Richard Ford

Artist Info

Richard FordLondon, 1796 - 1858, Heavitree

Ford, Richard (English engraver and draftsman, 1796-1858)

Note: An amateur engraver; he was the author of book entitled "Guide for Travelling in Spain" and he illustrated "The Spanish Ballads of Lockhart."

LC name authority rec. n50024836

LC Heading: Ford, Richard, 1796-1858

Biography:

Ford, Richard (1796–1858), art connoisseur and author, was born at 129 Sloane Street, Chelsea, London, on 21 April 1796. He was the eldest of the three legitimate children of Sir Richard Ford (1758–1806), police magistrate, and Marianne (1767–1849), a talented artist, the daughter of Benjamin Booth (1732–1807), a director of the East India Company, from whom she inherited an important collection of pictures, including sixty-eight paintings by Richard Wilson. Ford was educated at Winchester College, and at Trinity College, Oxford (BA, 1817; MA, 1822), before entering the chambers of Thomas Pemberton Leigh and Nassau William Senior. In 1822 he was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn, but never practised. Of cultivated tastes and independent means, he made four European tours between 1815 and 1819, travelling as far afield as Naples and Vienna (where he met Beethoven) and collecting engravings and paintings. On 18 October 1824 he married Harriet Capel (1807–1837), natural daughter and only child of George, fifth earl of Essex, and, like Ford, a skilful amateur artist.

In October 1830 Ford and his young family sailed for southern Spain, hoping the climate might improve his wife's delicate health. They spent the next three winters in Seville and the intervening summers in the Alhambra at Granada, leaving Spain in October 1833, just before the outbreak of the First Carlist War. During his three years in Spain, Ford made numerous excursions throughout Andalusia, and three longer expeditions: in spring 1831 to Madrid, Talavera, and Badajoz; in autumn 1831 via Valencia, Barcelona, and Saragossa to Madrid and back; and in summer 1832 on horseback via Mérida, Yuste, and Salamanca to Santiago de Compostela, Oviedo, León, Burgos, and Bilbao. While on these journeys, of which he remarked that a riding expedition for civilians in Spain was ‘almost equivalent to serving a campaign’—referring to those of the Peninsular War, several battlefields of which he visited—many notebooks were filled with descriptions of the monuments and works of art he saw, and he also made over 500 drawings and watercolours, largely devoted to Seville and Granada. Some of them were to be the basis of more finished paintings and gouaches completed a decade later. The artist John Frederick Lewis stayed with the Fords in Seville for several months during the winter of 1832–3. On several occasions Ford was the guest of Henry Unwin Addington, the British minister at Madrid. In the Prado there Ford saw the work of Velázquez ‘in all his protean variety’ and in 1843 he wrote a life of that artist for the Penny Cyclopaedia (reprinted in Sutton and Ford). He is also credited with ‘rediscovering’ in 1851 the whereabouts in England of the Rokeby Venus. Among paintings he acquired while in Spain were Zurbarán's San Serapion (later in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn.), Ribalta's The Vision of Father Simón (National Gallery, London), and Murillo's Two Franciscans (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa). Many of these paintings were sold at Rainy's Rooms in June 1836. As Ford remarked, those ‘which encumber other people's houses, give me no pleasure and much expense and trouble. The pleasure is in the acquisition, not in possession’.

Early in 1834 Ford separated from his wife, and settled at Southernhay, Exeter, to be near his younger brother, the Revd James Ford (1797–1877). He later purchased a house at nearby Heavitree, which was to shelter the valuable collection of Spanish books that he started to make in Spain and to which he continued to add, notably at the Heber and W. B. Chorley sales (1834–6 and 1846 respectively), but which were largely dispersed at Sothebys in 1861. Several of them, some in the British Library, contain his annotations. Ford amused himself by laying out gardens, building a summer-house in a Moresque style, and writing on the cob walls of Devonshire for the Quarterly Review (April 1837), in which he compared them to Spanish tapia. The house, sold by Sir Clare Ford in 1898, was demolished in 1958 and the gardens built over.

In May 1837 Harriet died suddenly in London, leaving Ford to bring up their two daughters, Georgina and Mary Jane, and a son, Francis Clare Ford (1828–1899). Margaret Henrietta (1840–1899) was the only child of his second marriage, on 24 February 1838, to Eliza Linnington (d. 1849), elder daughter of the ninth Lord Cranstoun. On 12 June 1851 Ford married Mary Molesworth (1816–1910), the sister of Sir William Molesworth. Among his descendants was Sir (Richard) Brinsley Ford.

The piece on cob walls was the first of a series of some fifty substantial articles and book reviews, largely on Spanish subjects, which Ford wrote during the next two decades, mainly for the Quarterly Review. These and his anonymous 76-page pamphlet, An Historical Enquiry into the Unchangeable Character of a War in Spain (1837)—a vigorous reply from a tory point of view to one written in defence of Lord Palmerston's ‘The policy of England towards Spain’—brought him to the notice of their publisher, John Murray. In 1839 Murray invited Ford to write a Handbook for Travellers in Spain for the growing series of guides he was publishing. Ford started work in the autumn of 1840 on his return from a prolonged visit to Italy, where in Rome he acquired a torso of a Venus in Greek marble (British Museum), and some important maiolica. It was during the four-year period of gestation of his Handbook that he first met George Borrow. Murray had submitted the manuscript of Borrow's The Zincali to Ford, who recommended its publication and later advised and encouraged Borrow in the writing of The Bible in Spain (both works sympathetically reviewed by Ford) and Lavengro.

In deference to Addington's advice, Ford decided in February 1845 to cancel (at some cost) three-quarters of the Handbook as already printed, the so-called ‘Suppressed Edition’, as it contained many passages likely to offend Spanish and French susceptibilities. An example of this cancelled edition which has survived—for Ford retained some twenty-five copies for presentation to friends—contains his confirmatory inscription that it was ‘rare from the almost entire destruction of the whole impression’. It was not until late July 1845 that the first published edition appeared. Within days, Ford was being lionized as the perceptive and articulate author of a most comprehensive and accurate account of that country, and one unlikely to be ever superseded. Although opinionated and occasionally acerbic, his perennially fresh descriptions and observations appear here at their most spontaneous, and stimulating. As later affirmed by Sir William Stirling Maxwell, ‘So great a literary achievement had never before been performed under so unpretending an appellation’, which ‘took its place among the best books of travel, humour, and history, social, literary, political, and artistic, in the English language’ (The Times, 1858), and that judgement holds. The influence of this masterpiece, reprinted in 1966, has been profound. The second edition (1847) was reduced in length by one third, having been pruned of the eminently readable introductory articles contained in the first edition, which, with new material, had been published late in 1846 as Gatherings from Spain, written ‘to offer a few hours' amusement, and may be of instruction, to those who remain at home’.

Ford's later years, mainly spent between Heavitree and 123 Park Street, London, the family home, were occupied in part with the compilation of the third edition of the Handbook (1855), the last in his lifetime, in which much of the excised material was reincorporated. Although the product of his maturer years is a more factually complete guidebook, twenty years had passed since Ford himself had left ‘well-beloved’ Spain. All later editions were emasculated, and have been compared to ‘Niagara passed through a jelly-bag’.

By 1855 Ford's eyesight was beginning to fail, and he was suffering from Bright's disease, which was to cause his death on 31 August 1858 at Heavitree, where he was buried. His tombstone was fitly inscribed ‘Rerum Hispaniae indigator acerrimus’: he was indeed the most ardent explorer of the Cosas de España, the ‘Things of Spain’.

Ian Campbell Robertson

Sources I. Robertson, Richard Ford, 1796–1858: hispanophile, connoisseur and critic (2004) · The letters of Richard Ford, ed. R. E. Prothero (1905) · F. C. Ford, Documents and memorials of the Ford family (privately printed, 1878) · B. Ford, introduction, in R. Ford, Gatherings from Spain (1970) · W. I. Knapp, Life, writings and correspondence of George Borrow, 2 vols. (1899) · I. Robertson, Los curiosos impertinentes, revised edn (1988), chaps. 19, 23 · B. Ford, Richard Ford in Spain [1974] [exhibition catalogue, Wildenstein Gallery, London, 1974; incl. introduction by D. Sutton] · I. Robertson, introduction, in R. Ford, A hand-book for travellers in Spain and readers at home, ed. I. Robertson, new edn, 1 (1966), xiii–xviii · I. Robertson, introduction, in R. Ford, Gatherings from Spain (2000) · B. Ford, ‘Richard Ford's articles and reviews’, Book Handbook, 7 (1948), 369–80 · A. Gámir, introduction, in R. Ford, Granada: escritos con dibujos inéditos del autor Granada (Granada, 1955) [an account illustr. with unpubd orig. drawings] · B. Ford, introduction, Richard Ford en Sevilla, trans. X. de Salas (1963) [a collection of his drawings with notes by D. A. Iniguez] · R. Ford, Letters to Gayangos, ed. R. Hitchcock (1974) · T. J. Bean, Proceedings of 1991 George Borrow Conference [Norwich 1991], ed. A. Fraser (1992) · N. Glendinning, ‘A collector's passion for Spain: Richard Ford, 1796–1858’, Country Life, 155 (1974), 1550–51 · W. Stirling-Maxwell, The Times (4 Sept 1858) · T. Hughes, Fraser's Magazine, 58 (1858) · Walpole Society, 60 (1998) [2 pts; The Ford collection, ed. L. Herrmann] · F. J. R. Barberán, ed., La Sevilla de Richard Ford (2007) · Richard Ford: viajes por España, 1830–1833 (2014)

Archives NL Scot., John Murray archive · priv. coll., collected papers and corresp. · T. J. Bean collection, MSS :: BL, letters to Macvey Napier and others · Bodl. Oxf., letters to Lord Lovelace and Lady Lovelace · Hispanic Society of America, New York, letters to George Borrow · Mitchell L., Glas., Glasgow City Archives, letters to Sir Edmund Head and Sir William Stirling Maxwell

Likenesses J. Gutierrez de la Vega, portrait, 1831, priv. coll. · José Domínguez Bécquer, three portraits, 1832, priv. coll. · J. F. Lewis, portrait, 1833, priv. coll. · A. Chatelain, portrait, 1840, priv. coll.; copy, oils, NPG · H. W. Phillips, portrait, posthumous

Wealth at death under £25,000: resworn probate, May 1878, CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1858)

Ian Campbell Robertson, ‘Ford, Richard (1796–1858)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2015 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/9863, accessed 1 Oct 2015]

Richard Ford (1796–1858): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/9863