author
Henry Venn Lansdown
Best remembered for writing about William Beckford, this 19th-century English author also worked as a landscape painter and drawing teacher. His surviving reputation rests on a small but distinctive corner of literary and artistic life in Bath.
1 Audiobook
Recollections of the late William Beckford of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath
by Henry Venn Lansdown
About the author
Henry Venn Lansdown was a 19th-century English writer and artist, known above all for Recollections of the late William Beckford of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath. Records from Bath identify him as a landscape painter and teacher of drawing, and place his death in January 1860 at about age 54 or 55.
Although he is not a widely documented literary figure today, his name continues to appear through his Beckford memoir and later reprints of that work. That gives him a modest but interesting place in the cultural history of Bath, where art, collecting, and literary memory often overlapped.
Reliable biographical detail appears to be limited, so fuller accounts of his life are hard to confirm from readily available sources. What can be said with confidence is that he moved in the orbit of Bath's artistic world and is still remembered for preserving recollections connected with Beckford.