Henry Vaughan (art collector)

Henry Vaughan, who was born in Southwark, London on 17 April 1809, was the son of a successful hat manufacturer, George Vaughan, and his wife Elizabeth Andrews.^[1] Henry and his elder brother and sister, George and Mary, were brought up as Quakers. He attended a school at Higham Hill, Walthamstow, run by Eliezer Cogan, where a fellow pupil was Benjamin Disraeli.^[2] On the death of his father in 1828, Henry inherited a large fortune and thereafter lead what could be thought of as a rather self-indulgent life, but he went on to become one of the most discerning art collectors and generous philanthropists of his time.^[3]

In 1834 he bought a lease on a large house, number 28 Cumberland Terrace, on one of the grandest of John Nash's developments in the newly fashionable Regent's Park, which would be his home for the rest of his long life. He spent much of his time travelling extensively, becoming a cultivated, enthusiastic, and eclectic collector of works of art, especially of prints and drawings by J. M. W. Turner, with whom he was personally acquainted.^[1] He was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1879, was a founder member of the Burlington Fine Arts Club and was also a member of the Athaeneum.^[1] His collecting interests were varied and eclectic; visitors to the house, which he shared with his sister Mary, would have seen rooms richly decorated with sculptures, bronzes, ivories, Spanish clocks, medieval stained glass, frames from Siena and Venice and Rembrandt etchings.^[3] However the house had few visitors as Vaughan was known as something of a recluse,^[1] preferring his collection to be shown in public galleries. He bought drawings by Michelangelo, Raphael and Rubens, but it was eighteenth and nineteenth century British art which was his main area of interest, acquiring works by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Flaxman, Millais and Leighton, among others.^[3] Unusually for the time, Vaughan was particularly interested in artists' ideas and working methods, acquiring many informal, preparatory drawings and sketches including fifteen of John Constable's oil sketches.^[3]

The artist he admired above all was J.M.W. Turner, whom he probably first met in the 1840s.^[3] By the time of Vaughan's death he owned more than one hundred watercolours and drawings by Turner and as many prints. His collection included examples of almost every type of work on paper the artist produced, from early topographical drawings and atmospheric landscape watercolours, to brilliant colour studies, literary vignette illustrations and spectacular exhibition pieces. It was an unparalleled collection that comprehensively represented the diversity, imagination and technical inventiveness of Turner's work throughout his sixty-year career.^[3]