Paintings for Beckford's Sanctuary: four lunettes commissioned by William Beckford at the end of his life for the Sanctuary in Lansdown Tower in Bath recently came to light in a Shropshire parish church. Nicholas Carter and Kathryn Turpin explain the significance of the paintings, which have been purchased by the Beckford Tower Trust for display at Lansdown Tower

In 1822, after the sale of Fonthill Abbey, William Beckford (1760-1844) moved to Bath, where he acquired 20 Lansdown Crescent. He also purchased land behind the house from which he was able to create a mile-long ride to the summit of Lansdown Hill, where in 1826 he began Lansdown Tower as a place of retreat. Described by Henry Venn Lansdown in a letter to his daughter Charlotte of 1838 as 'a succession of lovely scenes ... on our walk to the tower ... each totally distinct from the others ... yet united by some harmonious link', (1) Beckford's Ride culminated at the one hundred and fifty-four foot high austere neo-classical Tower, surmounted by a lantern derived from the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates and the Tower of the Winds. Here Beckford housed part of his eclectic and splendid collection, amassed during decades of renowned connoisseurship.

The Tower represents a continuation of Beckford's lifelong passion for architecture and collecting which had reached its zenith in the creation and furnishing of Fonthill Abbey. Today it is the only one of his architectural achievements to survive virtually intact. (Since 1993 the Tower has been owned by the Bath Preservation Trust and is administered as a museum by the Beckford Tower Trust.) The realisation of Beckford's scheme was carried out by the Bath architect Henry Edmund Goodridge (1797-1864). It may be regarded as an attempt to recreate in the contrasting environs of Bath the seclusion and privacy Beckford had enjoyed at Fonthill Abbey with its eight-mile perimeter wall. The Tower is a fitting conclusion to the series of magical and sumptuous rooms Beckford created during his lifetime, in which he manipulated space, light and colour to great effect.

Throughout his career as patron and connoisseur, Beckford developed and refined this concept of architectural space. His interiors were designed to display his collections, and were in turn enhanced by the items within them. This led to many commissions for specific spaces. One of these interiors can now be better understood as a result of the rediscovery of four lunettes commissioned for the Sanctuary at Lansdown Tower (Figs. 3-6). Arguably the Tower's most important interior, the Sanctuary was a small chamber only 16 feet 6 inches by 6 feet 6 inches, at the end of a corridor, and lit by skylights of coloured glass (Fig. 1). It was dominated by a statue of Beckford's adopted patron saint, St Anthony of Padua, carved by J.C. Rossi, standing on a plinth of Siena marble bearing the inscription 'DOMINUS ILLUMINATO MIO'. The statue was illuminated from above by a small circle of intense light, while the bookcases and cabinets which flanked the corridor, and contained many of Beckford's most prized possessions, remained dimly lit beneath the barrel-vaulted ceiling.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The atmosphere of the Sanctuary may have been reminiscent of the planned Revelation Chamber at Fonthill, designed by Benjamin West PRA. Indeed, the first pictures intended for the Sanctuary were of four apocalyptic subjects commissioned from Francis Danby (1793-1861), whose work Beckford admired, and whose An attempt to open the sixth seal he had purchased in 1828. The pictures were begun in 1829, and two of them, of angels, were exhibited at the Royal Academy that year, though all four were by then complete. Danby sent them to the Academy only at the last moment, and obviously entertained doubts about the project as a whole, writing 'I do not like the task, in fact there are not many paintable subjects in them [the bible's apocalyptic books] ... they are not understandable in writing, much less painting'. (2) There was a disagreement between artist and patron and the pictures were neither delivered nor paid for, being eventually auctioned off the following year for the benefit of Danby's London landladies after he had fled abroad. Only one of these paintings is known today, a scene from Revelation, x. v ('and the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven') entitled A Mighty Angel standeth upon the Land and upon the Sea, a rectangular picture measuring 53 x 78 cm (private collection).

Following this, the commission passed to Willes Maddox (1813-53), whom Beckford had met in Bath. Described by Cyrus Redding as a rising artist of the time, (3) he was an accomplished artist who had accompanied Edward Lear on a continental tour, and was subsequently to travel to the East to paint: he died in Pera on 26 June 1853 whilst working on a commission for the Sultan. For the lunettes underneath the two domes in the Sanctuary at Lansdown Tower he produced four semi-circular paintings on panel of New Testament subjects which were suggested to him by Beckford. Handwritten annotations in a copy of the catalogue of the 1845 Lansdown Tower sale (Bath Reference Library), in which three of the pictures were lots 334-336, record that the auctioneer reported that the paintings were 'the very last things that Mr Beckford ordered and saw them on his deathbed'. (4) Further notes in the catalogue comment that 'there is truly considerable merit in these works but the impression is German'. (5)

The pictures are certainly somewhat Nazarene in their style. Maddox employed a strong palette to interpret the subjects--The Temptation in the Wilderness (Fig. 3), Christ's Agony in the Garden (Figs. 2 and 4), The Annunciation (Fig. 5), and St Mary and St Anne (Fig. 6). Of Christ's Agony in the Garden, notes in the sale catalogue observe, 'he gives a divinity to the figures'. (6) The animated and vivid narrative of New Testament stories is in a marked contrast to the apocalyptic scenes originally intended. Compared to the work commissioned from Danby, these more straightforward commissions may perhaps be interpreted as a reflection of Beckford's move away from the extravagant and decadent hedonism of his earlier years towards a certain respectability in the latter part of his life.

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Still in their original oak frames, the importance of these lunettes lies not only in their intrinsic appeal, but also in their importance to a major interior in Beckford's last architectural project. Although the intended appearance of the Sanctuary is known from a chromolithographic illustration after Willes Maddox in Edmund English's Views of Lansdown Tower (1844) (Fig. 1), and from design drawings by Goodrich (Bath Reference Library), these lunettes are the only measure of scale available for the proposed full restoration of the Sanctuary, since they are shown, in their frames, in Goodrich's drawings.

In addition to the lunettes, Willes Maddox also painted a series of oil paintings of Beckford's 'Objects of Virtue', watercolours of the interior of the Tower, and, in 1852, portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Hamilton, the Duchess being Beckford's daughter Susan. In 1844 Maddox painted his most notable patron on his deathbed.

Three of the four lunettes, The Temptation in the Wilderness, Christ's Agony in the Garden and The Annunciation, were sold in the Lansdown Tower sale of 1845. The fourth, St Anne and St Mary, was not mentioned in the sale catalogue. Nothing is known about the subsequent whereabouts of all the pictures until 1933, when they were bequeathed to Bitterley church in Shropshire by Colonel Price Wood of Henley Hall. They remained unidentified until a routine valuation in 2003 by Nicholas Carter, who recognised the work of Willes Maddox, and knowing of his connection with William Beckford, easily uncovered the provenance of the lunettes from Beckford's last sanctuary. They were offered for sale by Hy. Duke's of Dorchester in March 2004 and were purchased for 716,000 [pounds sterling] by the Beckford Tower Trust. After cleaning they will, in due course, he returned to their original positions in the Sanctuary as part of the continuing long-term restoration of the Tower.

Beckford's Tower, Lansdown Road, Bath, is open 10.30am-5.00pm at weekends and on Bank Holiday Mondays until the end of October. For more information, telephone 01225 422212.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the help of Amy Frost of the Beckford Tower Trust

(1) Letter from H.V. Lansdown to C. Lansdown, Bath, 21 August 1838, in Henry Venn Lansdown, Recollections of the late William Beckford, Bath, 1893, p. 25

(2) Francis Greenacre, Francis Danby 179,3 1861, London, 1988, p. 105, with reference to Gibbons Papers, F. Danby to J. Gibbons, 17 January 1829. The correspondence between Danby and his patron John Gibbons was made available privately to Francis Greenacre by Mrs Edward Gibbons.

(3) Cyrus Reddiing, Memoirs of William Beckford of Fonthill, London, 1859, p, 276.

(4) English and Son, Lansdown Tower Sale Catalogue Bath, 1845. Bath Central Library

(5) Ibid.

(6) Ibid.

Nicholas Carter is a fine art valuer and has particular interest in nineteenth-century painting. He has held senior positions in a West End gallery, and in both London and provincial salerooms.

Kathryn Turpin read History of Art at Cambridge before studying singing at the Royal College of Music. She made her Royal Opera debut as Lady de Hautdesert in Sir Harrison Birtwistle's Gawain in 2000. Since the birth of her daughter Aurora she has undertaken research into William Beckford and John Downman.

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