Grand old man of taste
Isabel Carlisle talks to Sir Brinsley Ford, the doyen of Grand Tour studies
To say that Sir Brinsley Ford is a relic of the Grand Tour could be construed as impertinent. Relics are not fashionable in this age of progress, although tourism cer- tainly is. But those friends of his who shield Sir Brinsley from the publicity that he hates, and who are plied by him with potent glasses of montilla on an evening visit to his London home, agree that he is a survivor of a vanished age.
Born in 1908 he is now getting on for 90. His six-foot-three frame which once tow- ered over gatherings of the London art world embodies virtues that have now become extremely rare. He is erudite but self-deprecating, he has great charm and infectious enthusiasms for people and things. He also possesses that knowledge and delight in the arts, and the elusive thing called 'taste', which were so eagerly sought by young aristocrats and gentlemen on the Grand Tour through France to Italy and back in the 18th century.
How appropriate then that Sir Brinsley, a scholar of independent means, should have fallen into this field of study in the 1950s. In writing an article for the Walpole Soci- ety on the obscure mid-18th-century English watercolourist Jonathan Skelton, and trying to identify the people mentioned in his letters from Rome, Sir Brinsley was drawn into the then little-explored world of the Grand Tour. In 1962 he undertook to write a book on English artists in Rome in the mid-18th century for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
Sir Brinsley's growing expertise and archive made him the foremost expert on the Grand Tour but, after writing 280,000 words and filling 94 notebooks, he decided in 1972 to turn them, and all his research papers, over to the Mellon Centre on con- dition that they publish them. Next spring Yale University Press is bringing out the result as A Dictionary of British and Irish Visitors to Italy 1701-1800, edited by John Ingamells, the former director of the Wal- lace Collection.
If an exhibition can have an eminence grim, the Tate's Grand Tour exhibition (see page 58) has Sir Brinsley invisible but omnipresent. His archive has supported much of the scholarship behind the show and the catalogue has been dedicated to him as the doyen of Grand Tour studies. Loans from his own collection include Thomas Patch's 'Gathering of Dilettanti around the Medici Venus in an Imaginary Setting': caricatures of Grand Tourists among Roman sculptures from the Tribuna in the Uffizi Gallery. For Sir Brinsley this painting (which he bought as a screen joined in three pieces in 1961 and had reassembled), 'represents the spirit of the Grand Tour. I have only been able to iden- tify a few figures including Patch himself who is standing on a ladder measuring the proportions of the Medici Venus, an odd occupation for a well-known homosexual.'
Sir Brinsley, an admirer of Batoni who painted more than 200 Englishmen on the Grand Tour Cone man complained of the smell of the dogs while being painted'), is a supporter of the dying art of portraiture. In the hall of Sir Brinsley's London home are portraits of himself and his wife, drawn by Augustus John. 'I was also drawn by Epstein, who made me look like a peppery Anglo-Indian colonel, which I certainly didn't at twenty-five, though I suppose I may now have lived long enough to resem- ble the drawing,' he muses.
Upstairs hangs Sir Brinsley's own collec- tion, ranging from Old Masters to contem- porary art. It fills all the available wall space, and statuettes and small objects sit on tables or in cabinets. Sir Brinsley's great-grandfather was Richard Ford, who published the famous Handbook to Spain in 1845 and collected Spanish paintings and drawings as well as Italian bronzes and ter- racottas, many of which Sir Brinsley inher- ited.
It is through Richard Ford that Sir Brins- ley has a small Giambologna terracotta relief of 'Venus standing on a Dolphin'. Sir Brinsley stuck a photo of this beauty up on the wall of his but while serving in a search- light and anti-aircraft unit during the Battle of Britain. When the Colonel ordered him to take it down because it was setting 'a bad example to the men', Sir Brinsley threatened to appeal to the Brigadier unless they could all keep their pin-ups, and Venus stayed on the but wall.
The collection of contemporary art is not grand in terms of cost, or fame or the size of the paintings. Much of it hangs floor to ceiling in Sir Brinsley's bedroom. Most of the artists are relatively unknown, many picked straight from art school exhibitions. It is guided by a personal taste and convic- tion that has been there since Sir Brinsley's student days. In 1930, while at Trinity Col- lege Oxford, he bought a carving by Eric Gill, a bronze torso by Gaudier-Brzeska and a bust of Lytton Strachey by Stephen Tomlin. The first was sold, the second he still has and the third he gave to the Tate Gallery two years after buying it.
Sir Brinsley served as a Trustee of the National Gallery and on the boards of the Byam Shaw School of Art and City and Guilds of London Art School. He is the oldest member of the National Art Collec- tions Fund; he joined when he was 19 and has been a member for 69 years. He has also progressed from being the Secretary to the 'Venerable Father' of the Society of Dilettanti, which must be one of the oldest and most arcane societies in the country. It was founded in 1732 by a group of young Grand Tourists. They met to dine and drink together and to talk about Italy and antiquities. Whatever else they got up to was, according to Sir Brinsley, restrained in comparison to the debauchery of the con- temporary Hellfire club.
From its collection of paintings that hangs in Brooks's club in St James's Street, London, the Society has lent to the current Tate exhibition Sir Joshua Reynolds's two group portraits completed in 1779. One shows Sir William Hamilton, British Envoy at Naples, being introduced as a new mem- ber of the Society in 1777. The other mem- bers are shown drinking his health. This would have been followed by the Society's five toasts of which Sir Brinsley favours two, 'Grecian Taste and Roman Spirit' and `Seria Ludo', which he translates as 'serious matters taken in a light-hearted vein'. It is clear, by now, that without a trace of incon, gruity, Sir Brinsley embodies them both.
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