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HERSTMONCEUX PARISH
East Sussex, Englandlocal news additional news
if it's after 27 September 2007, click Refresh on your Web browser to see any changes
More on the Lambert watercolours of Herstmonceux Castle
Christopher Whittick, Senior Archivist at East Sussex Record Office writes (28 February 2006):
As is well known, Sir Roger Fiennes received licence to crenellate his manor of Herstmonceux in 1441. Herstmonceux Castle, described by John Goodall (Burlington Magazine 146 (2004) 516) as ‘among the most magnificent late medieval castles to survive anywhere in Europe’, is the result.
In 1775 Robert Hare inherited the Castle and was persuaded by his architect Samuel Wyatt that it was beyond economic repair. He ordered stripping and partial demolition of the interior, leaving the exterior as a picturesque ruin. Faced by the destruction of his ancestral home (which the family had sold in 1708), Lord Dacre employed the James Lamberts of Lewes, uncle and nephew, to record it. They were apparently paid the considerable sum of 110 guineas, which may be compared with the two and a half guineas a week which the London-based Grimm charged to Gilbert White of Selborne.
The volume which we seek to acquire bears the bookplate of Lord Dacre, and is clearly the original commissioned work. To date 35 surviving working sketches have been identified, their custody split between the Sussex Archaeological Society (21 sketches, presented in 1892) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (14 sketches, acquired in 1911). It is on these that scholars, including Goodall, have had to rely for the study of the castle’s original layout, design and appearance.
The artists
James Lambert (1725-1788), watercolour painter and topographical artist, was baptized at Willingdon near Eastbourne, the youngest of the eight children of John Lambert (1690-1764), a flax dresser, and his wife, Susan Bray. In about 1730 the family moved to the Cliffe, a suburb of Lewes, where Lambert lived for the rest of his life. He attended a common writing-school and later received instruction from a music-master. From 1745 until his death he served as the parish organist, publishing volumes of psalms (1756) and hymns (2nd edn, 1774) and teaching music at least from 1756 until 1758. By 1754 he was in business as a sign-painter and gilder and by 1758 as a stationer.
Lambert's ambition was to be a landscape painter, and he probably received instruction from a distant relative, George Smith of Chichester (c1714-1776). He exhibited at the Free Society of Artists between 1768 and 1773 and at the Royal Academy between 1774 and 1778. His pictures combined elements both of Claudean pastoral and of Dutch picturesque rustic imagery.
More remunerative, from about 1772, was Lambert's quick response to the rising demand for topographical watercolours, with the assistance of his nephew James Lambert (1741-1799). While local gentry commissioned views of their houses, John Elliot (1724-1782) requested images of Lewes's antiquities and Jasper Sprange views for engravings in his Tunbridge Wells Guide (1786); visitors ordered copies from Lambert's shop stock. His largest client was Dr William Burrell (1732-1796), for whom he worked between 1776 and 1784 and who bequeathed to the British Museum in London 269 watercolours, mainly of medieval buildings, by the two Lamberts. The elder Lambert, the more competent and prolific of the two, was probably the first painter in eastern Sussex to have been an artist rather than an artisan. Over 600 pictures by them individually or jointly have been identified.
How this acquisition will fit in with our collecting policy
East Sussex Record Office is the county and diocesan record office for the administrative county of East Sussex and for Brighton and Hove, and strives to acquire and preserve archival material relating to its area of responsibility.
ESRO would not normally attempt to acquire topographical watercolours, but this volume is more than a collection of landscapes. It is a conscious record of an exceptional building on the eve of its destruction, commissioned from local artists with a view to preserving information for posterity. In that sense it is entirely archival, and a fore-runner of the architectural recording of ancient buildings which developed in the second half of the 19th century.
Another example of the Lamberts’ Herstmonceux commission is already in the United States; East Sussex Record Office is determined to preserve this new discovery in the county of the artists who produced it and of the building whose fate it records.
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