Edward Cheney

Cheney, Edward (English collector, 1803-1884)

Biography:

Cheney, Edward (1803–1884), art collector and watercolour painter, was born at Badger Hall, Shropshire, the second son in a family of three sons and two daughters of General Robert Cheney (d. 1820) and his wife, Harriet, daughter of the merchant and banker Ralph Carr (1711–1806), of Dunston Hill, co. Durham. His father was aide-de-camp to Prince Frederick, duke of York. Cheney passed from the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, into the army, buying a commission in a regiment which was ordered to India, where he spent a few years in inactive service. After his father's sudden death in 1820, his mother and elder brother, Henry, moved to Italy, where Edward joined them about 1825 after leaving the army. At first he lived in Naples and became acquainted with Sir William Gell, the excavator of Pompeii, Edward Dodwell, and other archaeologists and collectors.

The Cheney brothers were notable in Anglo-Italian society of the 1820s and 1830s, and were especially connected with Rome, where their mother had established herself at the Palazzo Sciarra. Edward Cheney soon became friendly with British residents and regular visitors to Rome, and was welcomed in the great Roman houses. Among these were Lady Coventry and her daughter Lady Augusta, Spencer Compton, second marquess of Northampton, and his daughter Lady Marion Alford, Lord Beverley, later fifth duke of Northumberland, and Michelangelo Caetani, an artist who was to succeed his father as duca di Sermoneta. He formed a lifelong friendship with Henry Edward Fox, fourth Baron Holland, whom he met in Genoa in 1827: Fox's journal for 1827 and 1828 records their crowded social sojourn in Rome. The diarist Charles Greville arrived in Rome in March 1830 and met Edward Cheney: their friendship was quickly established and lasted until Greville's death in 1865. Cheney moved in the 1840s to Venice, where he lived at the Palazzo Soranzo-Piovene on the Grand Canal. Here he became a close friend of Rawdon Brown, the historian of the Venetian archives.

During his time in Italy, Cheney formed a collection of pictures and works of art, later housed at Badger Hall and at 4 Audley Square, London. He had a fine library (sold by Sothebys in June 1886) and owned superb drawings, Rembrandt etchings, bronzes, maiolica, and furniture. His picture collection, chiefly of the Venetian school, was remarkable for its concentration, unknown at that time, on Tiepolo, including a vast number of this artist's oil sketches. His pioneering interest in Tiepolo led him also to gather a large collection of his drawings, which filled twelve albums. He also patronized contemporary artists, including Thomas Cromek and Dessoulavy.

In 1851 Cheney began to act as unofficial consultant to the trustees of the National Gallery about the quality and availability of pictures in Italy, sometimes contradicting the purchases proposed by the critic John Ruskin. His London collection was described by Gustav Friedrich Waagen in 1857, and he was a member of the Burlington Fine Arts Club. He was an enthusiastic amateur watercolourist. He was also an original member of the Philobiblon Society, founded in 1853 by his friend Richard Monckton Milnes (later first Baron Houghton), for whose publications the Miscellanies he contributed a number of articles about original documents connected with Venetian painters of the sixteenth century. In 1838 he wrote his only novel, Malvagna, or, The Evil Eye, a romantic work set in Sicily, but it did not attract public attention.

Edward Cheney inherited the Badger Hall estate in December 1866 on the death of his bachelor brother Henry. Edward Cheney died at Badger Hall on 16 April 1884, also a bachelor: he bequeathed his property and collections to his nephew Colonel Alfred Capel Cure. The collection of pictures was sold at Christies and that of prints and drawings at Sothebys; both sales began on 29 April 1885. Two of the nine volumes of Tiepolo drawings were purchased in June that year, from a dealer, by the South Kensington Museum, for £11.

Charles Sebag-Montefiore, rev.

Charles Sebag-Montefiore, ‘Cheney, Edward (1803–1884)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/37277, accessed 23 Dec 2015]