Horace Walpole William Thomas Beckford E Popular Books
Horace Walpole William Thomas Beckford E Biography & Facts
William Thomas Beckford (29 September 1760 – 2 May 1844) was an English novelist, art critic, planter and politician. He was reputed at one stage to be England's richest commoner. The son of William Beckford and Maria Hamilton, daughter of the Hon. George Hamilton, he served as a Member of Parliament for Wells in 1784–1790 and Hindon in 1790–1795 and 1806–1820. Beckford is best known for writing the 1786 Gothic novel Vathek, for building the Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire and Beckford's Tower in Bath, and for his extensive art collection. Biography Beckford was born in the family's London home at 22 Soho Square on 29 September 1760. At the age of ten, he inherited a fortune from his father William Beckford, who had been twice a Lord Mayor of London. It consisted of £1 million in cash, an estate at Fonthill in Wiltshire (including the Palladian mansion Fonthill Splendens), several sugar plantations in Jamaica, and about 3,000 black enslaved people. This fortune allowed him to indulge his interest in art and architecture, as well as writing. He was briefly trained in music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but his drawing master, Alexander Cozens, was a greater influence, and Beckford continued to correspond with him for some years until they fell out. On 5 May 1783 Beckford married Lady Margaret Gordon, a daughter of the fourth Earl of Aboyne. However, he was bisexual and after 1784 chose self-exile from British society when his letters to William Courtenay, later 9th Earl of Devon, were intercepted by the boy's uncle, who advertised the affair in the newspapers. Courtenay was just ten years old on first meeting Beckford, who was eight years older. About six years later, Beckford was discovered (according to a house guest at the time) to be "whipping Courtenay in some posture or another" after finding a letter penned by Courtenay to another lover. Although Beckford was never charged with child molestation, fornication or attempted buggery, he subsequently chose to exile himself on the continent with his long-suffering wife, who died in childbirth aged 24. For many years Beckford was believed to have conducted a simultaneous affair with his cousin Peter's wife Louisa Pitt (c. 1755–1791). Having studied under Sir William Chambers and Cozens, Beckford journeyed in Italy in 1782 and wrote a book about his travels: Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents (1783). Soon came his best-known work, the Gothic novel Vathek (1786), written originally in French; he boasted that it took a single sitting of three days and two nights, though there is reason to believe that this was a flight of imagination. His other main writings were Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780), a satirical work, and Letters from Italy with Sketches of Spain and Portugal (1834), with brilliant descriptions of scenes and manners. In 1793 he visited Portugal, where he settled for a while, and conducted an affair with a young male musician called Gregorio Franchi. Following an appeal in 1817 by legal philosopher Jeremy Bentham that Beckford colloborate with him in advocating for the abolition of the death penalty for sodomy, Beckford may also have been the author, or one of the authors, of Don Leon, a poetic tract of homosexual advocacy. Beckford's fame, however, rests as much on his eccentricities as a builder and collector as on his literary efforts. In undertaking his buildings he managed to dissipate his fortune, which was estimated by his contemporaries to give him an income of £100,000 a year. The loss of one of his Jamaican sugar plantations to James Beckford Wildman was particularly costly. Only £80,000 of his capital remained at his death. Art collection Beckford was a compulsive and restless collector, who also frequently sold works, sometimes later repurchasing them. His collection was notable for its many Italian Quattrocento paintings, then little collected and relatively inexpensive. Despite his interest in Romantic medievalism, he owned few medieval works, though many from the Renaissance. He was also interested in showy Asian objects such as Mughal hardstone carvings. Although he avoided the classical marbles typically sought by well-educated English collectors, much of his collection was of 18th-century French furniture and decorative arts, then priced enormously high compared with paintings, by modern standards. He bought a single Turner in 1800, when the artist was only 25 (The Fifth Plague of Egypt, £157.10s), in 1828 William Blake's drawings for Gray's Elegy, and several works by Richard Parkes Bonington, but in general he preferred older works. By 1822 Beckford was short of funds and in debt. He put Fonthill Abbey up for sale, for which 72,000 copies of Christie's illustrated catalogue were sold at a guinea apiece; the pre-sale view filled every farmhouse in the neighbourhood with visitors from London. Fonthill, with part of his collection, was sold before the sale for £330,000 to John Farquhar, who had made a fortune selling gunpowder in India. Farquhar at once auctioned the art and furnishings in the "Fonthill sale" of 1823, at which Beckford and his son-in-law, the Duke of Hamilton, bought much, often more cheaply than the first price Beckford had paid, as the market was somewhat depressed. What remained of the collection, as maintained and added to at Lansdown Tower, amounting virtually to a second collection, was inherited by the Dukes of Hamilton. Much of that was dispersed in the "Hamilton Palace sale" of 1882, one of the major sales of the century. The Fonthill sale precipitated William Hazlitt's scathing review of Beckford's taste for "idle rarities and curiosities or mechanical skill," fine bindings, bijouterie and highly finished paintings, "the quintessence and rectified spirit of still-life", republished in Hazlitt's Sketches of the Picture Galleries of England (1824), and richly demonstrating his own prejudices. Beckford pieces are now in museums all over the world. Hazlitt was unaware that the sale had been salted with lots inserted by Phillips the auctioneer that had never passed Beckford's muster: "I would not disgrace my house by Chinese furniture," he remarked later in life. "Horace Walpole would not have suffered it in his toyshop at Strawberry Hill". Works owned by Beckford Now in the National Gallery, London: Saint Catherine of Alexandria; the National Gallery paid c £6,000 in 1839, as part of a bulk purchase from Beckford. Agony in the Garden, bought at the Joshua Reynolds sale in 1795 for £5, sold with Fonthill and repurchased by Beckford at the Fonthill Sale (as a Mantegna) for £52.10s. Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan, Giovanni Bellini, bought 1807, 13 guineas, sold to NG in 1844 for £630. Exhumation of Saint Hubert, Rogier van der Weyden and workshop, bought by Beckford in 1802 for £96.12s, by NG in 1868 for £1,500. Philip IV in Brown and Silver by Diego Velázquez, bought by NG for £6,300 at the 1882 Hamilton Palace Sale, a very high price for a Spanish pa.... Discover the Horace Walpole William Thomas Beckford E popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Horace Walpole William Thomas Beckford E books.
Best Seller Horace Walpole William Thomas Beckford E Books of 2024
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Law of Attraction
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The Icing on the Cake
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A Bookshop to Die For
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Peace on Earth
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The Target
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The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
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The Holy Bible - King James Version
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Silenced Girls
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Once Upon A One-Night Stand
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You Are Kind
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The Three Little Pigs
Mark LeskyClassic fairy tales, legends and folk stories in short version without violence retold with lovely illustrations in simple language. Perfect for reading aloud to small chi...
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How to Choose a Guy in 10 Days
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Never Enough
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The Four Loves
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The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre DumasAn Apple Books Classic edition. Alexandre Dumas’ classic paints a portrait of Edmond Dantès, a dark and calculating man who is willing to wait years to exact his perfect plan for r...
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Whiskey Girl
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Noxious
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My Paper Heart
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Alpha
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A Green Kind of Witch
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Caught Up with the Captain
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His Own Heaven
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Teach Me
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The Great Gatsby
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Think and Grow Rich
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Enemies With Benefits
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Little Women
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Dracula
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The Cupcake Cottage
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Get Lucky
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Salvation
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Finding Cinderella
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Masters of Restraint
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Rogue Alpha
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Just Me
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His Girl Next Door
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A Christmas Carol
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Saltwater Cove
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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
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Christmas in Sweetbriar Cove
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The Honeymoon Homicide
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Eternal
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Death at Hazel House
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Holy Bible
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Pride and Prejudice
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Silver Santa
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The Scarlet Letter
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Inception of Gold
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Coffee Girl
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Awaken Me
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