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NUNEHAM, George Simon Harcourt, Viscount : [A Series of Four Views of Stanton-Harcourt]

420 x 500 mm., etching on fine thick paper with large margins, in good condition.

A magnificent series of extremely high quality etchings of great rarity. The first Earl Harcourt was governor to the royal princes and in the early 1750s his children, George Simon the Viscount Nuneham and Lady Elizabeth Harcourt took lessons in drawing from Richard Dalton and landscape from George Knapton, Joshua Kirby and Alexander Cozens. It is known that they on occasion were taught in the company of the royal princes. The Harcourt family had owned Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire since the Norman Conquest but in 1712 had acquired Newnham Courtenay. The first Earl moved the family there and renamed it Nuneham. Also associated with the family at this time was the great artist Paul Sandby (1725-1809). In 1760 a painting of his of Nuneham was exhibited at the Society of Artists.The Viscount (1736-1809) was a Francophile at heart and loved the old family home which connected himself to the Normans. Like his father he was a patron of the arts although at the more extreme for the period. He befriended Rousseau who actually stayed with him during his exile from France. In 1760 Nuneham drew two images (plates I & IV) of the old Stanton-Harcourt family home. In the same year Paul Sandby provided a third, critically acclaimed the best. In 1763 Nuneham etched the three and produced a fourth drawing which he etched the following year. His contemporary Horace Walpole wrote on 16 March 1763 that the first two prints were “the richest etchings I ever saw, and masterly executed”. He noted also that Nuneham was planning two more. Despite the statements on the prints to the contrary there is some evidence from the pencil notes of Sandby that it was he who drew the original views.In 1785 Viscount Nuneham, the then second Earl Harcourt, presented the original copperplates for the series of four views to the Society of Antiquaries. A second edition, offered here, dedicated to the Society was printed in the same year. Daghlian and Hilles, p. 230; Salway, Peter (1996) ‘The Society’s Prints of Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire’, in ‘The Antiquaries Journal vol. 76 pp. 269-75; Sloan, Kim (2000) A Noble Art; Upcott III p. 1076.

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