Joshua Reynolds Horace Walpole, 1756
© National Portrait Gallery, London
(1719-1797)
'if everyone shared my opinion of you, you would be the first man, not just in England, but in the universe. That's not flattery! It is your spirit, only in you are such talents and such extreme goodness united.'
Madame du Deffand
Walpole was a writer and aesthete, the youngest son of the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he began collecting during his Grand Tour of Europe. After the death of his father in 1747 he inherited a house in Twickenham which he transformed into a masterpiece of Gothic Revival architecture, Strawberry Hill.