Everything Curious
The British Library Manuscript Department is a Mecca for many a
local historian. Its unrivalled collections of private papers and topographical
drawings shed light on every corner of Britain. For some though London may be a
long journey away. The
British Library's Online Gallery is good news for them. This exciting
initiative aims to make 100,000 images and sounds from the British Library
available online.
Among its pleasures is the astonishing assemblage of drawings by Samuel Hieronymous Grimm. He was a Swiss artist who started his career with dramatic Alpine scenes, sketched his way through France and then settled in England in 1768. Here he found keen antiquarians in need of his services. After Grose's Antiquities of England and Wales was published in 1773 with Grimm's illustrations, he was much in demand as a topographical artist.
His greatest patron was Dr Richard Kaye, an able
cleric who rose from country parson to Dean of Lincoln. Each step up the ladder
meant a new part of the country to explore, with Grimm at his side, quiet and
unobtrusive, making sketch after sketch in Indian ink. In pursuit of
'everything curious', the scholarly Dr. Kaye amassed over two and a half
thousand drawings by Grimm, the bulk of which he bequeathed to the British
Museum. They are now in the British Library, together with some nine hundred
scenes of Sussex drawn by Grimm for the lawyer and antiquarian Sir William
Burrell. When Grimm died in 1794, he left images of at least thirty-five
English shires and every county in Wales.
Grimm's drawings have a realism and immediacy so often missing from the stiff engravings and posed portraits of the period. Ordinary people wander across his sketches. He captures a cricket match, or sedan chairmen celebrating an election. When Kaye was the Rector of Kirkby in Ashfield, Grimm recorded the boys and girls of Kirkby going in neat procession to church. Venerable churches figure often in his sketchbooks, but his eye could also be caught by a building only half-up. We see Georgian elegance fresh out of the scaffolding. Grimm gives us a view of Georgian life like no other. He is the observer of the everyday.
Grimm records a lost landscape. What were in his day
villages around London are now part of the spreading metropolis. Grimm's views
of a rural Hampstead, Highgate or Marylebone seem a world away. Buildings long
gone emerge from Grimm's sketchbooks in fascinating detail. Notice the stocks
in front of the old town hall at Painswick.
The collection has long been a treasure trove for researchers. Now anyone with access to the Internet will have a Grimm's-eye peephole into the past.
Further reading
- Rotha Mary Clay, Samuel Hieronymous Grimm of Burgdorf in Switzerland (Faber and Faber: London 1939).
- Paul Joyner, Samuel Hieronymous Grimm: Views in Wales (National Library of Wales 1983).
- British Museum, Catalogue of the Manuscript Maps, Charts and Plans, and of the Topographical Drawings in the British Museum, vol. 2 (1844).
- Jean Manco, A Grimm View of Bath, Bath City Life (Summer 1993).