Volume 1

The Farington diary / edited by James Greig.

  • Joseph Farington
Date:
[1922?-1928]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Farington diary / edited by James Greig. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tect who, along with his brothers, built the Adelphi, and introduced new ideas into building and decoration.] October 29.—Gainsborough Dupont called. . . . He told me his uncle, Gainsborough, had completed his sixty-first year when he died. The tumour in his neck which proved cancerous and caused his death, he had been conscious of five or six years, but when he occasionally mentioned it he was led by others to believe it only a swelled kernel. A cold he caught at Hastings trial caused it to inflame. He applied to Dr. Heberden [Gainsborough’s next door neighbour] who treated it lightly and said it would pass away with the cold. He applied to John Hunter, who advised salt water poultices, which greatly increased the inflamation and a suppuration followed. There seems to have been a strange mistake or neglect both in Heberden and Hunter—Gains¬ borough was ill for six months. A fortnight before his death he desired to see Sir Joshua Reynolds, who visited him. He regretted leaving the world at a time when he thought he had discovered something new in the arts. A little jealousy of each other seemed to exist in the minds of Sir Joshua and Gainsborough. The latter thought himself slighted by the former on some occasional advances which he had made towards him. Gainsborough proposed two or three years before his death that they should paint each others pictures. Sir Joshua sat once to Gains¬ borough but did not seem ready to make a second appointment. In the later part of his life he painted chiefly by candlelight which became his inclination.* November 14.—Holcroft [author of “ The Road to Ruin ”], who is indicted for High Treason [He was discharged on December 1st] was a chorus singer some years ago. In that capacity Wm Dance, the musician, saw him in the country, and at the time Miss Harrop (now Mrs Bates) was of the party. Holcroft had a son who He is said to have treated with great severity. The lad ran away & went on board a ship, & being traced by his father who went to the ship, blew his brains out on his father approaching him. Holcroft is avowedly a man of the most loose principles with regard to religion. [Another account states that his son William, a lad of sixteen, com¬ mitted suicide while trying to escape to the West Indies after robbing his father of £40.] November 15.—As instance of the profligate charges made by the persons employed by the Prince of Wales, He [Frazer, of the Board of Agriculture] said the Farriers Bill for one year was £1800 though the Prince has reduced his Stud to a very small number. Dr -, the * Gainsborough Dupont’s statement in the main corroborates the story of his Uncle’s last illness. John Hunter’s treatment of his patient and the charge of neglect or error on the part of the eminent doctors who attended him, are new, so, too, is the declaration that Gainsborough had been aware of the tumour in his neck for five or six years. Gainsborough became so alarmed at his illness that he made his will, and signed it on May 5th, 1788 ; he died on August 2nd of that year. As Farington shows in his Diary, painting by candlelight was a fairly common practice in the latter half of the Eighteenth Century. Gainsborough, how¬ ever, may have been its initiator. [See later entries about Gainsborough.]