William Thomas Beckford (29 September 1760 – 2 May 1844) was a British writer and politician. He was reputed at one stage to be England's richest commoner. Beckford was the son of William Beckford and Maria Hamilton, the daughter of George Hamilton. He served as a Member of Parliament for Wells in 1784–1790 and Hindon in 1790–1795 and 1806–1820. Beckford is best known for writing the 1786 Gothic novel Vathek, for building Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire and Beckford's Tower in Bath, and for his extensive art collection.
Beckford was born in the family's London home at 22 Soho Square on 29 September 1760. At the age of ten, he inherited a fortune on the death of his father William Beckford, who had been twice a Lord Mayor of London. It consisted of £1 million in cash, an estate at Fonthill in Wiltshire (including the Palladian mansion Fonthill Splendens), several sugar plantations in Jamaica, and about 3,000 slaves.
This fortune allowed him to indulge his interest in art and architecture, as well as writing. He may have studied music with Dr James Nares (1715-1783), organist of the Chapel Royal. At the age of five he had three lessons with the eight year old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose significance he afterwards exaggerated, even claiming to a credulous biographer to have given Mozart the melody of Non più andrai. His drawing master, Alexander Cozens, was a greater influence, and Beckford continued to correspond with him for some years until they fell out.
On 5 May 1783 Beckford married Lady Margaret Gordon, a daughter of the fourth Earl of Aboyne. However, he was bisexual and after 1784 chose self-exile from British society when his letters to William Courtenay, later 9th Earl of Devon, were intercepted by the boy's uncle, who advertised the affair in the newspapers. Courtenay was just ten years old on first meeting Beckford, who was eight years older. About six years later, Beckford was discovered (according to a house guest at the time) to be "whipping Courtenay in some posture or another" after finding a letter penned by Courtenay to another lover. Although Beckford was never charged with child molestation, fornication or attempted buggery, social and family pressure obliged him to retire to the continent with his long-suffering wife, who died in childbirth aged 24.
For many years Beckford was believed to have conducted a simultaneous affair with his cousin Peter's wife Louisa Pitt (c. 1755–1791).
Having studied under Sir William Chambers and Cozens, Beckford journeyed in Italy in 1782 (the Grand Tour) and wrote a book about his travels: Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents (1783). Soon came his best-known work, the Gothic novel Vathek (1786), written originally in French; he boasted that it took a single sitting of three days and two nights, though there is reason to believe that this was a flight of imagination.
His other main writings were Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780), a satirical work, and Letters from Italy with Sketches of Spain and Portugal (1834), with brilliant descriptions of scenes and manners. In 1793 he visited Portugal, where he settled for a while, and conducted an affair with a young male musician called Gregorio Franchi.
Following an appeal in 1817 by legal philosopher Jeremy Bentham that Beckford collaborate with him in advocating for the abolition of the death penalty for sodomy, Beckford may also have been the author, or one of the authors, of Don Leon, a poetic tract of homosexual advocacy.
Beckford's fame, however, rests as much on his eccentricities as a builder and collector as on his literary efforts. In undertaking his buildings he managed to dissipate his fortune, which was estimated by his contemporaries to give him an income of £100,000 a year. The loss of one of his Jamaican sugar plantations to James Beckford Wildman was particularly costly. Only £80,000 of his capital remained at his death.
Beckford was a compulsive and restless collector, who also frequently sold works, sometimes later repurchasing them. His collection was notable for its many Italian Quattrocento paintings, then little collected and relatively inexpensive. Despite his interest in Romantic medievalism, he owned few medieval works, though many from the Renaissance. He was also interested in showy Asian objects such as Mughal hardstone carvings. Although he avoided the classical marbles typically sought by well-educated English collectors, much of his collection was of 18th-century French furniture and decorative arts, then priced enormously high compared with paintings, by modern standards. He bought a single Turner in 1800, when the artist was only 25 (The Fifth Plague of Egypt, £157.10s), in 1828 William Blake's drawings for Thomas Gray's Elegy, and several works by Richard Parkes Bonington, but in general he preferred older works.
By 1822 Beckford was short of funds and in debt. He put Fonthill Abbey up for sale, for which 72,000 copies of Christie's illustrated catalogue were sold at a guinea apiece; the pre-sale view filled every farmhouse in the neighbourhood with visitors from London. Fonthill, with part of his collection, was sold before the sale for £330,000 to John Farquhar, who had made a fortune selling gunpowder in India.
Farquhar at once auctioned the art and furnishings in the "Fonthill sale" of 1823, at which Beckford and his son-in-law, the Duke of Hamilton, bought much, often more cheaply than the first price Beckford had paid, as the market was somewhat depressed. What remained of the collection, as maintained and added to at Lansdown Tower, amounting virtually to a second collection, was inherited by the Dukes of Hamilton. Much of that was dispersed in the "Hamilton Palace sale" of 1882, one of the major sales of the century.
The Fonthill sale precipitated William Hazlitt's scathing review of Beckford's taste for "idle rarities and curiosities or mechanical skill," fine bindings, bijouterie and highly finished paintings, "the quintessence and rectified spirit of still-life", republished in Hazlitt's Sketches of the Picture Galleries of England (1824), and richly demonstrating his own prejudices. Beckford pieces are now in museums all over the world. Hazlitt was unaware that the sale had been salted with lots inserted by Phillips the auctioneer that had never passed Beckford's muster: "I would not disgrace my house by Chinese furniture," he remarked later in life. "Horace Walpole would not have suffered it in his toyshop at Strawberry Hill".
Now in the National Gallery, London:
Saint Catherine of Alexandria; the National Gallery paid c £6,000 in 1839, as part of a bulk purchase from Beckford.
Agony in the Garden, bought at the Joshua Reynolds sale in 1795 for £5, sold with Fonthill and repurchased by Beckford at the Fonthill Sale (as a Mantegna) for £52.10s.
Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan, Giovanni Bellini, bought 1807, 13 guineas, sold to NG in 1844 for £630.
Exhumation of Saint Hubert, Rogier van der Weyden and workshop, bought by Beckford in 1802 for £96.12s, by NG in 1868 for £1,500.