William Beckford, collector.(Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, New York, New York)(Brief Article)

William Beckford was one of Britain's most flamboyant eccentrics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was known not only because of his great wealth but also through his writings, astute patronage, insatiable collecting, and scandalous bisexual liaisons. His fleeting monument to himself in Wiltshire, Fonthill Abbey (which fell down during his lifetime), was a vast house in the Gothic revival style surmounted by a three-hundred-foot-tall spire. It was the talk of the town in its day because it was among the first structures in the Gothic style and its cathedral-like appearance was a radical departure from the more classical country seats then scattered throughout England. Immense as it was, it was nonetheless crammed with rare artworks and precious objects that few saw because Beckford was a social outcast.

Beckford inherited his wealth, which his forebears had amassed from enormous sugar plantations in Jamaica. His somewhat less than aristocratic social status on his father's side (he was perceived as nouveau riche) further reduced his own position when his homosexual dalliances became general knowledge. The scandal caused the withdrawal of the offer to make him a baron. Indeed, in 1785, shortly after the birth of his daughter, Susan Euphemia, the family was forced to retreat for a while to Switzerland. Yet when he opened Fonthill Abbey in 1822 in preparation for selling it and most of its contents at auction, 7,200 people, including half the British peerage, came to see what was inside.

A mere fraction of Beckford's immense holdings have been drawn together for an exhibition entitled William Beckford, 1760- 1844: An Eye for the Magnificent, which is on view at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture in New York City from October 18 to January 6,2002. The show makes clear that Beckford had an astonishing eye, and in the design of his interior schemes he was in the vanguard of fashion. The show presents more than 150 objects including paintings, drawings, gold and silver objects, European and Oriental porcelains, jade, and furniture.

Beckford traveled on the Continent frequently during the 1780s and 1790s and maintained residences in Lisbon and Paris as well as a town house in London. His family seat, Fonthill House, was being extensively refurbished during these years, but in 1807 he decided to pull it down ...