Further Daubuz

John Theophilus Daubuz, the bachelor brother of Lewis Charles Daubuz, is a fascinating but fugitive figure. He was described in contemporaneous London directories as “a merchant of New Broad Street” or “Finsbury-circus.” In 1818, he was listed as a sheriff in the counties of London and Middlesex (“Incidents, Promotions, Births, marriages, Deaths, &c., in London and Middlesex,” The New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register, March 1, 1818, p. 166.) From its establishment in 1824, he was a director of the Indemnity Mutual Marine Assurance Society, one of the first insurance companies set up in direct competition with Lloyd’s upon the breaking of their monopoly in the City of London. And in the same year, only months before its liquidation, he was “Treasurer to the Levant Company,” in which capacity he handled charitable subscriptions for the relief of sufferers from the Syrian Earthquake on August 13, 1822, in which 20,000 people lost their lives. (John Barker, Syria and Egypt Under the Last Five Sultans of Turkey: Being Experiences, During the Fifty Years, of Mr. Consul-General Barker…, London: Tinsley, 1876, Vol. I, pp. 329–330.)

Although he appears to have been inactive in the Regency art market we know that John Theophilus Daubuz was a distinguished book-collector. He was listed among the subscribers to John Rutter’s de luxe Delineations of Fonthill and Its Abbey (London: Charles Knight & Co., etc., 1823) and was remembered as recently as 1908 in William Carew Hazlitt’s Roll of Honour: A Calendar of the Names of Over 17,000 Men and Women Who Throughout the British Isles and in Our Early Colonies Have Collected Mss. and Printed Books from the XIVth to the XIXth Century (London: Barnard Quaritch, 1908, p. 57).

However, Mr. Daubuz is conspicuous for having consigned to an auction sale at Christie’s in Pall Mall, on March 30, 1805, a group of “Italian Pictures, of the very distinguished class, recently consigned from Italy,” more specifically, it seems, acquired indirectly and rather mysteriously from the Palazzo Barberini in Rome (lots 6–38). At this date Prince Carlo Barberini-Colonna, Prince of Palestrina and Duke of Montelibretti (1735–1819), was inclined to seize any opportunity to sell anything to anyone, but Mr. Daubuz probably got this stash of paintings through an intermediary, almost certainly in Paris, during the brief period following the Peace of Amiens when Britain and France were not at war (1802–03). Travel from England to the continent before and after this brief spell was impossible, and, during it, travel beyond Paris was more or less practically so.

Despite this spectacular provenance, and the wildly ambitious attributions of almost every picture, all but a very few were left unsold. It may well be that the London trade conspired to lock out this newcomer to the art market, and punish him.

According to the Getty Provenance Index, it seems likely that after this debacle Mr. Daubuz either off-loaded his Barberini pictures somewhere on the continent, or else put them in the attic or a box room at Leyton. A few may well have passed with the rest of his chattels to Brother Charles.

In any case, Mr. Daubuz’s lots at that sale purported to include (1) a portrait of Abramo Federici by Francesco Apollodoro; (2) a Madonna and child by Federico Barocci; (3) an italianate landscape by Jan Both; (3) a Madonna and child by Guido Cagnacci (£31 10s); (4) and (5) a St. John the Evangelist and a companion St. Matthew by Simone Cantarini (Simone da Pesaro); (6) a wooded landscape by Claude; (7) and (8) “a pair of pleasing landscapes and figures” by Adriaen van Diest (£6 15s); (9) a St. Jerome by Carlo Dolci; (10) a portrait of “an abbess” by Sir Anthony van Dyck; (11) a portrait of a woman by Lavinia Fontana; (12) and (13) two portraits, a man and a woman by Giorgione; (14) a landscape with cattle by Johannes Glauber (£6 6s); (15) an estuarine landscape by Jan van Goyen (£8); (16) (17) (18) and (19) a St. Joseph and a companion Madonna, an infant St. John the Baptist, and a St. Anthony of Padua—all by Guercino; (20) a portrait by Bartholomaeus van der Helst, and the pièce de résistance, (21) Salome, the Daughter of Herodias, with the Head of St. John the Baptist, by Leonardo da Vinci. None of these painting may now be indentified with any degree of certainty.

The date of Mr. Daubuz’s unfortunate, possibly damaging entrée to Christie’s coincides almost exactly with his purchase of “The Great House” at Leyton. According to the Reverend John Kennedy:

This house was built by Sir Fisher Tench, Bart., who lived in it till he died—October 31st, 1736, aged 63. The Rev. John Strype describes it thus:—“Of more modern erection are the Magnificent and beautiful seat & habitation of the late Sir Fisher Tench, Bart., adorned with large and most delightful gardens, plantations, walks, groves, mounts, summerhouses & pleasant canals stored with fish and fowl, and curious vistoes & prospect, which upon the death of Sir Nathaniel Tench, son of Sir Fisher, came to his sister Jane Tench, who married Mr. Sowerby; and his children have very lately sold it to Mr. John Stanniland of London, Harberdasher; as also the fair & pleasant tho’ lowly situated Manor House of Leyton.”
This house originally had two wings, from one of which the cupola now on the tower of the parish Church was taken. The present front of the house was originally the back; the present High Road and the County Cricket Ground being fields attached thereto. The High Road then followed nearly the line of the present Scott’s Road, the estate on that side extending as far as the Philli-Brook, which divided it from the Phillibrook estate.
In 175o it was purchased by Thomas Oliver, Esq., a West Indian Merchant, and Alderman of London…In 18o5 John Theophilus Daubuz bought the Great House Estate from the heirs of Alderman Oliver for £5,8oo. Mr. Daubuz was of French extraction, his ancestors having come to this country at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes…Mr. Daubuz died in 1831 [sic], leaving his estate to his elder daughter [sic], Ann Hand Mary Daubuz, with the exception of the present Grove House, and two fields adjoining it, which he left to his younger sister, Magdalen Daubuz. Ann Hand Mary Daubuz died in 1836, leaving her estate to her married brother, Lewis Charles Daubuz, of Truro; he lived with his daughter at the Great House till he died in 1839. His two sons, Charles Lewis and William, now inherited it, and by them it was let first in 184o to Stephen Cattley, a Russian Merchant, who with his family lived in it till about 1845, when it was let to Mr. Kennard, and after him it was let as a school to Mr. Arnold, a relative of Dr. Arnold, of Rugby. In 1855 it was a boarding house, under the management of Mr. Dovey. From 1858 to 186o it was inhabited by James Daubuz, the eldest son of Lewis Charles Daubuz; soon after this date it was rented by Mrs. Davey (then Woods), and a few years after she purchased it; and now it is used by her as a private lunatic asylum. (A History of the Parish of Leyton, Essex, Leyton: Phelp Brothers, High Road, 1894, pp. 327–329.)

This passage was neatly plagiarized a few years later by the author of a privately circulated pamphlet, with carefully barbed embellishments, as follows:

John Theophilus Daubuz bought the house and lands from the heirs of Thomas Oliver for £5,800, and it is probable that about this date [1805] the extensive alterations carried out in the style of the Brothers Adam, were made. Mr. Daubuz was of French extraction, his ancestors having come to this country at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). Apparently something of a Philistine he (among other alterations) converted the two fine panelled rooms for use as domestic offices, had much of the panelling in other rooms stripped from the walls, which were canvassed and papered, and the remainder of the woodwork including the staircase and hall, painted stone colour! He is also credited in the Parish Records with blocking church improvements which threatened encroachment on his family pew…[Soon after 1860] the house now became a Private Lunatic Asylum (a fate which has helped to preserve many a fine mansion in districts which have seen better days) and as such it continued to be used until 1896. After remaining in the market for some time it has now been acquired by Mr. Miles and seems likely to share the fate of the Manor House, Leyton Grange, and other fine houses destroyed long since to furnish accommodation for the housing of the ever-increasing population of London. Should a purchaser be found there is a chance of reprieve, as although the greater part of the extensive grounds are already built over, having in fact furnished space for the formation of several new roads, the house still stands and is offered for sale as a club or institution, for which purpose it is well adapted. It is to be hoped that it may yet be spared—Greater London can ill afford to lose such relics of times that are past. (The Great House, Leyton, by Edward Gunn, Architect. Being the Fourth Monograph of the Committee for the Survey of the Memorials of Greater London, London: E. Arnold, S. Buckley, 1903, pp. 15–16.)

Like many other landowners, in 1830 Mr. Daubuz was directly affected at Leyton by the so-called Swing Riots. Several of his haystacks at Leyton were set on fire. The following notice duly appeared in the London Gazette:

Whitehall, January 25, 1831. Whereas a reward of one thousand pounds was offered in the London Gazette, of the 21st of December last, to be paid by John Theophilus Daubuz…to any person giving such information as should cause the apprehension and conviction of the person or persons who, on the night of the 14th of the said month of December, set fire to a stack or stacks on the premises of the said John Theophilus Daubuz, at Low Leyton, in the county of Essex; and whereas no information hath been obtained tending to the discovery of such offenders; notice is hereby given, that the said John Theophilus Daubuz hath withdrawn, and doth hereby withdraw, the aforesaid offer of reward, and that the same will not be paid after the date hereof. (No. 18772, February 1, 1831, p. 196.)

Since Leyton eventually passed from John Theophilus Daubuz to Lewis Charles Daubuz, and thence to the elder brothers of John Claude Daubuz, sometime Rector of Creed in the Diocese of Truro, it is impossible to know whether many of the chattels found their way to Cornwall. It seems likely that the replica of Gainsborough’s The Cottage Door came into Mr. Daubuz’s possession by that route, because this is the only even remotely plausible context in which he came to own it.

In 1836, John Theophilus Daubuz was listed as a Justice for the Peace in the County of Essex.

More Daubuz

The Daubuz family were Huguenot refugees from France. According to Susan E. Gay (Old Falmouth: The Story of the Town from the Days of the Killigrews to the Earliest Part of the 19th Century, London: Headley Brothers, 1903, p. 74):

Theophilus Daubuz, of Huguenot descent, came to Falmouth about 1730–1, and lived in a house belonging to Dr. Russell, of Truro, (presumably one of the Russells of Falmouth), situated, I believe, at or near the Market Strand. In 1763 he obtained land near Arwenack, with a view of building a “handsome house, and stable, with a small garden,” but possibly changed his plans, as no house of that date seems to have been erected there. Among other things Mr. Daubuz started in 1744 a privateer, but after a two months cruise, “in which she took only two Prizes and pillaged a little Town on ye Coast of Spain, ye whole booty not worth a £1,000,” she returned. This remark shows the profitable nature of privateering, and the reason why it was so much indulged in by all nations, the old raiding instincts of our forefathers not having wholly died out in the greater enlightenment of our own days. In the same year Mr. Daubuz married a “Miss Greene, a Grand-daughter of Mr. Jones, about half his age,” who died eight weeks after the wedding. He projected a Distillery Company, the distiller being a friend or relation, but I do not know if it succeeded. One of the Daubuz family lived in Falmouth as late as 1788.

Evidently the distillery did succeed, thanks to Miss Greene’s usefully unspent dowry; the proceeds of that brief visit to that little town on the coast of Spain, and the shrewd investment in land at Arwenack. Subsequent generations were comfortably prosperous.

The first generation of Daubuzes that concerns us is that of Lewis Charles Daubuz, whose delightful obituary appeared in 1840 in the Gentleman’s Magazine:

Lewis Charles Daubuz, Esq.
Dec. 15. At his seat, Leyton, in Essex, in the
85th year of his age, Lewis Charles Daubuz, Esq.

The greater part of his long and useful life was spent in Truro [Cornwall], where he must have resided not less than half a century; but his birth-place we believe was Falmouth. Not many years since he succeeded to a large property, by the will of his younger brother, John [Theophilus] Daubuz, esq. who, dying a bachelor, bequeathed his mansion and estate of Leyton, to his second sister, the late Miss Anne Daubuz, for her life; a large freehold property, with a handsome country residence in Sussex, to his eldest nephew, James Daubuz, esq. and the great bulk of his chattel property, with the reversion of Leyton, to the gentleman now deceased. When Mr. Daubuz quitted Truro for Leyton, some time after the death of his sister Miss Anne Daubuz, the most sincere and general regret was expressed by the inhabitants,—for at the age of more than fourscore years he retained no small remains of the energy and sprightliness of youth; and all classes were fully sensible of the great loss they were about to sustain. In person he so remarkably resembled the Duke of Wellington, that he was often, when among strangers, mistaken for His Grace, whom he likewise, in a different sphere, no less resembled in loyalty and devotion to his country. Connected extensively in business, from early life, with distant quarters of the globe, he possessed the means of better information than most men; and few have brought a sounder judgment to bear upon the various interests, whether political or commercial, of the British Empire. In his intercourse with the private circle of his friends, he was uniformly cheerful and communicative: he was the active promoter of every Institution which he deemed for the benefit of society, particularly of those established for the propagation of sound religion; and, in addition to his liberal subscription to public charities, he was the never-failing friend, privately and unostentatiously, of the fatherless and widows in their affliction; he was worthy, in short, of the stock from whence he sprang, which was that of a French Protestant family of great respectability, who were cruelly compelled, with thousands of sufferers in the same religious cause, to quit their native country, on the perfidious revocation of the Edict of Nantes, by that haughty and bigoted tyrant, Louis the Fourteenth. The Rev. Charles Daubuz, Vicar of Brotherton, Cheshire, and author of a learned dissertation on the Prophecies [Caroli Daubuz presbyteri & A.M. Pro testimonio Flavii Josephi de Jesu Christo libri duo: quorum priore de variâ ejus fortunò usuque, necnon auctoris consilio in eo conscribendo pertractatur, posteriore verò ex stylo ac dicendi modo & sensu, ejus veritas comprobatur / cum præfatione Johannis Ernesti Grabe. Londini [London]: Typis W. B. impensis verò R. Sare in Porticu Hospitii Grayensis Australi, 1706.], was, we believe, Mr. Daubuz’s grandfather; his great work is still appealed to as of the highest authority, and he is quoted by D’Oyley [sic] and Mant, as among the most eminent commentators on the Bible [Holy Bible...arranged by George D’Oyly and Richard Mant. London: 1813]. Mr. Daubuz married Wilmot, the youngest but one of the five extraordinarily beautiful daughters of William Arundell Harris, esq., of Keneggie, near Penzance, grandfather of the present Mr. [W. A. H.] Arundell, of Lifton Park,—this most charitable and amiable lady died at Truro many years since. His eldest sister, Mrs. Magdalen Daubuz, is still living in the neighbourhood of Leyton, full of years and good deeds. Mr. Daubuz has also left behind him four sons and two daughters, with several grandchildren.

I find it heartening, even touching, to know that the Reverend John Claude Daubuz, sometime Rector of Creed in the Diocese of Truro was the third son of Wilmot, that “most charitable and amiable” second-youngest daughter of Mr. Harris, and that in her prime, like her four sisters, she was extraordinarily beautiful.

Mr. Daubuz

A good proportion of my working life is spent immersed in what we in art museums call “provenance research,” in other words the history of the ownership of individual works of art, usually but not always those in our care. Lately, this work has assumed considerable importance owing to the grim legacy of the Nazis who (apart from the obvious) also systematically stole enormous quantities of cultural property from Jewish families, in due course propelling much of it thence to the postwar international art market, and effectively thus bequeathing to future generations the task of tracing, correctly identifying, and, with luck, restoring it to their surviving descendants. Alas, contrary to certain impressions created by the media, we do not often succeed in bringing about such happy reunions, but in the course of our inquiries we do encounter intriguing people and stories somewhat arbitrarily joined by the common thread of custody and stewardship, sometimes over the course of several centuries.

Unlike people, objects travel light. Today we leave in our wake a ridiculous confetti of telephone records, flight bookings, receipts, tax returns, correspondence, and every conceivable kind of documentation with which our path through life may be plotted with surprising accuracy, often these days for the benefit of British tabloid newspapers. By contrast, it can be exceedingly difficult to establish that such-and-such a picture listed in an old inventory as Portrait of a Woman is one and the same as the painting we are just now attempting to pin on a particular mid-eighteenth-century sale or owner. At times we can be more fortunate, as for example when the line in that old inventory expands helpfully into Portrait of a Woman Wearing Yellow Shoes, and Caressing With Her Left Hand the Wing of a Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo. If not exactly a smoking gun, this at least confines our search to a mercifully small subgroup of pictures in which, say, a Restoration beauty poses with a readily identifiable species of parrot, such that the likelihood of more than one such sitter wearing yellow shoes is no higher than being struck by an asteroid on New Haven Green. In other words I suppose it could happen, but it seems unlikely.

Such random thoughts were this morning prompted by this good replica of The Cottage Door by Thomas Gainsborough, which for about 100 years in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries passed through three generations of the naturalized Huguenot family of Daubuz in Cornwall, in the west country of England: in particular the Reverend John Claude Daubuz, sometime Rector of Creed in the Diocese of Truro, who sits squarely in the middle. The original painting is in the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif.

Mr. Daubuz was the third son of Lewis Charles Daubuz, a mercantile gentleman of ample but not limitless means. John Claude matriculated on May 2, 1821, aged seventeen, and duly went up to Exeter College, Oxford, almost certainly predestined for Holy Orders—having presumably shown no early aptitude for deployment in the Royal Navy, or suitability for an articled clerkship, which at this date were the two other useful trajectories for relatively impecunious younger sons.

After four years, rather longer than usual, and only by the skin of his teeth, young Mr. Daubuz took out his degree, and was in 1828 ordained priest by the Right Reverend George Henry Law, Bishop of Bath and Wells.

In 1836, Mr. Daubuz married Mary Uzella, the daughter of a wealthy banker, William Foster, of Lanwithan Manor, Lostwithiel. On their wedding day Mr. and Mrs. Daubuz signed a deed according to which they became the beneficiaries of a substantial trust established for her benefit by Mr. Foster. That trust was still in a robust state of health almost fifty years later—earning nearly exactly the same modest but rock-solid rate of interest; there were few if any financial bubbles in Victorian Britain. The healthy state of Mrs. Daubuz’s finances, as indeed the robust state of their physical health also, made it possible for Mr. Daubuz to live undisturbed as Rector of Creed from 1829 to 1857, presumably for most of that nearly thirty-year period occupying a tranquil, plain, unpretentious whitewashed Cornish country house—the ne plus ultra of a comfortable Georgian rectory. It is set on a slight rise, surrounded by a mature park and garden. I have seen it.

At this date the Oxford Movement made little impact on the life of the parish of Creed, or the local deanery. Indeed I daresay word of it only occasionally reached the Lord Bishop’s palace in Truro, creating uneasiness. Evidently Mr. Daubuz took the trouble to preach every few years, and at roughly the same intervals presided over what was at that time known as “the Lord’s Supper”—in other words only when successive curates either went missing, died, or were incapacitated by shingles, or the flux.

In between times Mr. Daubuz published nothing; filled no other public office; served on no jury; managed to avoid any obligation arising from a justiceship of the peace or any minor magistracy that might otherwise have required the attention of the local squire and/or parson; scrupulously refrained from becoming directly involved in the affairs of his rapidly multiplying tribe of children, and otherwise lived quietly as a normal English country clergyman of means—from time to time dispensing appropriately modest sums in charity to old soldiers, destitute widows, and the poorest of his tenants, perhaps stimulated in that direction by this very picture.

“St. Creed” (or St. Crida) is a beautiful old parish church, with a distinguished set of seventeenth-century bronze bells.

At great length, after he relinquished the living of Creed, Mr. and Mrs. Daubuz retired to Killiow House, near Truro. Killiow is now a golf club, but by all accounts it was an exceedingly ancient manor, and the pretty old Georgian house that survives today was wholly transformed during the Regency by Mr. Daubuz’s father. John Claude Daubuz made a plucky effort to introduce pike into one of the artificial ponds he built at Killiow, but they died out soon afterwards. This is a valuable hint towards what was probably Mr. Daubuz’s preferred occupation: fishing. Certainly his only institutional affiliation, apart from the Church of England, seems to have been with the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, and joining it as an ordinary member may have been a shrewd method of preparing to build his ponds.

Having successfully avoided any form of intellectual stimulus for upwards of fifty years, in peaceful retirement Mr. Daubuz discovered the pleasures of controversialism. His first tract was published locally in Truro by Netherton and Worth in 1879, and was entitled The Origin and Nature of Man: His Fallen State: His Redemption: How Effected, and By Whom. This attracted some attention in the press, specifically a bold response by some bright spark, perhaps an ambitious young clergyman, a self-appointed new broom, to which, after two years of rumination, Mr. Daubuz cautiously replied with A Defence and Explanation of a Treatise on the “Origin and Nature of Man,” that is, “A reply by J. Daubuz to a critique in the newspaper the Rock of his The Origin and Nature of Man,” and, at length adding to these, within only a few months of his death on September 24, 1883, some final Thoughts on the Creation of the World, and the Fall of Man. There was nothing surprising, new, flamboyant, or even particularly scholarly here, except a Mr. Septimus Harding-like goodness, dependability, and a dutiful determination, perhaps, to tow the Lord Bishop’s line.

Old Mrs. Daubuz was still going strong in 1885, when, recently widowed, she appeared in her own right as an entry in Edward Walford’s The County Families of the United Kingdom, though hers is one of many marked with a cross, apparently indicating “that the family to whose name it is prefixed have failed to supply the editor with full and satisfactory information in time for publication.” This is a typical Walford put-down, but may also suggest that Mrs. Daubuz and her family were in fact admirably un-preoccupied by aspirational matters of pedigree.

Now I should hasten to underline that no rational person would hold up Mr. Daubuz as a plausible model for ordained ministry today. His little world is as distant from ours as the county town of Truro is as far from New Haven, Conn. Yet I confess I have grown to like him. He wore no mask, and carried no mantle of high office. He wrote little, most probably said even less, and kept himself to himself. He was certainly not a flashy art collector. He merely inherited this replica of the painting by Gainsborough that led me to Mr. Daubuz in the first place, and in the end, when he expired peacefully at the great age of 78 or 79, he bequeathed it to his eldest son and namesake, along with much of the rest of his estate.

However, in between, Mr. Daubuz lent his picture, together with A Portrait of the Artist as a Beggar by Jan Steen, to the Royal Academy Exhibition of the Works of the Old Masters at Burlington House in Piccadilly, presumably leaving for a period of four or five months two rather conspicuous holes on the flocked walls of his dining room. Having passed into his care unsought, evidently he made sure that the painting was properly looked after—it is today in good if not pristine state—and generously agreed to share his picture with an interested public when, to his infinite surprise, the Royal Academy begged leave to borrow it. Mr. Daubuz rarely traveled up to London, and one can only imagine the bemusement with which he watched his pictures being loaded into the cart, then rattle alarmingly down his drive en route for Falmouth and an insubstantial cutter bound for Gravesend.

By any measure Mr. Daubuz’s footprint was exceedingly light. His achievements were modest; indeed his impact upon his parish, his diocese, and his county were, as far as one can tell, practically zero. Yet it is also true that he did no discernible damage, acquired no enemies, raised no eyebrows, shook no foundations, left his peaceful world essentially as he found it, and passed out of the sight of men without reproach. He maintained his wife’s estate, and did not exploit it other than for the benefit of her heirs, their posterity. It was said that Mr. Daubuz bore a striking physical resemblance to the Duke of Wellington, but unlike His Grace he never had anybody flogged for insubordination, tempting though it may have been to resort to that radical measure when an under-gardener at Killiow was caught swiping one of his beloved pike.

Lately I have observed in quite a different context how ordinary people who lived and died in the distant past have, at times, the knack of swimming from faintness into vivid focus—thanks in this instance to a red beeswax seal bearing the arms of the family of Lewis Charles Daubuz, and a fragile brown scrap of paper with an explanatory note in pen and black ink that is still firmly glued to the back of the stretcher. By and by, despite their obscurity, such men and women may even strike one as extraordinary. Of course, it helps mightily if, once upon a time, you were lucky enough to be guided through the first few decades of your own life by a gentleman as dutiful and unostentatious as the Reverend Mr. Daubuz. Such are the emotional roots of any practicing historian, and, as this Eastertide rapidly approaches, I suspect they help to point us in the right direction.