Seven watercolor drawings of Montserrat
Richard Colt Hoare (Barn Elms, London, 1758 – Stourton, 1838) was the son of a wealthy family of London bankers, art collectors, and patrons of artists. Grieving the loss of his wife and grandfather, he embarked on his Grand Tour from 1785 to 1791, which took him to Italy and from there to France, Sicily, Malta, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. In his memoirs, published in 1819, the traveler stated that from Florence he made an excursion to Nîmes and Avignon in October 1788, and from there crossed into Spain “with a view chiefly of seeing the singular hill of Montserrat in Catalonia”. Among the artists under his patronage were Carlo Labruzzi, Louis Ducros, and at times J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Samuel Woodforde, and Francis Nicholson. Since the Napoleonic Wars made his passion for European travel impossible, he devoted himself to enriching his personal library and collecting antiquities. As a result of his travels, between 1815 and 1819 he published the books Recollections Abroad and A Classical Tour through Italy and Sicily. On his journeys he made numerous field sketches, on the basis of which he created more finished drawings in sepia aquatint as well as watercolors. He gave some of these drawings to his tutor, the painter John "Warwick" Smith, and to his friend Francis Nicholson so that they could turn them into oil paintings. Many of his drawings bound in books were dispersed on the occasion of the sale of Stourhead during the 1880s.
The series of seven drawings of Montserrat by Hoare was acquired by, or perhaps presented as a gift to, Montserrat on the occasion of the Jubilee Celebrations of 1931.
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