Fonthill Splendens. According to tradition, Beckford wrote Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters as a mock-guide to the art collections at Splendens.

Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780)


Beckford's first published book - Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780) - is a satire. In five biographical sketches of varying length, painters and artists as well as schools of painterly taste, are explored through means of fictitious and historical characters and places. Not one of Beckford's heavier works, the Memoirs is instead memorable for its lightness of touch and for the poetic descriptions of landscapes and paintings which it contains.

Later on in life, Beckford amassed an impressive collection of paintings (today, some twenty of these may, for instance, be viewed at the National Gallery in London: works by Cima, Bellini, Botticelli, Raphael, Steenwyck, Dou, and Elsheimer - amongst others - stand out as spectacular examples not only of his taste but also of his considerable buying power). In the 1770's and very early 1780's, however, the time in which the Memoirs was composed and published, Beckford's home environment was defined by the art collections gathered by his father: the two Beckfords eventually came to share few, if any, artistic tastes.

Please use the links below to continue on to this online edition of the Memoirs. As this book has been scanned using OCR, errors have no doubt survived; the edition should be used as a rough study-aid only and the printed editions consulted whenever a quotation is needed.

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