When James Grimston, 2nd Viscount Grimston (1711–1773) visited West Wycombe on 9 August 1769, he was clearly baffled by the names of several artists represented in the collection of paintings. In his travel journal, he made a list of the pictures in the two principal rooms, thus becoming the earliest visitor whose impressions of Francis Dashwood’s collection have been preserved. Having traversed the safer ground of works given to familiar names such as Salvator Rosa, Correggio, Titian and Rubens, Grimston found himself on thin ice when shown – presumably by a member of the household staff, since he does not mention meeting Dashwood – a ‘Magdalen despising riches’ by ‘Farion’, ‘Faith and Charity’ by ‘Siena’ and ‘Noah’s first sacrifice’ by ‘Pastinelli’. All three were hanging in the Drawing Room (today’s Music Room).¹

The connecting thread from the Saint Mary Magdalene by the Florentine painter Francesco Furini (1603–1646),² to the pendants of the Allegory of Faith and Allegory of Charity (figs 1 and 2) by the Sienese artist Raffaello Vanni (1587–1673),³ to The Sacrifice of Noah (fig. 3) by the Florentine Giovanni Martinelli (1600–1659)⁴ – whom Grimston confused with the Bolognese Lorenzo Pasinelli – is that they are works by painters of the seventeenth-century Tuscan school.⁵ The visitor’s unfamiliarity with these artists’ names is therefore hardly surprising. Although Dashwood had made two Grand Tours in 1730–31 and 1739–40,⁶ his collection eschewed most of the canonical artists of the Roman and Bolognese schools and formed what appears to be an almost deliberate counterpoint to the typical Grand Tour collection.⁷ Dashwood’s post-mortem inventory, taken on 1 January 1782, lists the Furini in the First Hall (today’s Dining Room) and the Vanni pair as well as the Martinelli in the Portico Room, another name for the Drawing Room.⁸

In 1797 the topographer Thomas Langley (1769–1801) published the first comprehensive historical survey of West Wycombe. He catalogued the paintings in the Drawing Room, noting that some of them had recently been moved.⁹ The Furini had rejoined the Vanni pair and the Martinelli in this room. Langley recorded another important pair of Tuscan school paintings that had been either moved from another room or overlooked by Grimston: Saint Dorothy of Cappadocia and Saint Catherine of Alexandria (figs 4 and 5) by Cesare Dandini (1596–1657).¹⁰ These two octagonal canvases, also listed in the 1782 inventory,¹¹ are among the finest paintings acquired for West Wycombe, and their provenance points back to the origins of Dashwood’s preference for Tuscan over Bolognese and Roman seventeenth-century painting. During his second Grand Tour, he spent time in Florence and Siena in December 1739 and again in Florence in September–October 1740.¹² At the time, the pair of Dandinis hung in Palazzo del Chiaro in via de’ Ginori as part of one of the city’s most significant art collections, which Dashwood is likely to have visited.¹³ In 1741, the last surviving (and childless) member of the family, Pier Giovanni del Chiaro, donated the contents of the palazzo to a charitable confraternity, the Compagnia della Purificazione della Vergine e di San Zanobi, also known as the Compagnia di San Marco after the church to which it was attached.¹⁴ After his death, the confraternity decided to sell the entire collection at auction in 1743.¹⁵

The Dandinis and many of Dashwood’s other pictures were probably purchased through his agent in Leghorn, Anthony Lefroy (1703–1779). This Huguenot merchant was a significant collector in his own right, assembling an important numismatic collection of more than 6500 ancient coins. He was elected a member of the Accademia Etrusca in Cortona in 1753.¹⁶ Together with Dashwood’s London agents, the firm of Thomas Hyam and Son, Lefroy organised shipments ranging from paintings and sculpture to wine and fruit. The surviving correspondence and bills are fragmentary, covering only the years 1754–56.¹⁷ The two paintings that appear in these documents show that Dashwood’s unusual predilection for Tuscan artists did not exclude the acquisition of works by more famous names such as Rubens and Ribera, or at least attributed to them, as the agents cautiously wrote: ‘a picture of ye Holy Family we suppose of Rubbans’¹⁸ and ‘a picture bought at Florence repres.g Pythagoras of ye Spagnoletto’ (fig. 6).¹⁹

Lefroy was still in touch with Dashwood in 1763,²⁰ when financial difficulties forced the former to sell his collection in London.²¹ The Saint Mary Magdalene by Furini offered in the Lefroy sale is probably the same painting which Grimston recorded at West Wycombe six years later.²² Whether Dashwood had seen this canvas hanging in Lefroy’s house in Livorno during his Grand Tour cannot be determined with certainty but the taste of this sophisticated collector clearly left a strong impression on him.

Lefroy was also closely connected to the man who shaped Dashwood’s taste more than any other: when Lefroy’s daughter Phoebe married Count Carlo del Medico Staffetti in 1767, one of the witnesses was the Florentine nobleman Antonio Niccolini (1701–1769).²³ Niccolini was born in Florence in 1701 as the sixth son of the Marchese Filippo Niccolini and Lucrezia degli Albizzi (fig. 7). Educated by the Jesuits at the Collegio di San Giovannino, he took minor orders in order to be able to receive ecclesiastical benefices. After graduating from the University of Pisa with the dual degree in civil and canon law (in utroque iure) that was the customary preparation for a career in the church, he moved to Rome in 1723 to work as a canon lawyer. Niccolini quickly established himself not only in the legal profession but also as a theologian, philosopher and antiquary. As the last, he became an important behind-the-scenes contributor to the monumental Museum Florentinum (1731–66), Anton Francesco Gori’s catalogue of Florentine antiquities and paintings.²⁴

The collection of coins and medals in the Niccolini family palace on via de’ Servi comprised about four thousand objects, the most important of which were published by Antonio’s brother Giuseppe in 1728 in a book that refers to their father’s collection as the ‘museum of Filippo Niccolini’.²⁵ In October 1739, shortly before Dashwood’s arrival in Florence, Charles de Brosses visited Antonio to see the collection and characterised him as ‘an extraordinary man; I have yet to find someone on my travels who combines such a clarity of intellect with such grace, such a prodigious memory and ease of speaking, and such a wide-ranging knowledge on any topic one could imagine, from adjusting a female headdress to Newton’s calculus.’²⁶ The same month, Montesquieu sent Niccolini a letter recommending Dashwood to the Florentine polymath – or, as he put it, one man of letters to another.²⁷ The pair do not appear to have been in contact during Niccolini’s first stay in London in 1725, when he sat for a full-length portrait by Thomas Gibson.²⁸ They did meet during Dashwood’s first visit to Rome in 1731 and subsequently spent time together in Florence and Livorno in 1739–40, as Niccolini fondly recalled in a letter in 1763.²⁹

While living in England from October 1746 until June 1748, Niccolini befriended Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707–1751). His frequent visits to Cliveden led Horace Walpole to remark that ‘Niccolini sups continually with the Prince of Wales, and learns the constitution!’³⁰ At Cliveden he would also have encountered Dashwood, who had been introduced into the circle of the Prince of Wales by his close friend, George Bubb Dodington (1691–1762). After his return to Florence, Niccolini continued to correspond with Dashwood until at least 1763.

Two other paintings owned by Dashwood speak eloquently of the formative influence that the stay in Florence in 1739–40 had on his taste, and of his desire to commemorate the city at West Wycombe: a portrait of the Florentine composer and violinist Francesco Maria Veracini (1690–1768), painted by Franz Ferdinand Richter (1693–c.1743) in Florence in 1739 (fig. 8), and a considerably later view of the Piazza San Pier Maggiore in Florence by Vincenzo Torrigiani (1742–1770).³¹

Veracini was considered one of Europe’s best violinists and was also successful as a composer. Until 1738, he had been employed in London by the Opera of the Nobility, the company supported by the Prince of Wales and later by Charles Sackville, Earl of Middlesex (1711–1769), who had been on the Grand Tour with Dashwood in 1731 and was a fellow founder of the Society of Dilettanti.³² In 1739 Veracini was temporarily in Florence and it is likely that Dashwood, who must have known him in London, acquired the portrait by Richter at this time. Two years earlier, the German artist had portrayed the Earl of Middlesex in the dress of a Roman general, strongly reminiscent of operatic costume.³³

In the genre of landscape painting, Dashwood assembled a remarkably comprehensive group of works by Torrigiani, Jan Frans van Bloemen, Francesco Zuccarelli, Marco Ricci and Hendrik Frans van Lint. The subjects of most of these views are quintessential Grand Tour material: the Doge’s Palace and the Grand Canal in Venice, both somewhat implausibly attributed by Langley to Zuccarelli,³⁴ a classical landscape by van Bloemen (fig. 9),³⁵ a landscape with ruins given to Marco Ricci,³⁶ and a pair of Mediterranean harbour scenes by van Lint (fig. 10).³⁷ Two Roman views by Gaspare Vanvitelli, depicting Saint Peter’s Square and the Piazza del Popolo, were at West Wycombe Park until 1986 but are not identifiable in the early inventories.³⁸ What this group has in common is that they are relatively small-scale pictures of the kind that were readily available for sale either during Dashwood’s Grand Tour or after 1740, when he continued to acquire paintings through Lefroy. All are by artists who produced high-quality works but did not achieve fame (or prices) on the level of Canaletto or Giovanni Paolo Panini. Dashwood generally appears to have preferred to buy existing works rather than commission paintings from the artists most in demand among British Grand Tourists; instead of one of the ubiquitous ruin capricci by Panini, he chose to represent the monuments of antiquity by an Arch of Constantine then thought to be by Viviano Codazzi.³⁹

The hang of the collection at West Wycombe Park cannot be reconstructed with any degree of certainty as paintings are likely to have migrated not only from room to room but also between the country house and Dashwood’s London residence in Hanover Square. The inventory of 1782 lacks artist names but when read in combination with the early lists compiled by Grimston, Langley and Neale,⁴⁰ it allows a reliable reconstruction of the collection’s scope at the time of Dashwood’s death. He was confident in the aesthetic formation he received in Tuscany from Niccolini and Lefroy, had an eye for undervalued artists and was unafraid to buy against prevailing fashion. In this the collection parallels the manner in which canonical models are cited in the interior decoration of West Wycombe while at the same time departing from accepted norms.⁴¹ Subsequent sales of pictures from West Wycombe, as well as a few new acquisitions, have altered the character of the collection, yet the remarkable individualism – only occasionally crossing the border into eclecticism – of Dashwood’s taste is still clearly discernible at West Wycombe.