THOMAS ANSON’S LIBRARY AND ART COLLECTION
The library at Shugborough is not a pretentious status symbol but a cosy gentleman’s study. Thomas Anson’s home was, at least after the 1748 rebuilding, a modest villa, a place for repose and serious contemplation. It contained the fruits of the classical and ancient world -
“Not metaphysic dream, or sceptic doubt,
Or fierce polemic wrangle; but the songs
Of ancient Greece, that universal strain
That earth & Heaven applauded, & the Gods
With rapture stoop’d to hear….” (5)
Thomas’s collection of books and art treasures was offered up for sale almost in its entirety in 1842 to pay for the disastrous gambling debts of Thomas, 2nd Viscount Anson (1795-1854). A few important pieces were saved, but most was lost.
The 1842 sale catalogue shows the content of Thomas’s library and is a guide to his interests though it is easy to forget that he must have had other treasures and other books at 15 St James Square.
There were many editions of Greek and Latin literature, including Aldine editions of Greek literature from published in Venice in the early 16th century, and, not surprisingly, books of architecture and art, including a complete set of Piranesi. He owned a 1713 edition of Newton’s “Principia” and, more esoterically, Newton’s “Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms amended” of 1727.
There was an intriguing group of first editions, in French, of works by Jean Jacques Rousseau, including the novels “Emile” (1762), two editions of “La Nouvelle Heloise” (1761), “A Discourse on Inequality” (1755), letters (1769) and “Remarks on his writings”, 1767.
Rousseau was a powerful influence on radical thinkers in England and the presence of his works in Thomas Anson’s library is an indication that Thomas, by then in his late sixties, was forward looking and even revolutionary in his thought. In “A Discourse on Inequality” Rousseau argued that man “is born free but everywhere is in chains”, and that society corrupts the essential goodness of humanity.
The world of Shugborough, as described in the 1767 poem (see SHEPHERDS, SHEPHERDESSES AND THE GOLDEN AGE) seems to be a world inspired by, or very close to, Rousseau. The Greek ideals of harmony and beauty match Rousseau’s “back to nature” feelings and simplicity. The park was apparently open to passing shepherds and shepherdesses, and it was a place where wild animals are safe from shooting and hunting. As with other grand projects in country houses a large part of the object was to create employment.
Though Thomas was buying property in the village of Shugborough the paintings by Dall suggest the village buildings were integrated into the landscape and local peasants were free to come and go. The villagers were only finally moved out in the developments at the end of the century when Shugborough became barer the “model farm” dominated..
The 1767 ends in a romantic and picturesque mood.
“Along the sunny ridge that overhangs
Eastward thy fair demesnes, & wide commands….
Westward, with near approach, & bolder swell,
The wavy hills rise mountainous, befringed
With gloomy groves of never-changing leaf,
Cedar, or pine, or fir: plantations vast,
And venerable! …
…Oft let me wander, when the morning ray
First gilds thy groves & streams, & glittering towers,
And meditate my uncouth DORIC lay…”
A carving of a mask of Pan on the sandstone caves on the Haywood Cliffs, now separated from the house by canal and railway, suggests that they were part of the original landscape, a Rousseau style hermit’s cave.
Rousseau may seem remote from Shugborough but there were surprising points of contact in the 1760s.
In the novel “Julie, of the New Heloise” (1761) Rousseau sends a principal character on the voyage round the world with Admiral Anson. Rousseau had been inspired by descriptions, in Admiral Anson's Voyage, of the unpopulated islands, Tinian and Juan Fernandez. In 'Julie' the hero , with Anson, visits the islandsa nd returns to find Julie has a made a wilderness garden.
'I was looking at the wildest, loneliest spot in the whole of nature, and I seemed to be the first mortal who had ever penetrated within this wilderness.'
In 1766 Rousseau came to England in temporary exile after the publication of his “Social Contract” had made him an outcast, assumed to be a dangerous revolutionary. He stayed at Wootton Hall, near Ellastone, Staffordshire, from March 22nd 1766 and spent his time walking to Dovedale , studying the wild plants, and writing his “Confessions”. Erasmus Darwin, an admirer, went out of his way to meet Rousseau “by accident” while walking. This was so contrived the philosopher was very annoyed. David Hume, who had invited him to England, persuaded George III to grant Rousseau a pension, but Rousseau became neurotically suspicious of Hume and returned to France in June 1767.
At Wootton Hall Rousseau’s closest friend was 22 year old Brooke Boothby who visited him again in later life and called him “a divine man”. Boothby had lived in Stafford in his school years and after 1772 was part of the Lichfield literary circle with Darwin and Anna Seward.
Rousseau was near enough to Shugborough for a day’s visit – as Wootton Hall is very near the Weaver Hills, where Thomas’s agent had gone to watch Bonnie Prince Charlie 20 years earlier.
The only book to be held back from the 1842 sale, perhaps as a single representative example of Thomas Anson’s collection, was a copy of the French Translation of J J Winckelmann’s “Letter about the Herculanean Discoveries”, of 1762. Winkelmann was the principle theorist of the Greek revival, though he never travelled to Greece himself. It was he who expressed the 18th century view of the purity of Greek art – of pure lines and white marble – which was not a true image of the art and architecture of the Greeks as it was at the time but an ideal. Later generations were shocked to discover Greek sculpture had been coloured.
Winkelmann’s attitude is likely to parallel Thomas Anson’s, the devotion to the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” of Greek Art. (Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, 1755). “The only way for us to become great…is the imitation of the Greeks”.
Winkelmann’s writing is contemporary with Stuart’s work in England. His “Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks” was translated into English in 1764 by Henry Fuseli.
In Winkelmann’s mind true beauty in art was masculine.
Thomas's agent John Dick, in Leghorn, wrote to Winckelman for advice on a statue of Venus that Thomas was buying.
HIS COLLECTION
The house and grounds were full of genuine classical sculpture and modern copies. It is hard to imagine, now the gardens are quite bare, the effect of the many marble statues, herms and altars scattered about.
Scheemakers was employed transporting, supplying and mending statuary. In 1767 he sent Anson a bill, in his mixture of Dutch and English, which includes:
for two heds maid in to busts on pedestals 12.12.0
for sending a statue in a cart to the wagon an opnen 0.9.0
for packin a figure of Flora 0.7.0
for two men packing op sonderi tings 0.7.0
for mending brutus and four locks of hair to Adonis 1.0.0
payd for 8 heds from Rome 3.8.0
The bill also includes a chimney piece made for the back parlour by John Flaxman the Elder, father of the neo-classical artist:
for a ciminy pies in the back parlor slab & corns 35.14.0 (1)
Scheemakers continued to work regularly with Stuart after this.
Between 1765 and 1771 Thomas Anson bought pictures from Italy through Sir John Dick, British Consul at Leghorn. and sculpture from Joseph Nollekens, who had been Scheemakers assistant, in Rome. The bill quoted above shows that Nollekens sent the works to Scheemakers, who then arranged their transport, by wagon, to Shugborough.
Nollekens wrote long detailed letters to Thomas, and competed for the purchase of all kinds of classical sculptures with cardinals and the Pope. He carved a statue of Castor and Pollux in the classical style, which, though modern, reached the highest price of any sculptures in the Shugborough sale and is now in the Victorian and Albert Museum.
Other statues included Flora and Adonis in the Green House, centaurs which were originally in the Tower of the Winds, a Thalia, muse of comedy, which Thomas Pennant thought particularly fine, Roman sarcophagi (very likely bearing the “D M” inscription) and many other ancient and modern works.
A large quantity was bought from a bankrupt merchant in Leghorn, in 1766,including many medals, which were a particular interest of Anson’s.
The paintings included landscapes by Claude and Gaspard Poussin (Nicholas’s stepson), and a few striking religious paintings, including Susanna and The Elders, copied from Guido Reni.
THE TRENT AND MERSEY CANAL
Shugborough played a literally central role in the development of the canal network, which was a crucial par of the industrial revolution. Haywood Junction, just outside the Shugborough estate, is the junction of two major canals which received Acts of Parliament the same day, 14th May 1766, and would become the core of the network..
Lord Anson, Earl Gower and Thomas Broade had commissioned a survey of a canal from Stoke-on-Trent to Wilden Ferry, on the Trent, from James Brindley in 1758. As Lord Anson had no particular interest in the area by that time it was very likely Thomas who was the real supporter, and he continued to be a supporter of the Trent and Mersey canal in the 1760s.
Josiah Wedgwood was the inspiration for the canal project in its final form, with Thomas Bentley, his partner, and Erasmus Darwin, the extraordinary philosopher and poet from Lichfield. Wedgwood saw the canal as the answer to the transport of fragile pottery.
A meeting was held on 30th December 1765 at Wolseley Bridge, just south of Shugborough, to launch the plan. It was essential that Anson would support it as the canal had to pass through Shugborough alongside the Trent. Thomas Anson was one of the “Company of Proprietors of the Navigation from the Trent to the Mersey.” (4)
The first sod was dug by Josiah Wedgwood at Brownhills near Tunstall on July 26th 1766. The next year Wedgwood began work on his new factory in at Etruria, alongside the canal, which was opened on 13th June 1769. It was in the last years of the 1760s that Wedgwood developed his “black basaltes” stoneware and began his range of neo-classical vases.
The Canal opened as far as Shugborough, from the south, on 24th June 1770, and reached Stoke on Trent in 1772.
The canal project demonstrates that Wedgwood and Darwin knew Anson from at least 1765. Darwin, who had a fertile mind, inventing steam cars and revolutionary theories of evolution long before his grandson, became a close associate of Wedgwood.
FINAL DAYS
The last work on the monuments in Thomas Anson’s lifetime was the completion of the Lanthorn of Demosthenes, originally planned in 1764.
The original monument had been capped by a tripod, and Stuart had drawn his reconstruction of what this might have looked like.
By December 1770 Josiah Wedgwood had become a close friend of James “Athenian” Stuart, carrying on the inspiration of Greek design from him into his own work... Wedgwood was discussing with Stuart the adaptation, or new building, of premises in the Adelphi on the south side of the Strand for a new showroom. Wedgwood wrote to his partner Bentley about this and about a visit to Matthew Boulton’s Soho Works in Birmingham where they discussed whether it was a good thing or not for Wedgwood to have a showroom for his ware next to Boulton & Fothergill’s showroom.
“We agreed that those customers who were more fond of show & glitter than fine forms & the appearance of antiquity, wo’d buy Soho vases, and that all who could feel the effects of a fine outline & had any veneration for antiquity wo’d be with us.”
He continues:
“I forgot to tell you that Mr Boulton was making an immense large Tripod for Mr Anson to finish the top of Demosthenes Lanthorn, building there from Mr Stewart’s design. The Legs were cast & weighed about 5 cwt, but the workmen staggered at the bowl & did not know which way to set about it; a Council of the workmen was call’d & every method of performing this wonderfull work canvassed over. They concluded by shaking their heads & ended where they begun. I then could hold no longer, but told them very gravely they were all wrong, they had totally mistaken their Talents and their metals; such great works should not be attempted in Copper or in Brass. They must call in some able Potter to their assistance and the work might be completed. Would you thin kit? They took me at my word & and I have got a fine job upon my hands in consequence of a little harmless boasting. Mr Stewart said he knew Mr Anson wo’d glory in having the Arts of Soho and Etruria united in his Tripod, &that it wo’d be a feather in our Caps which that good gentleman would delight in taking every opportunity to shew for our advantage. So this matter stands at present but Mr Boulton, Dr Darwin and I are to dine with Mr Anson on New-Year’s Day & shall talk the matter over again.” (6)
The New Year’s meeting did not take place, but Dr Darwin was invited to Shugborough with “Wedgwood, Boulton, Keir and Bentley, if he is the country” in January 1771. Wedgwood was not able to attend this time due to trouble with his artificial leg.
The completion of the Lanthorn brings together Anson and Stuart with Wedgwood, who would take the Greek Revival inspiration into its next phase, Darwin, the revolutionary philosopher, and Boulton, the key figure in Industrial Revolution Birmingham. It’s interesting to note that even Stuart still sees the promotional value of pleasing Thomas Anson, even at the age of 75.
“Keir” is James Keir (1735 – 1820), born in Edinburgh, but attracted the Midlands by the fame of Erasmus Darwin and the “Lunar Society.” He contributed improvements to Darwin’s poem “The Botanic Garden” in 1787. In 1791 Keir proposed a toast at a Birmingham dinner on 14th July 1791 in favour of the French revolutionaries and the fall of the Bastille and precipitated the “Church and King” riots in which conservative workers were incensed by radical masters.
A final link the chain comes in a letter from Wedgwood to Boulton on 3rd December 1772.
'Mr Anson behaved with great politness to me & admired our things very much. He has given me leave to mold from any of his medals, or anything else he has. He ordered a pair of the best painted vases we have & I intend sending a pair of 93s we have here @ £10-10 unless you have any you think will do better. ....I left the patterns at Mr Ansons and was to have gone again after this week with a Moulder but I cannot go till after the 12th. At parting he very politely made me a present of a silver medal of the late Ld. Anson & said if he liv'd till summer he would come & spend a day with me at Etruria & his sisters will come with him, but his life is very precarious, I fear he will scarcely survive the winter.'
Sadly Thomas died in early 1773 and never made the journey - but it is a very tidy end to the story that Shugborough might have supplied designs for the next generation of Greek Revival art. (9)
Anson almost certainly brought Stuart and Scheemakers together and he may also be the catalyst that brought Stuart and Wedgwood, Darwin and Wedgwood, and even others of this circle together in creative partnerships. His central role in the Greek Revival and its revolutionary consequences becomes ever more clear.
Thomas Pennant, nephew of Thomas's friend Mytton, describes Thomas Anson’s death in his “Journey to Chester”:
“My much-respected friend the late Thomas Anson, Esquire, preferred the still paths of private life, and was the best qualified for its enjoyment of any man I ever knew; for with the most humane and the most sedate disposition, he possessed a mind most uncommonly cultivated. He was the example of true taste in this country; and at the time that he made his own place a paradise, made every neighbor partaker of its elegancies. He was happy in his life, and happy in his end. I saw him about thirty hours before his death, listening calmly to the melody of the harp, preparing for the momentary transit from an earthly concert to an union with the angelic harmonies.”
There is a list of bills to be paid at Anson's death in the Staffordshire Record Office which includes:
'For hire of harp £1 13s 6d'
Thomas died in London and was brought back to Colwich Church by a hearse with six horses. His funeral was simple. He was buried at St Michael’s Church, Colwich, in what Pennant calls “the burial place of the Ansons, made a l’antique, in form of a catacomb.” The coffin inscription was simply:
'Thomas Anson
died 30th march 1773'
There is a list in the Staffordshire Record Office which appears to be marked 'List of rings'. These would be mourning rings to mark Thomas's death. The list defines Thomas's particular friends and acquaintances in 1773.
The names include:
Philip , 2nd Earl of Hardwicke and Jemima, his wife, the Dean of Lincoln (James Yorke, younger brother of Lady Anson), Lord Harcourt (a founding member of the Dilettante Society and another patron, presumably at Thomas's encouragement, of Stuart), Mr Mytton (who must be John Mytton, a Dilettanti Society member since 1764 and now the head of the Mytton family - Thomas's old friend James Mytton, who died in 1764, was his uncle and, for a while, guardian.), Mr (Thomas) Pennant (John Mytton's cousin), Sir Piercy Brett, Admiral Keppell, Mr Adair (mentioned in letters from Anson's Italian agent John Dick), Mr Stuart, Mr Cambridge (very probably Richard Owen Cambridge, satirist and host of house parties in Twickenham, an old friend of Admiral Anson and a close friend of Thomas's musical friend James Harris), Sir Thomas Parker (another cousin and old friend of Lord Hardwicke) Lord and Lady Macclesfield, Mr Orme (The East India Company historian and friend of Stuart and Anson) and Mr Kammell.
Thomas's will left the estate to his sister (and his nephew, George Adams), allowing them to move any furniture they liked to Oakedge Hill, their house (with landscaping by William Emes) on the slopes of Cannock Chase) with annuities to his other surviving sisters. He also left money to a small but fascinating group of friends.
There were £100 (£10,000 today) annuities to James Athenian Stuart and Mr Stillingfleet, £50 (£5,000 today)annuities to Mr Kammell and to a Mr Kent and £500 (£50,000) to Mr Orme, in token of his long friendship. (Apart from staff the only other named beneficiary was Sir William Bagot who was left Thomas's medal colection, and then had a fairly acrimonious dispute with George Adams/Anson about whether this really meant all of them.)
Mr Stillingfleet is mentioned in many of Stuart's letters. He can only be Benjamin Stillingfleet, botanist and musician (he translated Tartini's textbook on harmony.) Stillingfleet was the original 'bluestocking' as he wore blue rather than black at formal gatherings. Thomas seems to have had an interest in botany. His very brief diary of his Egyptian voyage includes details of how to preserve seeds and bulbs on the voyage. Stillingfleet was also active in agricultural reform. There are are many references to him in Stuart's letters to Thomas.
Stillingfleet actually died before Thomas, in December 1771.
Mr Kammell is mentioned in one of the poems in honour of Thomas as a musician performing at Shugborough. Antonin Kammel, 1730-1784, was a Bohemian composer and violinist who lived in England most of his life.
On April 25th 1772 Sir William Bagot had written a poem looing forward to party at Shugborough:
'Bring Attic Stuart, Indian Orme,
Kammell unruffled by a storm
Shall tune his softest strain;
And my Louisa will rejoice
To notes like his to tune her voice
With health restored again.'
Kammel had been a student of philosophy in Prague, and then went to Padua to be a pupil of Tartini. He came to London in 1765 as violinst and as a timber merchant for Count Waldstein. He appeared as soloist in Bach and Abel's London concerts and many festivals. He wrote purely instrumental music in the early classical style, including several sets of string quartets (published c1770, 1774, 1775) when the form was just being developed by Haydn. (11) He knew and worked for Anson over several years. His 6 duets for two violins op. 5 (1768?) are dedicated to Thomas Anson Esq.
He had a very succesful career but had lost a fortune in unwise investments in 1772.
In June 1773 Kammell wrote to his Bohemian patron Count Waldstein:
'My dear good old friend Mr Anson, the brother of the Admiral who defeated so much the Spaniards, died two months ago. I do not like to lose good friends, his death contributed a lot towards my illness, in his testament he left me 50 gineas yearly for the time of mu life, my friend George Pitt, when he saw me so distressed after Anson's death, he also gave me by the law 50 gineas yearly, now I have 100 gineas yearly to spend as I wish..' (13)
Another patron of Kammell was James Harris (1709-1780), philosopher and musical patron, and close friend of Handel, who was, with Thomas and Sir Thomas Parker, a principal legatee in Lord Hardwicke's will in 1765. Harris's letters mention a whole series of concerts at 15 St James Square where 'the best hands in London' (including Kammell) could be found.(14) . Harris's daughter was said (in 1775) by her mother to be the only woman in London who played the harp - which may be another clue to a link between Harris and Anson.
Harris wrote, on 6th April 1773:
'Mr Anson's death is a loss to many, the poor he was charitable to to a degree, the artists of all sorts had his protection and partook of his generosity, and all his friends were sharers of his most elegant entertainments. His great fortune comes to Mr Adams his nephew. Both he and Mrs Adams are amiable people and deserve it'. (15)
See THE SHEPHERDS MONUMENT
None of this material about Thomas Anson's musical life was known before 2001.
Mr Kent must be Nathaniel Kent (1737-1810), agriculturalist. He was Thomas Anson's estate manager in Norfolk. The Ansons had bought property from the Coke family in 1750 - long before the family married into the family of Coke of Norfolk. Kent had been a diplomat, and studied farming in the Netherlands. Thomas encouarged him to become an agricultural adviser. According to the DNB he soon after this met Benjamin Stillingfleet and shared ideas of farming. Again the important link is likely to to be Thomas Anson. Kent published 'Hints for Gentlemen of Landed Property' in 1775 which inspired the modern farming methods of Coke of Norfolk, and Shugborough in 1805. Coke is credited with introducing modern crop rotation but it was Kent was introduced the idea into England. Later Kent managed the royal estates at Windsor and Richmond and he was awarded a goblet by Thomas Coke in 1808 for his services to agriculture. Thomas Anson, Viscount Anson, married Thomas Coke's daughter and built the model farm at Shugborough in 1805, but the marriage and the farm owe their origins to Thomas Anson's support of Nathaniel Kent.
Kent called Thomas Anson:
'the true friend of merit and the encourager of science wherever he found it'. (12)
Robert Orme (1728 -1801) is also mentioned several times in Stuart's letters. He had lived in India but returned to England in 1760. He became historian of the East India Company. He was also a close friend of Nollekens who sculpted abust of him, and also of Sir William Jones, son of mathematician William Jones, who was the leading authority on Indian culture and wrote fine translations of Indian literature.
These five legatees, and the names of those at Thomas's funeral, show who were his closest friends and acquaintances. It is revealing that none of the Lichfield intellectual circle are mentioned, nor the 'Lunar Society' industriliasts, like Wedgwood. Thomas's closest circle seems to be the London artistic and philosophical set. The most important of these in the Greek Revival were Stuart, Lord Lyttelton and James Harris, with Anson at the centre. Most of the circle linked through the Yorke family.
The documentary evidence which survives in Staffordshire is fragmentary and may not give a true impression of his life and activities. Many years of his life are a complete mystery and uch of what has been written before has been conjecture based on the few fragments of evidence. The work of Kerry Bristol on Anson and Stuart, the rediscovery of Anton Kammell by Freemanova and Mikanova, and the publication of the musical corresponence of James Harris by Rosemary Dunhill and Donald Burrows, all since 2000, has revealed Anson as an important patron and shone a clear light on the meaning of Shugborough.
The rediscovery of Ancient Greece inspired revolution and ideals of liberty. It may have been an Athens of the mind but that vision had begun, mysteriously, in the circle centring on Thomas Anson and Shugborough Hall. Thomas Taylor, in 1791, wrote against the black tide of commerce and materialism:
“Rise then, ye liberal few and vindicate the dignity of ancient wisdom. Bring truth from her silent and sacred concealments and vigorously repel the growing empire of barbaric taste.” (8)
This is as much a challenge now as it was in the 18th century.
(1) Ingrid Roscoe: James “Athenian” Stuart and the Scheemakers Family, APOLLO Vol. CXXVI September, pp178-184, 1999
(2) Kerry Bristol: The Society of Dilettanti, James “Athenian” Stuart and the Anson family, APOLLO vol. 152 9461) pp 46-54, 2000
(3) David Watkin: Athenian Stuart, George Allen & Unwin, 1982
(4) http://wedgwoodmuseum.org.uk/canal.htm
(5) 1767 anonymous poem in Staffordshire Records Office.
(6) John Martin Robinson: Shugborough, National Trust, 1989
(7) Eliza Meteyard: Life of Josiah Wedgwood, London, Hurst & Blackett, 1865
(7) http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=40557
(8) Thomas Taylor: The Hymns of Orpheus, 1792.
(9) Mss. letter in the Wedgwood Museum
(10) J Mordaunt Crook: The Greek Revival, John Murray, 1995
(11) Grove Dictionary of Music
(12)http://www.bahs.org.uk/30n1a1.pdf. An Eighteenth-Century Land Agent (British Agricultural History Society)
(13) Mikhaila Freemanova and Eva Mikanova: 'My honourable Lord and Fathe'..18th-century English musical life through Bohemian eyes, Early Music, May 2003
(14) Rosemary Dunhill and Donald Burrows: Music and Theatre in Handel's World: The papers of James Harris 1732-1780, OUP 2002
(15) Hampshire Record Office 9M73/G1260/11
