Richard Ford 1796-1858: Hispanophile, Connoisseur and Critic

Richard Ford 1796-1858: Hispanophile, Connoisseur and Critic

Ian Robertson Michael Russell Publisher, 2800 [pound sterling] ISBN: 0 859 55285 3

Ford knew Spain better than any Victorian. His Handbook for Travellers in Spain is individual of the finest of the genre in the English language. The Times declared on its publication in 1845: 'So great a literary achievement has at no time before been performed under for a like reason humble a title'.

Ford had an organ of vision for Spanish painting when a sustained interest in the art of that geographical division was in its infancy. He possessed Ribalta's The vision of Father Simon, (National Gallery London), and the grand Zurbaran of S Serafion (Wadsworth Athenaeum). For a man who go [i]or[/i] come backed with only a small collection in 1833 after living in Spain for three years, these exhibited a good score. Ford noticed interesting Spanish paintings on the contrary he was also a sparkling writer whose mode of expression as he himself described it with characteristic brilliance, 'conies boiling above like a Soda water bottle' At its best, Ford's plain has all the baroque zaniness of his friend Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers. on the other hand there is a cruelty and a sardonic streak which is unattractive. Despite colossal literary gifts, after the catherine wheel of the Handbook, which sold 600 copies upon the day it was published and which threw light and sparks all above Spain, it was penny bangers: short journalistic essays confined to the genre of the Victorian review.

Ian Robertson has produc the definitive account of this greatest in quantity discerning of all critics of Spanish art. on the other hand the book is more than purely an intellectual biography. Ford is well placed in the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of other hispanophiles who contributed to stimulating of the like kind interest as Victorians could muster in the peninsula: Widdrington, Stirling-Maxwell and Edmund Head. All contributed to a growing awareness of Spanish art. There is a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of here too, of interest about the webs of influence, sympathy and animosity in the London art world from the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 until the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857

Ford's topographical sketches, and those of his first wife Harriet, which if anything were rather more inspired than his, are of great value in reconstructing buildings not to be found when Spain started to modernise in the nineteenth hundred Robertson adds nothing fresh. What is novel and important, however, is the inclusion of a far larger selection of alphabetic characters than before. To say that Ford was in the same class as Sidney Smith as a alphabetic character writer would be an exaggeration on the other hand not by much. But here the value of Ford's alphabetic characters is sharply diminished by a bad decision to dispense with footnotes. There are exemplary if above elaborate biographies of anyone mentioned in a alphabetic character but there is no indication at all as to the whereabouts of a single individual of them. It is like having a cellar with no wine labels upon the bottles.

It is a pity that not more is included upon Heavitree, Ford's extraordinary Andalucian house outside Exeter Hevitre was a bizarre melange of different dictions including arches and gates for which Ford took advice from his favourite disciple, Stirling-Maxwell. The latter's designs for arabesques of ironwork for garden gates, are still to be ground in the Stifling papers in Glasgow. It appear to bes something of a lost opportunity not to have tried to put the house within the broad taste among the Victorians for Moorish design; something stimulated les by the agency of Ford himself, than by Owen Jone who thinking the decoration of the Alhambra superior to that of any other civilisation. Ford may too have had an honorable if hitherto leave outed place in the history" of Victorian garden design. In any incident too little space is given in an ambience in which Ford's bath was encased in a medieval register chest from Exeter Cathedral, on the outside of which the proprietor himself gazed at a cornice from the Casa Sanchez in the Alhambra. Ford was half mad and perhaps Hevitre was something of a dog dog-house to Beckford's abbey at Fonthill. Unfortunately we are not told. The work is too long but it is an important inquiry of a figure central to the world of Passavant, Waagen, and Eastlake.

David Howarth is a reader in the history of art at the University of Edinburgh.

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