The Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady Beaumont to the Wordsworth Family, 18031829

Sir George Beaumont is a key figure in the history of British art. As well as being a respected amateur landscape painter, he was a prominent patron, a collector, and co-founder of the National Gallery. William Wordsworth described Beaumonts friendship as one of the chief blessings of his life, and this edition reveals that the two men became collaborators as well as companions. In addition to documenting unique perspectives on social, political, and cultural events of the early nineteenth century (providing new contexts for reading Wordsworths mature poetry), the letters collected here chart the progress of an increasingly intimate inter-familial relationship. The picture that emerges is of a coterie that in influence, creativity, and affection rivals Wordsworths more famous exchange with Coleridge at Nether Stowey in the 1790s. The edition includes an extended study of how Wordsworth and Beaumont helped shape one anothers work, tracing processes of mutual artistic development that involved not only a meeting of aristocratic refinement and rural simplicity, of a socialite and a lover of retirement, of a painter and a poet, but also an aesthetic rapprochement between neoclassical and romantic values, between the impulse to idealize and the desire to particularize.