some years in Portugal. Not merely a patron of art, he was also an author, and one singularly original in style. His wild and extraordinary tale, entitled “Vathek,” soon formed a portion of our classical literature. This extraordinary man died on the 25th of May, 1844, at the advanced age of 84. In the year 1823, we find the collection again in the market, its new proprietor considering the furniture, etc., wholly unsuited to so splendid a structure; the auctioneer on this occasion being Mr. Phillips, of New Bond Street, who apprised the distinguished company assembled on the first day, that the sale was one of the most important that had ever been offered to the British public. It occupied thirty-seven days, and the amount realized was rather over £80,000.
THE STRAWBERRY HILL COLLECTION.
Lord Orford, more familiarly known as Horace Walpole, the very finest gentleman of the last century, and the founder of the Strawberry Hill Collection, was the youngest son of the eminent minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and was born October 5th, 1717. After studying at Eton and Cambridge, he travelled; and it was while in Italy that he fostered the love of Art, and taste for elegant and antiquarian literature, which took such complete possession of him as to engross the principal part of his long life. Walpole has by some critics been designated an elegant trifler; yet if we consider that he was one of the first to turn public attention to a taste for the Arts, that he fostered the engravers in this country who became eminent in their branch of Art, that he brought from obscurity various historical memoirs of deep interest, we shall hesitate to consider him a trifler. Among English writers, Walpole is admitted to be one of the best models for lively epistolary correspondence. In a letter to Sir Horace Mann, he writes: “You know my passion for the writings of the younger Crébillon; you shall hear how I have been mortified by the discovery of the greatest meanness in him; and you will judge how one must be humbled to have one’s favourite author convicted of mere mortal mercenariness! I have desired Lady Mary to lay out thirty guineas for me with Liotard, and wished if I could to have the portraits of Crébillon and Marivaux for my cabinet. Mr. Churchill wrote me word that Liotard’s price was sixteen guineas; that Marivaux was intimate with him and would certainly sit, and that he believed he could get Crébillon to sit too. The latter, who is retired into the provinces with an English wife, was just then at Paris for a month; Mr. Churchill went to him, and told him that a gentleman in England who was making a collection of portraits of famous people, would be happy to have his, etc. Crébillon was humble, ‘unworthy,’ obliged, and sat. The picture was just finished, when, behold! he sent Mr. Churchill word that he expected to have a copy of the picture given him,—neither more nor less than asking sixteen guineas for sitting! Mr. Churchill answered that he could not tell what he should do, were it his own case; but that it was a limited commission, and he could not possibly lay out double; and was now so near his return that he could not have time to write to England and have an answer. Crébillon said, then he would keep the picture himself—it was excessively like. I am still sentimental enough to flatter myself, that a man who could beg sixteen guineas, will not give them, and so I may still have the picture.”
Walpole died on the 2nd of March, 1797. By command of the Earl of Waldegrave, the contents of Strawberry Hill were sold by auction on the 25th of April, 1842, and the proceeds of the sale, which lasted twenty-four days, amounted to £33,450 11s. 9d.
Mr. Tiffin, in his interesting little book, “Gossip about Portraits,” writes mournfully of the dispersion of this recherché collection: “What a melancholy time to the amateur was that at Strawberry Hill, in 1842, when these treasures were dispersed. In recalling that time when I wandered through these rooms looking listlessly at many objects that to the connoisseur (not only of art but of history) ‘spoke volumes.’ I began faintly to understand the worth of such collections.”
THE SALTMARSHE COLLECTION.
On the 4th, 5th, and 6th of June, 1847, was sold by auction, by Messrs. Christie and Manson, the collection of pictures, the property of Mr. Higginson, of Saltmarshe, Herefordshire. The total amount realized by the three days’ sale, reached the enormous sum of £46,695 3s. At the close of the sale it was remarked that the proceeds of the last day, £35,789 9s. was the greatest sum realized in one day on record. Though the collection was, on the whole, more remarkable for numbers than quality, it contained some good and important works. Mr. Higginson was a gentleman possessed of considerable wealth, and was in his day a rapacious accumulator of pictures. Five of them alone brought upwards of £10,000. On the first day’s sale, a fine example of Constable’s fetched 360 guineas; a Nasmyth, 44 guineas; and “A Country Ale-house,” the old hackneyed subject of George Morland, 95 guineas. On the second day, a sum of 405 guineas was obtained for a Gerhard Dow. On the third, and most important day of the sale, the late Marquis of Hertford gave the grand sum of 1000 guineas for a small female head by Greuze, one of the most distinguished artists of the modern French school. A truly important work of Claude’s fell to the same nobleman for 1400 guineas. A landscape, the joint production of P. De Koning and Lingelbach, was purchased by the late Sir Robert Peel, and we believe has just been sold to the Government by his son, the present Sir Robert. “The Holy Family, with Elizabeth and Saint John,” by Peter Paul Rubens, which was formerly in the Imperial Gallery of Vienna, and afterwards in the possession of M. Delahante, who gave 3000 guineas for it, upwards of thirty years previous to the sale, was knocked down by the auctioneer to the late Marquis of Hertford for the reduced sum of 2360 guineas.