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Capability Brown's account with Drummonds Bank, 1753-1783
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
Extract
Apart from the records of individual clients, two main sources help us to understand Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s financial affairs: his account book in the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society in London, and his bank account with Drummonds in Charing Cross which stretches unbroken from 1753 (some four years after Brown left Stowe to start an independent career as a landscape designer) to his death in 1783. Thanks to the research of Miss Dorothy Stroud, the account book in the Lindley Library has long been familiar, but the material at Drummonds, now the Drummonds Branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland, deserves to be better known.
- Type
- Section 5: Contributions to Architectural Biography
- Information
- Architectural History , Volume 27: Design and Practice in British Architecture , 1984 , pp. 376 - 381
- Copyright
- Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1984
References
Notes
In preparing this contribution the author would like to express particular thanks to Dr Geoffrey Beard who first drew attention to the Preston double portrait; to Mr John Fleming whose book Robert Adam and his Circle in Edinburgh and Rome indicated the presence of the relevant correspondence in the Register House, Edinburgh; to Sir John Clerk of Penicuik and the Keeper of the Records of Scotland for permission to quote from that correspondence; to Mrjohn Kerslake for his personal advice and published researches on Burlington iconography which provided the essential starting point for this survey; to the Director of the National Portrait Gallery, the Trustees of the Chats worth Settlement, and the Director of the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, for their permission to reproduce Burlington portraits; and to the following colleagues who advised or secured information: Mr Michael Cross and Mr Stephen Sartin (Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston), Mr Peter Day (Chatsworth Collection), Mr Christopher Gatiss and colleagues of the Courtauld Institute Photographic Survey, Mr Richard Green (City of York Art Gallery), Mr Brian Henderson and colleagues of the Scottish Record Office, Professor Peter Murray, Professor and Mrs Alistair Rowan, Professor Alastair Smart, Professor Douglas Stewart and Mrs Margot Wittkower.
1 Stanhope, Philip Earl of Chesterfield, Letters to his Son, ed. Strachey, C. (1924), 1, 381 (17 October 1749).Google Scholar
2 Kerslake, J. Early Georgian Portraits in the National Portrait Gallery (1977), 1, 28.Google Scholar
3 Loc. cit., pi. 90; MS Catalogue of Paintings in the Chatsworth Collection (1933), p. 20; Catalogue Supplement 1974 City ofYork Art Gallery (1975), p. 33.
4 Kerslake, op. cit., p. 29.
5 The Preston double portrait (P. 306), 38% X 46% in, was given to the Harris Museum and Art Gallery by W. W. Galloway in 1928, with earlier provenance unknown. In fact, it may never have been in Burlington’s own collection since the Aikman letter of 2 November 1723 quoted below (see n. 8) seems to imply that the work was commissioned by another person.
6 Fleming, J. Robert Adam and his Circle in Edinburgh and Rome (1962), pp. 25-26, 327-28.Google Scholar
7 Scottish Record Office, Clerk of Penicuik Papers, GD 18/4588. For clarity the author has modernized Aikman’s spelling (except for ‘Burlingtoun’) and completed words abbreviated.
8 Loe. cit., GD 18/4589.
9 Fleming, op. cit., p. 26.
10 Clerk of Penicuik Papers, GD 18/4614.
11 Kerslake op. cit., p. 30, pi. 91.
12 Ibid., p. 29, pi. 87.
13 Walpole Society, xxii (1933-34), Vertue m, p. 96.
14 1739: ‘Mr. Vanlo having drawn a family piece in large of Ld. Burlington his Lady and two daughters — thisnobleLordissettingataTable — leaning on it a port-Crayon in his hand some draughts papers. books lying
by them — the Lady is Setting, richly dressed in brocades Flowerd silk a pallet of Oil Colours in her left hand she is giving it to a Blackmore behind her as if she had done with it. the eldest daughter stands behind with a book in her hand shut, the youngest daughter has a musick book which she opens on Her mothers lap. thus they are all disposd in the Virtuosi way — the whole picture is well drawn the faces like — the attitudes gracefull and natural, the Colouring strong & a free pencil — this master peice will remain as a Testimony here of his skill and knowledge in Art.
I think amiconi had something in composition more degagée — and lightsome, but not so strong in the likeness. ’ Van Loo’s group portrait was removed from Chatsworth to Lismore by the 6th Duke of Devonshire in 1850; M. Girouard, ‘Lismore, County Waterford’, Country Life, 6 August 1964, p. 340.
15 MS Catalogue of Paintings in the Chatsworth Collection. Another Knapton portrait of Burlington is recorded as having been in the same collection but remains untraced. To complete the current list of established or ascribed portraits, apart from a signed and dated work by Vanderbank of 1721 in the Avery Library, Columbia University, said to represent Burlington, two others of the Earl can be seen at Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk, seat of his brother-in- law, Sir Henry Arundell Bedingfeld. One of these is attributed to Michael Dahl (Kerslake, op. cit., p. 30).
16 ‘A Mylord Conte di Burlington, il Palladio e iljones de’ nostri tempi’, inscribed by Maffei on the flyleaf of Alessandro Pompei’s Li Cinque Ordini dell’Architettura Civile di Michel Sanmicheli (Verona, 1735), now in the library at Chatsworth.