Henry Hoare the Younger

Henry Hoare the Younger

Henry Hoare the Younger ( July 7, 1705 - September 8, 1785 in Clapham) was a British banker and patron of the arts. He created on the acquired from his father, situated on the landscaped grounds of Stourhead . He was the eldest son of Henry Hoare the Elder and his wife Jane. Within the family he was also called Henry the Magnificient ("the great one").

life and work

Hoare spent his youth in Quarley, Hampshire. He was engaged in amusements and reading the classic writers. In 1726 he married Anne Marsham, who died in 1727. In 1728 he married Susan Colt. In 1734 he acquired Wilbury House in Wiltshire and was elected Member of Parliament for Salisbury . In the following years he devoted himself to studying painting and began to collect art. After his mother's death in 1741, he moved to Stourhead.

With the death of his uncle Benjamin Hoare, he became the main owner of the Hoare Bank , which his grandfather Richard Hoare had founded. His annual banking income was about £ 10,000 , a very large amount at the time. After the death of his second wife in 1743, Hoare began to create the landscape park.

The Pantheon at Stourhead

He hired the architect Henry Flitcroft to transform his property into an ideal landscape modeled on nature . Among other things, he designed the Flora Temple (1745), the Pantheon (1753–54) and the Apollo Temple (1785). The work commissioned by Hoare was much more than just a garden, the landscape was completely reshaped over a large area. The Stour River was dammed to create a lake. The ideas for this new landscape design were the paintings by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin . Stourhead, together with the park of Stowe House (Buckinghamshire), is the model of the English landscape garden, as it subsequently emerged all over Europe.

Hoare decorated Colen Campbell's house at Stourhead with paintings and sculptures. In 1783 he retired to his second home in Clapham, where he died in 1785. Hoare was buried in Stourton Cemetery. He survived all of his children (Anne, from his first marriage, died 1735; Henry, died 1752; Anne, died 1759; Susanna, died 1783; also two sons who died early). Heir to Stourhead was his grandson Richard Colt Hoare (1758-1838).

literature

• Victoria Hutchings: Henry Hoare . In: Oxford dictionary of national biography . Volume 27, Oxford 2004. ISBN 0-19-861377-6 , pp. 358-360.
• Patrick Goode, Michael Lancaster (Eds.): The Oxford companion to gardens. Oxford 2001, ISBN 0-19-860440-8 , pp. 257-258.

Web links

National Trust: The Hoare Family