Grand Tour sketchbook and diary written by the playboy Johnny Hungerford Arkwright, shortly to inherit 10,000 acres of prime Herefordshire farmland paid for by his grandfather, the industrial tycoon Richard Arkwright. Johnny Arkwright made this trip to southern France and Italy in December 1857, returning to England the following month for his sister’s wedding, only for his father to die exactly a month later, forcing the young man into a position of immediate responsibility. Described by the family’s biographer Catherine Beale as a rumbustious youth with ‘appealing frailties’, this is a most unusually forthright, at times eccentric, Grand Tour diary.
At the time of writing Arkwright states that he was avoiding the state of marriage, - ‘I prefer loving the whole race at present - Haw haw haw’ – and slightly incredulous ‘to think of being on the wide world - master of very little French, and a very large cheque book’ The young rake counsels himself against an ill-advised dalliance on the Nice-Genoa ferry, though the ‘Italian Contess’ is almost too much for him: ‘She smokes cigarettes ever and anon, pulling out Lucifer and lighting them under her fur paletot (Oh John! Don’t fraternize with that women when you get to Florence. I am sure she is not any better than she might be!!!)’ He does not seem to have heeded his own advice with his French landlady in Lyon who becomes part of an elaborate riff on horizontal and perpendicular French experiences: ‘The country is flat; the poplars very perpendicular. The beer is flat - most of the people are flat for they bring up your ‘merlan au gratin’ perpendicularly in a horizontal position….’
Arkwright is candid about the discomfort of coach travel ‘some joviality ceases inside a coach where there is the awful certainty of 26 hours hard sitting staring you in the face’ but the fun is swiftly resumed. From Nimes he ‘stole a bit of Roman carved brick, but it was only for mamma’s Museum’; in Genoa he manages to dodge a Herefordshire neighbour (Lady Frankland Lewis of Harpton Court) and finds himself being groped - ‘feeling me all over with both hands’ on the road to Livorno. The city of Florence overwhelms him with ’the river - the deep unimaginable color of its roofs and picturesque gables… the hills and houses climbing up them forever’. A fire in the hotel room below him briefly threatens young Arkwright’s life until the actions of a ‘sweep who sat on the top of the chimney’ managed to choke off the oxygen supply. Invited to the New Year ball of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Arkwright attempts a verbatim report of conversations overheard: ‘A little music next Thursday, if you like, happy to see you - Very beautiful! Who is she? The wife of a merchant at Odessa… ’ before Grand Duke Leopold made his rather unimpressive appearance: ‘en famille… Paterfamilias after the manner of dying perch gasps for breath… blows his nose and paddles away.’ Within days Arkwright was back in London about to inherit the family’s wide acres. The accompanying sketchbook revisits many of the locations found in the diary but most of Arkwright’s increasingly competent sketches (he talks about being a beginner in his journal) are from later travels in the 1860s and 1870s as well as taking in other Arkwright properties and friends further afield in Scotland.
DESCRIPTION:
1 Small quarto exercise book, quarter black roan over paper covered boards, inscribed by Arkwright on the upper cover: ‘JHA to Florence 1857’; buff covered endpapers and laid paper stock with horizontal chain lines. The ‘Portrait of gingerbread taken at Marseilles’ - Arkwright has drawn round a gingerbread figure - appears on the verso of the first flyleaf. 44 pages of text on rectos (one stub) with 40 on versos written from the other end of the manuscript. Arkwright begins on Nov 26 1857, c10,000 words, ending in early January.
2 SKETCHBOOK: (18x11cm), quarter black roan over textured paper with pencil holder; stationer’s label of ‘Lechertier-Barbe’ sold in London; 40 leaves; 61 pages of watercolours mixed with pencil sketches, mostly from the 1860s and ‘70s. Arkwright depicts the Hatton Estate at Uffington which was owned by Arkwright relatives in 1863; there’s a sequence of Scottish images from Wester Ross, clearly a shooting and sailing expedition in Sheildaig, with huntsmen at lunch and the boat ‘”Smokie” 13 Ton little smuggler’ as well as Poolewe, Inverlair and Skye where Arkwright depicts Lady Heathcoat-Amory. From southern Europe in 1867 Arkwright paints Pau (Pyrenees) and Alpine scenes; takes a trip along the Riviera with effective paintings of Nice (double page spread) and ‘olive trees’ ad well as a scene ‘From [Nice] shop window Bought it afterwards. 1867’, ‘near Monaco’, Menton, Campagna and then Rome. There is a little group of German scenes executed in 1874 including ‘near Homburg’ as well as a scene of washing women at St Moritz in 1874.
CONTEXT: In her study of Johnny Arkwright’s life Champagne and Shambles: The Arkwrights and the Country House in Crisis, Catherine Beale characterises Johnny as ‘irrepressible and popular’. The Arkwrights were well schooled in good archival practice and much of the family archive now resides in Herefordshire Record Office. These two manuscripts were acquired from Kinsham Court, north Herefordshire which was owned by Johnny Arkwright’s son from 1872.
Johnny Arkwright (1833-1905) was travelling a year before he inherited Hampton Court in Herefordshire from his father, also John Arkwright, and son of the industrialist Richard Arkwright of Crompton in Derbyshire. He published verse while at Eton and became the largest landowner in the most agricultural county in England.
