Carlisle, Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of
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- Carlisle, Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of
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(1748 - 1825), only surv. s. of 4th E. of Carlisle; suc. fa. 1758 as 5th E.; educ. Eton and King's Camb. 1764; Dilettanti 1767; KT 1767; m. 1770 Ldy. Margaret Leveson-Gower, dau. of 1st M. of Stafford; KG 1793.
1768 Turin (24 Jan. - Mar.), Genoa (by 30 Mar.), Parma, Bologna, Florence (15 Apr.), Rome (23 Apr.), Naples (9 May - 1 Jun.), Rome (by 17 Jun.), Venice (2 - 10 Aug.), Piacenza, Verona [Mannheim, 16 Aug.; England, Mar. 1769]
Although he was to become a discerning collector of old master paintings, Lord Carlisle's visit to Italy, made immediately after he had left Cambridge, was a rapid affair involving few purchases. From Antibes on 8 December 1767 he told his great friend George Selwyn, 'I intend to go through Italy as fast as I can. I certainly shall not be more than a year. In that time I hope ... to be able to speak Italian to be understood and read it perfectly'.1 He arrived in Turin on 24 January 1768 with Lord Kildare, their passage over the Alps having been delayed a day by winds and snow. Carlisle did not enjoy Turin: 'the whole day is spent in visiting; you go to the opera only to make visits into people's boxes to whom you have been presented' (243). February was very cold, the streets 'covered with ice, and the houses with snow' (251), but he amused himself with the thought that his dog Rover should be painted by Batoni and he was then entertained by hearing that, as Lent began, 'sins during the Carnival, are so very numerous that I believe the monks are forced to absolve them by the lump' (254, 256). He studied Spanish and Italian while he waited for the arrival of his Knight of the Thistle insignia, which was conferred upon him by the King of Sardinia on 27 February and then, with Kildare and Thomas Potter, he passed over the Apennines to Genoa ('a little botanical knowledge would have made this journey more agreeable'; 284). Kildare came to consider Carlisle 'a great coxcomb' who despised everybody, 'especially foreigners', but he noticed that the ladies 'were very much inclined to be in love with him, which I do not wonder at, as he is certainly a pretty man and his green ribbon [the Thistle] became him much'.2 After three days in Genoa Carlisle considered he had 'seen everything worth observation': some 'glorious pictures' and some 'noble palaces', but 'no antiquities of consequence here. One of the streets is truly magnificent indeed; a row of palaces on each side, faced with marble ... more like scenery than real houses' (284 - 5).
He waited for his friend Charles James Fox (with whom he had been in France the previous year) who was sailing from Nice. Together they passed through Parma, whose fine pictures would 'have furnished my new wing [at Castle Howard] ... very well', and Bologna, where he found 'the finest pictures in the world' (291), to Florence; the pending arrival of Maria Carolina, the new Queen of Naples, encouraged them to depart for Rome where they had arrived by the end of April. 'I have now seen very perfectly Turin, Genoa, Piacenza, Regio, Parma, Bologna, Florence, the Vatican, St Peter's, and two palaces here. About six weeks more will complete it', he wrote (295), sufficient to admire all the well-known pictures and antiquities, and to kiss the Pope's toe. At Naples, 'one of the finest cities in the world', he was 'magnificently lodged' in the consul's house. He climbed Vesuvius at night and told Selwyn that he had so far bought 'two small landscapes of Gaspar Poussin, and two copies of pictures at Florence; for, next to having fine originals, copies of beautiful pictures are preferable to indifferent ones of good masters' (298 - 9). He visited Herculaneum, noting that 'it is very difficult to buy anything of the workmen, as there is a guard always over them when they dig'; there was a bal masqu? and a great dinner for the new Queen, with much finery but, observed Carlisle, 'at night all those fine clothes are deposited in the pawn-broker's shop, and the poor owners starve for the rest of the year on one dish of macaroni a-day' (302 - 4). On his return to Rome he visited Cicero's Villa ('where the Tusculan questions were wrote. You may easily fancy with what reverence I beheld this scene'), and commissioned a picture of it, telling 'the man to keep the drawing, lest you [Selwyn] should like to have a copy'. But he was not acquiring works of art on a grand scale: 'I only mean to get a few things for my own dressing room' (305). 'I shall have finished Rome in three weeks more, so as to have seen everything perfectly, and the principal things twice or three times. I am out on this business seven or eight hours every day', he wrote (308); a Mr Harrison was his cicerone (and subsequently travelled north with him). At the end of his stay in Rome he sat to Nollekens for his marble bust, now at Castle Howard,3 'the man assures me it will be very like' (311), and he acquired a Piranesi drawing of a coach with antique ornaments, which he intended having made on his return to England (312).
Carlisle's last letter from Italy (318) described how he was confined to his chair in Venice by gnat bites; it was dated Venice, 2 August, although the Venetian records reported his arrival on 20 August.4 He stayed a week in Venice and left Italy through Piacenza and Verona, whose buildings delighted him, and none more than the theatre at Piacenza (320). By December 1768 Carlisle was in Paris, where his dog Rover, who had survived a broken leg in Florence (but had not been painted by Batoni), was run over by a coach; ibat et ad Stygias nobilis umbra plagas, commented his afflicted master, whose Latin apparently remained more serviceable than his Italian (352).
1. Jesse, Selwyn, 2:204; further refs. given in brackets. 2. Leinster Corr., 3:524. 3. J. Kenworthy Brown, CL, 7 Jun. 1979, 1848. 4. ASV IS 759.