Print ‘Englefield House in Berkshire, the seat of Jas Knowles’ @1790

$15.00 CAD

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Copper engraved print, engraved by Lowry.

'Published according to Act of Parliament by Alex.r Hogg, No. 16 Paternoster Row' (London).

Nice copy on thick paper. Some smudging along left and top borders.

18 x 22.5 cm

 

Wilson Lowry FRS (January 24, 1762 – June 23, 1824) was English engraver.

He was born at Whitehaven, Cumberland, the son of Strickland Lowry, a portrait painter. The family settled in Worcester, and Wilson Lowry, as a boy, left home to work as a house painter in London and Arundel, Sussex. On returning home is received some instruction in engraving from a local craftsman.

He went to London at the age of 18 with an introduction to the print seller John Boydell, who gave him work and introduced him to William Blizard, the surgeon. Blizard encouraged Lowry to become a surgeon and for four years he undertook training, but abandoned it.

Lowry received training at the Royal Academy and worked for a number of engravers, as well as Boydell. Lowry developed a number of special instruments to assist his work: about 1790 he devised a ruling machine; in 1801 a device for generating elliptical curves; in 1806 another for making perspective drawings. Lowry was the first engraver to use diamond points and to discover the composition of a corrosive fluid for biting the lines into steel plates.

Lowry specialised in making engraving of architectural and mechanical topics, and excelled in perspective views of machinery.

 

Englefield House is an Elizabethan country house with surrounding estate at Englefield in the English county of Berkshire, owned by the Benyon family.

The present house was erected before 1558. There were substantial alterations by Thomas Hopper in the 1820s.

Englefield House was the home of the Englefield family, supposedly from the time of King Edgar. Sir Thomas Englefield was the Speaker of the House of Commons. In 1559, the house was confiscated from Thomas Englefield's grandson, Sir Francis Englefield, a servant of the Catholic Queen Mary, for "consorting with [the] enemies" of the new Protestant monarch, Elizabeth I.

Popular local tradition is that the Queen granted Englefield to her spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, although there is no evidence of this. After a succession of short-lived residents, the estate was eventually purchased by John Paulet, 5th Marquess of Winchester, famous for his Civil War defence of Basing House in Hampshire.[ He retired to Englefield at the Restoration and is buried in the parish church. From his Paulet descendants, the house passed, through marriage, to the Benyon family.

Wikipedia


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