Sir (Richard) Brinsley Ford, C.B.E., LL.D.

Brinsley Ford, a descendent of the Irish playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, was born on 10 June 1908. After Eton and Trinity College, Oxford, at which he read modern history, Ford’s independent means could have led to a life of civilized indolence, a role which - patrician, travelled, convivial - fitted him like a glove. But, dilettante though he may have been, Ford’s tireless campaigning on behalf of the country’s artistic heritage earned him a position of eminence in the world of art far beyond his activities as patron and collector. He inherited an impressive collection of drawings and paintings, including a magnificent group by Richard Wilson, and set about adding to it with all the youthful insouciance of wealth. Ford was a considerable patron of living artists and sculptors but his catholic tastes and connoisseur’s eye for quality embraced all genres and periods. On his marriage in 1937 he bought 14 Wyndham Place, the house where he was to live for the rest of his life and which, with the later addition of houses on either side, was to become his private art gallery. He enjoyed nothing better than welcoming visitors for a lively guided tour of his treasures ( with `nipskis’ of sherry), until he suffered a crippling stroke in 1991. Ford’s first published article, ‘Ingres’ Portrait Drawings of English People in Rome, 1806-20’ appeared in The Burlington Magazine in 1939 – a foretaste of the subject which was to obsess him (his own words) for the rest of his life. In the same year he joined the Territorial Army and the outbreak of war saw him, somewhat incongruously, a troop sergeant-major in the Royal Artillery commanding an anti-aircraft unit during the Battle of Britain. He was later transferred to the Intelligence Corps and, more in keeping with the style to which he was accustomed, he lived at Wilton House, then HQ of Southern Command, and was quartered in the double-cube room with its superb painted ceiling depicting The Story of Perseus – but a far cry from Buchenwald which Ford was one of the first British officers to enter at the end of the war. For his wartime services he was awarded the Belgian Order of Leopold II, the US Bronze Star and the Medaille d’Argent de la Reconnaissance Française. Back in London, Ford published The Drawings of Richard Wilson in 1951, and collaborated with the late Francis Watson on an exhibition, Eighteenth Century Venice, at the Whitehapel Art Gallery, to which he lent all his Venetian drawings, including works by Guardi and Tiepolo, bought before the war. Ford was soon recruited into public life: he chose works for the Arts Council Festival of Britain Exhibition in 1951 and for the Coronation Exhibition of 1953. He was a member of the editorial board of The Burlington Magazine from 1952 until 1986 and then a trustee from 1988 until his death. Appropriately, Ford was invited to join the Society of Dilettanti in 1952, serving as secretary from 1972-88. The Society’s social programme, particularly the dinners, gave him much pleasure but he also took a great interest in the administration of its charitable fund and was concerned for its future. He organized the transfer of its base, with the valuable collection of pictures, from the St James’s Club to Brooks’s in 1975, and in 1982 arranged a party to celebrate the 250th anniversary. It was perhaps just as well that not all Ford’s exuberant ideas for recreating the kind of rout enjoyed by eighteenth-century milords were actually carried out. Group portraits of the dilettanti had been painted by Reynolds in 1774-6 and Ford felt the time had come to commission another. He .persuaded his friend, John Ward, to paint two such portraits, at a much reduced fee, which now hang in Brooks’s.The National Art Collections Fund was, perhaps, the organization closest to Ford’s heart and the one through which he exerted most influence. He had joined as a nineteen-year-old student at Oxford, served on its executive committee since 1960. As chairman from 1975-80. He became an expert fundraiser and was responsible for extending the award of grants to include the National Trust, thus enabling works of art to be returned to their original home. Ford’s active association with the National Trust continued for another decade and he served as chairman of its Foundation for Art Committee from 1986-90. Although Ford’s spiritual home was eighteenth-century Italy, he was also rooted in the here and now, particularly in the field of art-school training. His collection included the early work of young, unknown artists, to whom he was always generous and encouraging, and he regularly bought pictures at art school exhibitions. He was a member of the council of the Byam Shaw School of Art from 1958-73, of the executive committee of the City and Guilds of London Art School from 1976 and a patron of the Attingham Summer School Trust from 1984. A travelling scholarship for artists to study at the Prado was established from the sale for £33,000 at Sotheby’s in 1976 of Ford’s prized first edition of Goya’s La Tauromaquia. The scholarship was named the Richard Ford Award after Ford’s Hispaniophile great-grandfather and was administered by Ford with a committee drawn from the Royal Academy. This committee was also adopted to administer a foundation named the Aeneas Award to assist students to visit Italy, Ford being elected joint president. Despite the many calls on his services, which Ford felt it his duty to accept, he continued research into British Grand Tourists in Rome in the eighteenth century, with an eye to publication. Although progress was slow, and the task mammoth even for a specialist with an academic base, Ford expanded his remit to cover the whole of Italy and to include dealers, artists and antiquaries as well as collectors and patrons. In 1962 he was approached by the Mellon Foundation with a proposal for a book, which he gladly accepted. But the project was dogged by delays and finally, in 1988 Ford, aged eighty, called it a day and donated his archive to the Mellon Foundation for someone else to sort out. The Director of the Mellon Foundation (now re-named the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art) was spurred into action; assistants and editors were employed and in 1997 Yale University Press published, for the Paul Mellon Centre, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701-1800, compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive by John Ingamells. It is one of the most valuable, and certainly the most readable, dictionaries of the cultural and social history of Britain and Italy in the eighteenth century, and it is a source of much satisfaction that Ford lived to see the conversion of his notebooks and papers into a work of the finest scholarship. Another felicitous event in the year before Ford died was the publication of his catalogue of the Ford Collection by the Walpole Society, of which he was president from 1985 until his death. The Society published its sixtieth volume in 1998, an unprecedented two-part publication, devoted to the works of art at Wyndham Place i.e. works collected by Sir Brinsley Ford, his ancestor Benjamin Booth (1732-1807) and his great-grandfather Richard Ford (1796-1858). The entries are based on the material in Ford’s manuscript catalogue, some forty splendid leather-bound folio volumes, and each part is preceded by an entertaining introduction written by Ford in his characteristic polished prose. He chose all the items for reproduction and financed the project through the Brinsley Ford Charitable Trust, supplemented by the gift of eighty pages of coloured plates from Patrick Walker. Worldly, sophisticated and wonderful company, Ford was nevertheless essentially modest, humorous, kindly and approachable and he could perhaps be best described in phrases familiar to him from dealers’ catalogues: ‘extremely rare and much sought after’. He died on 4 May 1999.