Author: Coyte, Joseph William
Biography:
COYTE, Joseph William (b 1746: ancestry.co.uk)
Born on 3 Sept. 1746 and baptised at St. Anne’s, Soho, on 21 Sept., he was the son of George Coyte, a silversmith and jeweller, and his first wife Mary Bison. They had married in London on 3 Jan. 1743. George was a son of the Rev. William Coyte, rector of Hintlesham, Brantham, and East Bergholt in Suffolk, and a friend of Thomas Gainsborough who painted his portrait. He had apprenticed in Suffolk in 1731 before moving to London where he eventually established premises in Bridge Street, Covent Garden. Joseph Coyte was apprenticed to his father in 1762. (On 3 July 1762 at St. George’s, Hanover Square, George Coyte married for a second time but no death record for his first wife, Joseph’s mother, has been found.) He may be the Joseph Coyte who married Mary Luffe at St. Marylebone on 15 Jan. 1778. George Coyte died in Apr. 1782, having married his housekeeper, Mary Coston, shortly before his death; she and Joseph were joint inheritors by the terms of his 1780 will which left his stock in trade to Joseph. Nothing more is known of Joseph Coyte although an anecdotal account of him from 1793 survives in Robert Southey’s memoir of his early life. It describes Coyte as a poor engraver who took pride in composing verses extemporaneously but who earned “a miserable livelihood for his family.” Coyte’s 1811 A Cockney's Adventures, During a Ramble into the Country, received hostile reviews. (ancestry.co.uk 28 Apr. 2024; Register Book of Marriages Belonging to the Parish of St. George, Hanover Square [1886]; ACAD; Elaine Barr, “Gainsborough and the Silversmith,” Burlington Magazine 119 [Feb. 1977], 113-15; C. C. Southey, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey [1849]) SR