Читать книгу The Fatal Cup: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations - John Price Williams - Страница 48

in the Print Room of the British Museum.3 The Dictionary of National Biography refers to it sniffily as “coarse and indelicate, but by no means lacking in technical skill”.

It probably formed part of a portfolio he had of such drawings, done for the benefit of his friends. Lamb’s biographer Talfourd reported that these sketches “trembled on the borders of indelicate”. Carew Hazlitt called them exquisite delineations of the female form, which, regarded from an unprofessional point of view, might have been characterised as decidedly erotic and reminded him of the “famous leg-comparing episode” in the memoirs of the Duc de Grammont.4

Wainewright was a passionate collector of rare books, prints and objets d’art, which he itemised at length in one of his essays as “Janus’s Jumble”. “My tables groan with the weight of volumes of Raffaëlle, Michel Angelo, Rubens, Poussin, Parmegiano, Giulio &c. &c. and the massive portfolio cases open wide their doors, disclosing yet fresh treasures within”. The binding of one of the books alone cost him 12 guineas (nearly £1.500). There was a small Book of Hours, a Christian devotional book said to have belonged to Anne Boleyn, studded with brilliants

3. Period VI, vol 79

4. The French King Charles II and his court, having little else to do, were discussing the short and thick legs of Lady Chesterfield, when the King persuaded a Miss Stuart to raise her skirt above the knee for comparison purposes, “which she did with the greatest imaginable ease “. Most were ready to prostrate themselves to adore their beauty, Grammont reported. Hamilton, A. Memoirs of the Court of Charles the Second. Bohn, London, 1846.

THE FATAL CUP

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