Seven engraved portraits of Captain Francis Grose, from various sources, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century.
I collected these years ago for a biography I hoped to write about Grose, which never came to fruition.
A little foxing. These would probably display nicely in a single frame.
'Francis Grose (1731-1791) was an English antiquary, draughtsman, and lexicographer. He produced A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) and A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions (1787).
A little marginal foxing on a couple of plates. Very good antiquarian condition.
'His parents were Swiss immigrant and jeweller Francis Jacob Grose (d. 1769), and his wife, Anne (d. 1773), daughter of Thomas Bennett of Greenford in Middlesex.
'Posted to Kent on excise duties in 1750, he met and married Catherine Jordan of Canterbury. They were eventually to have ten children, six of whom survived to adulthood. Their eldest son, also called Francis Grose, was the Lieutenant Governor of New South Wales, Australia from 1792 to 1794.
'Grose had early on shown a keen interest in drawing, having attempted sketches of medieval buildings as far back as 1749, and having taken formal instruction at a drawing school in the mid-1750s. He was not a particularly gifted draughtsman but he mixed in the London artistic milieu and began to exhibit, first at the Society of Artists in 17678 and then at the Royal Academy. His interest was in the field of medieval remains, which were beginning to exercise an increasing grip on the public imagination. In 1772, he published the first part of The Antiquities of England and Wales, a work which he unashamedly aimed at the popular market.
'From 1772 onwards, he also toured the country to visit and draw sites for inclusion in The Antiquities. The fourth and last volume came out in June 1776, and Grose almost immediately began work on a supplement.
'The Supplement to The Antiquities was resumed in 1783, this time with a higher proportion of the illustrations being done by other artists. Drawing on his own fieldwork, Grose also branched out into producing dictionaries, including the famous A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) and A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions (1787).
'He produced books on military antiquities and armour, as well as satirical essays, and in 1788 began the first of several tours of Scotland in order to produce The Antiquities of Scotland. It was on the second of these tours, in summer 1789, that he met and immediately formed a friendship with the poet Robert Burns. Burns met him while he was staying with Robert Riddell at the Friar's Carse, collecting material for his Scottish work. Burns suggested to him that he should include Alloway Kirk in his Scottish Antiquities, and Grose agreed on condition that Burns provided a witch tale to go with his drawing. In June 1790, Burns sent Grose a prose tale with a variant in a letter to Grose, following it up with a rhymed version, "Tam o' Shanter".
'Grose was the first art critic to affirm, in his "Rules for drawing caricaturas: with an essay on comic painting" (1788), that aesthetic emotions emerge from a specific "cultural" environment, and that aesthetics are neither innate nor universal, but formed by their cultural context.
'While on an expedition to Ireland to collect antiquarian material, Grose died in Dublin at the house of Horace Hone, of an apoplectic stroke. (Wikipedia)
