William Beckford

ISBN: 0839002270

Author: Lees-Milne, James

Condition: Used

William Beckford (1760-1844) was a brilliant eccentric of exceptional intelligence and audacious taste. Perhaps best known for his building of the ultimate Gothick folly, Fonthill Abbey, he was also a bibliophile, gardener, musician, patron, traveller, wit and writer. He was a great collector of paintings (many of them now in the National Gallery), furniture, books and other works of art. But he was also a preposterous misfit in the eighteenth century England in which he lived, his life ruined by the exposure of his homosexuality when he seemed on the threshold of an outstanding career in public life.James Lees-Milne (1908-97), famous as a diarist and a rescuer of country houses for the National Trust, gives us a vivid impression of this outstanding aesthete and his esoteric tastes.