Seven watercoloured drawings of Montserrat
Richard Colt Hoare (Barn Elms, London, 1758 - Stourton, 1838) was the son of a wealthy family of bankers in London, collectors and art patrons of artists. Grieved by the death of his wife and his grandfather, undertook his Grand Tour, from 1785 to 1791, which brought him to Italy and from there to France, Sicily, Malta, Switzerland and the Netherlands. In his memoirs, published in 1819, he said that staying in Florence made a trip to Nimes, Avignon, in October 1788, and from there he went to Spain, “with a view chiefly of seeing the singular hill of Montserrat in Catalonia". Among the artists who were under his sponsorship includes Carlo Labruzzi, Louis Ducrot and temporarily J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, Samuel Woodgforde and Francis Nicholson. As Napoleon War made impossible his passion to travel around Europe, he dedicated to enriching his personal library and collecting antiques. As a result of his travels, between 1815 and 1819 he published the books Recollections Abroad and A Classical Tour through Italy and Sicily. In his travels he made numerous sketches from which he painted finest drawings with aquatint sepia and watercolour. He gave some of these drawings to his tutor, the painter John Warwick Smith, and other ones to his friend Francis Micholson because he wanted them to made oil paintings. Many of his drawings on books were dispersed due to the sale of Stourhead in 1880.
The series of seven drawings of Montserrat from Hoare was acquired, or perhaps given to Montserrat, during the “Jubilee Celebrations” in 1931.
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