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.

    86/464 (page 46)
    J794 Eighteenth Century Bolshevism April 14.—Probably the cause of West giving up the competitor- ship for the design of the commemoration medal was being told by Bourgeois that Northcote said He ought not to grasp at or expect every honor, that the Academy had clothed him with a robe of velvet, but that He should not struggle for every stripe of ermine. The settling the invitation list [to R.A. annual dinner] last night at the Council, went off very smoothly, without the trouble of a balot. Seward had been invited at the instance of West & Sir Wm. Chambers. Smirke pointed out to Bartolozzi that Mr. Smith, Mr. Pitts private secre¬ tary, did not come within the view of the Academy. He was not in¬ vited. [That it was at times difficult to obtain the coveted invitation is further shown in Farington’s record on April 23, “ Boswell had applied in vain for a ticket [for the Academy dinner] for his Brother, as had Mr. Malone for his Brother Lord Sunderlin.”] Lawrence told me on Monday last, that Dr. Moore [father of General Sir John Moore, of Corunna fame, traveller and author of “Zeluco,” a novel of life and manners with a fascinating hero] who is much con¬ nected with Lord Lauderdale,* was in the house at the third reading of the Bill for encouraging volunteer corps. Dr. Moore said the speech of Pitt portrait and hers (both were by Gainsborough) when they were hanging near together at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885. Margaret Burr’s Annuity But the Bedford theory is presumably upset by the documents discovered by Mr. Sydney E. Harrison. In this collection are receipts actually signed by Gainsborough for the payment of his wife’s annuity. The charge, however, was on the Duke of Beaufort’s estate, not the Duke of Bedford’s—the names might easily have been confounded long ago in tea-table gossip. Dates given show that it was in all likelihood the fourth Duke who was implicated. Mr. Harrison’s discovery does not, of course, with certainty solve the secret of Mrs. Gainsborough’s birth. But colour is given to conjecture by her claim that she had royal blood in her veins. The Beauforts were directly descended from Edward III. The interesting documents in the Connoisseur did not, as suggested, wholly solve the mystery of Mrs. Gainsborough’s birth, but on Feby. 5, 1799, Margaret, her elder daughter, removed all possible doubt. On that day Farington called on her at 63, Sloane-street, and she said that her father “ married at the age of nineteen years, that her mother was a natural daughtr. of Henry, Duke of Beaufort, who settled £200 a year upon Her which was paid till the last half year which remains unsettled as she died on the 17th of December last [1798] and it was not due till the 25th.”—Ed.] * Lauderdale (eighth Earl) went with Dr. John Moore to France in 1792, and while there they met the Revolutionary Brissot and saw the attack on the Tuileries. On his return in 1793 he protested against the war with France. In 1821 he obtained the Order of the Thistle and became a Tory. He died in 1837, aged eighty. Eleanor, Lauderdale’s third daughter, was Mr. A. J. Balfour’s grandmother.