Walpole, Horace, 4th Earl of Orford

Walpole, Horace, 4th Earl of Orford (b London, 24 Sept. 1717; d London, 2 Mar. 1797). English collector, connoisseur, man of letters, and amateur architect. He was the son of Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745), who was Britain's first prime minister and also a notable collector of paintings. In 1739–41 Horace made the Grand Tour, travelling in France and Italy with the poet Thomas Gray. His literary fame rests on his voluminous correspondence and on The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first ‘Gothic novel’. In the history of taste he is primarily important for his house at Twickenham, Strawberry Hill, which he bought in 1747 and extended into a showpiece of the Gothic Revival, employing professional architects to work from his sketches. He filled the building with his collections (dispersed after his death) and it became such a tourist attraction that he took to issuing admission tickets. In 1757 Walpole established his own printing press at Strawberry Hill, from which he published his Anecdotes of Painting in England (4 vols., 1762–71), a highly important source for the history of British art from the Middle Ages to his own time, based on Vertue's notebooks but augmented by his own research. His other publications include A Description of the Villa of Mr Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill (1774) and Aedes Walpolianae (1747), a catalogue of his father's paintings at Houghton Hall, Norfolk. These were bought en bloc by Catherine the Great of Russia in 1779 and are now in the Hermitage, St Petersburg; among them are several works by van Dyck, including his portrait of Inigo Jones (c.1632–5), and Rembrandt's Sacrifice of Isaac (1635).