National Trust, Anglesey Abbey

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Anglesey Abbey, a former Augustinian priory near to Newmarket, and its collections are essentially the creation of one man, Urban Huttleston Broughton (1896–1966), 1st Lord Fairhaven. In 1926 he and his younger brother Henry, later 2nd Baron Fairhaven, bought the house and had Sidney Parvin restore it in a conservative but opulent style. Their father had made a fortune as a mining and railway engineer in the US between 1887 and 1912 but Huttleston’s taste for British painting – including oil sketches by William Etty, a rare coastal scene by Gainsborough, an exotic William Hodges of Tahiti, and a particularly fine Bonington of a coastal scene in Northern France, as well as a plethora of Pethers – seems to have been formed partly by his mother. She had bought Constable’s 'The Embarkation of George IV from Whitehall: The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, 1817', which now hangs in the library. He had been stationed at Windsor during the First World War which inspired him to buy views of the Castle, eventually assembling over 100 paintings, 150 watercolours and drawings, and 500 engravings, recording its development over three and a half centuries. After the War, he expanded his horizons to include Old Masters like Claude Lorrain and notably Cuyp’s 'Saint Philip Baptising the Ethiopian Eunuch'.

Quy Road, Lode, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire CB25 9EJ England

angleseyabbey@nationaltrust.org.uk

01223 810080

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/Anglesey-Abbey/