Caption

Inscribed on the plinth of the vase: R.C.HOARE Bart. / AETAT XXXVII / H.R. HOARE / AETAT XI, this painting is a full-length double portrait of Richard Colt Hoare, aged 37 and his son, aged 11, standing in an Italian landscape, where the former had been four years before. Colt Hoare holds a partly-rolled print of a classical landscape in one hand and a large portfolio, of probably his own sketches, partially resting on the ground, in the other. He was an amateur artist, archaeologist, historian and topographer of Wales and Wiltshire.

Summary

Oil painting on canvas, Sir Richard Colt Hoare, Bt (1759 - 1835) with his Son Henry (1784 - 1836) by Samuel Woodforde, RA (Ansford 1763 - Ferrara 1817), inscribed on the plinth of the vase: R.C.HOARE Bart. / AETAT XXXVII / H.R. HOARE / AETAT XI, 1795/96. Colt Hoare stands full-length, on the left looking to the right, in an Italianate landscape, wearing a black suit with a white waistcoat. His right arm rests on a pedestal with a vase on top of it and he holds a print, partly rolled, in his right hand, also of a classical landscape, and a large portfolio of probably his own sketches, partly resting on the ground, in his left. His son, who stands at his left, looking up at him, takes him by the arm and points to the right at the landscape beyond. He wears a brown coat with a red waistcoat and white frilled shirt and buff breeches.

Full description

There could have been no more appropriate way of depicting Colt Hoare, as he is familiarly known, than as he is shown here: in an Italian landscape, which he is only fortified to contemplate, by holding a print of the classicising model to which he would like it to conform in one hand, and a portfolio of the sketches with which he will capture it, and has captured others like it, in the other. The son who attempts to distract him from his inner reverie upon it, almost seems to be an intrusion upon the scene - and indeed (since he was not actually present in Italy) must be understood as urging him in spirit, not in person, to return home. The earlier part of this interpretation is, no doubt, somewhat unfair, yet the portrayal must be very much as it was willed by the sitter. For Samuel Woodforde was virtually a Hoare house artist. As Farington was told by him in 1807: "when between 16 & 17 years old .... the late Mr. [Henry II] Hoare of Stourhead .... immediately offered him encouragement; allowed him to draw from pictures at Stourhead & then sent him to study at the Royal Academy. Mr. Hoare died in a few years, but the Father of the present Sir Richard Hoare .... the first Baronet of that name .... offered to send Woodforde to Italy and to allow him £100 a year for 3 years .... He went to Italy, and in 2 years His Patron died; but his son, the present Sir Richard Hoare, coming to Rome abt. that period, promised to continue the allowance so long as He, Sir Richard, should remain in Italy, which he did till Woodforde had been absent from England abt. 6 years. He then returned with Sir Richard through Germany to England, and for sometime after the allowance was continued to Him .... until he told Sir Richard that he found himself getting some money ...." The picture is mentioned in an uncertainly dated letter of Colt Hoare's to the Earl of Ailesbury , and in Woodforde's notebook (private collection, England), as having been painted in 1795, four years after the sitter's return from Italy, to which he had gone partly to distract himself after the death of his wife and the boy's mother, Hester Lyttelton, in 1785. Whilst abroad, chiefly in Italy and Sicily, he had taken an artist, Carlo Labruzzi (Rome c. 1765-Perugia 1818) with him, but he had himself sketched and drawn prodigiously, having taken lessons from John 'Warwick' Smith before he left. J.B. Nichols's Catalogue of the Hoare Library at Stourhead (1840) records some 900 drawings made on the Continent, with another 200 by Labruzzi, and 21 worked up from Hoare's by Francis Nicholson, bound in twenty volumes. Sadly these were all sold in the Heirlooms Library Sale of 30 July-8 August 1883, and only seven of them were bought back, so as to be once again in the Library that Colt Hoare had himself added to Stourhead in 1794-1804. They make, however, a fascinating collection, since they range from free sketches, generally in black chalk, made on the spot; through ink drawings, often superimposed on these, evidently worked up from them the same evening; to full wash or watercolour drawings, only made back in England, prior to these finished drawings all being bound in sequence, in topographically divided volumes, each supplied with a neatly written introduction, and a commentary on the individual plates. The dry, impersonal nature of the texts suggests that these volumes were intended as preparations for publication, but, in the event, though he published his (unillustrated) two volumes of Recollections abroad: during the year 1790. Sicily and Malta (1817), and: during the year 1790, 1791 [Italy, the Tyrol, &c.] (1818), it was only the chance of Napoleon's confinement on Elba in 1814 suddenly arousing interest in that remote island that prompted Colt Hoare to rush out his own account of the place of twenty-five years before, with engravings by John Smith after his drawings, to capitalise upon the thirst for information about it. In some ways, indeed, this picture marks the ending of a chapter in Colt Hoare's life, and the beginning of his real career, as artist, archaeologist, historian and topographer, of Wales and Wiltshire. For, two years before it was painted, he made the first of his meticulously prepared and recorded itineraries through Wales, which he was to make almost every year thereafter (with a tour of Northern England in 1800 and another of Ireland - the only one to be published by himself - in 1806), up until 1810 . This first tour was primarily and conventionally picturesque in its objects, but, as he extended and deepened his knowledge of Wales in successive tours, his interest became increasingly archaeological, and then turned to his native Wiltshire. This was in part due to his friendship with three people whose interests lay in the same direction: the lawyer and historical topographer Richard Fenton (1746-1821), whom he first met in 1793 and subsequently called 'Counsellor Fenton', but did not travel with until 1804; the experienced traveller and writer, William Coxe (1747-1828), whom he first met and travelled with in 1798, collaborating on Coxe's Historical Tour of Monmouthshire that appeared in 1800, and to whom he gave the living of Stourton about the same time; and the Heytesbury tradesman and pioneering archaeologist, William Cunnington (1754-1810), whom he first encountered in 1801. It was under the influence of these three that Colt Hoare published, first his annotated edition and then his translation of Giraldus Cambrensis's Itinerary of Archbishop Baldwin through Wales in 1188, in 1804 and 1806 respectively; and then his greatest monuments, The Ancient history of Wiltshire (1812-21), and The History of Modern Wiltshire (1822-44) . Nowhere in all this is there any indication of Colt Hoare the collector and connoisseur. Yet his travel diaries show him keenly interested in the character and quality of his fellow-landowners' collections, and he himself added a number of distinguished pictures to the collection formed at Stourhead by his maternal grandfather, Henry II Hoare 'the Magnificent' (1705-85) - most notably Cigoli's great altarpiece of The Adoration of the Magi - which he was careful to distinguish from his grandfather's acquisitions, in the unprecedently systematic arrangement and account of the collection at Stourhead that he gives in the first volume of Modern Wiltshire. At the same time he was an earnest encourager of contemporary artists, from Turner, who painted a set of eight watercolours of Salisbury Cathedral for him (as well as a number of topographical watercolours, that were not framed and hung), to Woodforde himself, and Henry Thomson, from whom he obtained a series of 'fancy' pictures. In the same spirit, he played an active part at the British Institution, and wrote an introduction to William Carey's catalogue of the collection of his friend and fellow-patron, Sir John Leicester (1810). His commissions to and purchases from artists were considerably influenced by (and in the case of Northcote's The Dumb Alphabet, actually taken over from) the latter. But his taste was never adventurous, and after a sneering attack on his "patronage" in The Annals of the Fine Arts in 1817 he desisted altogether . (adapted from author's version/pre-publication, Alastair Laing, In Trust for the Nation, exh. cat., 1995)