Author: GILPIN, William
Biography:
GILPIN, William (1724-1804: ODNB)
William Gilpin, generally identified with the concept of the “picturesque,” was born at Scaleby Castle, near Carlisle in Cumberland (now Cumbria), on 4 June 1724, and was baptised on 7 June. His parents were Matilda (Langstaffe) and Captain John Bernard Gilpin; his father was a noted amateur artist and his brother Sawrey had a successful career as a painter of animals. He was educated at St. Bees School near Whitehaven and then at Queen’s College, Oxford (matric. 1740, BA 1744, MA 1748), and was ordained deacon in 1746 and priest in 1748. On 5 May 1753 he married his cousin Margaret Gilpin in London. They had at least four children, two of whom died in infancy. After short-term appointments as curate of Irthington (1746) and minor canon of Carlisle cathedral (1752-3, 1758), he settled at Cheam in Surrey, where he took charge of a boys’ school (1753-77) and ran it successfully on progressive principles. The first of several biographical projects was his life of an ancestor, Bernard Gilpin, which appeared in 1752. Gilpin exercised his professional clerical responsibilities in the religious discipline of the school and in his role as vicar of Aspatrick (1775-7); publications on the catechism (1779) and on the New Testament (1790) reflected his pastoral work in those years. In 1777 he was called as vicar to Boldre in the New Forest, Hampshire, a living he held until 1788. In 1783 he was made a prebendary of Salisbury Cathedral, a post he held until his death. He died at Boldre on 5 Apr. 1804 and was buried in the churchyard on 13 Apr. Gilpin’s writings on aesthetics, which became very popular and ran to multiple editions, financed the building and endowment of two charity schools at Boldre in 1791. They included not only the Three Essays but also the anonymous Essay on Prints (1748) and Dialogue upon the Gardens . . . at Stowe (1748) and a set of illustrated tours of parts of the British Isles--the Wye Valley and parts of Wales (1782), the Lake District (1789), and the Scottish Highlands (1800). (ODNB 5 Aug. 2025; ancestry.com 5 Aug. 2025; findmypast.com 5 Aug. 2025; CCEd 5 Aug. 2025; Alumni Oxonienses) HJ