GIMCRACK: A Rake's Progress - Tapa dura

Gimcrack: a rake's progress

Hardcover. Condición: As New. Dust Jacket Included. 1st Edition. Fine copy in dustwrapper. Edition limited to 250 numbered copies; smartly designed by Libanus Press. The full, rackety, short life of Kenneth Mackenzie (1744-1781), first and last Earl of Seaforth in the new creation, who died of scurvy on the way to Madras with his regiment. "Poor Seaforth," wrote Joseph Banks to William Hamilton, "he went off suddenly, & was drunk when he died. It would have been extraordinary luck if he had been sober as it was for some time his custom to Keep up a regular fire of Drams day & night . . ." "The colourful adventures of an eighteenth-century playboy, inspired by clues in the paintings he commissioned," promises the publisher's blurb. "Dandy, swordsman and madcap, musician, connoisseur and lady's man, the last EARL OF SEAFORTH was Chief of the Clan Mackenzie, M.P. for Caithness and Colonel of his Highland regiment. Grandson of an attainted Jacobite, he was educated on the Grand Tour, and taken up by libertines and gamblers who gave him the nickname Gimcrack - because he was short and fast, like the winning stallion immortalised by Stubbs. As a child of the Enlightenment he climbed volcanoes with William Hamilton, entertained the boy Mozart at home in Naples, took part in a bizarre scientific experiment with Joseph Banks, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society. In hot pursuit of the freer pleasures of the age, he frequented the brothels of Covent Garden, caroused with the Dilettanti, and secretly married a fashionable courtesan made famous by Joshua Reynolds. But finding no firm purpose in life he declined into drink and debt - and a tragic death at sea, still in his thirties.". Nº de ref. del artículo: 6eB800047

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