Author: Hoare, Prince
Biography:
HOARE, Prince (1755-1834: ODNB)
The son of Elizabeth (Barker) and William Hoare, he was baptised at Bath, Somerset, on 9 Oct. 1755. His father was a well known painter and Royal Academician, and his uncle—also named Prince Hoare—a sculptor. He attended the Bath grammar school and followed in his father’s footsteps, enrolling at the Royal Academy in 1772 and visiting Rome for further study 1776-80. Although he did continue to work as an artist, with paintings exhibited in 1781-5, he soon turned to the stage and produced many “musical entertainments,” “operas” (notably Dido, Queen of Carthage, 1792), “musical farces,” and even a “musical romance” (Mahmoud, 1796). There were also regular comedies, farces, a tragedy, and adaptations. In 1799 the Royal Academy appointed him its honorary foreign secretary, under which charge he published correspondence between academies in Britain and on the Continent and Academic Annals of Painting (1805). He was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the Royal Society of Literature, to which he left his library. Something of an outlier among his publications is his edition of Memoirs of Granville Sharp, Esq. (1820) commissioned by the African Institution and Sharp’s family. The abolitionist had been a close friend of Hoare. In his later years he settled in Brighton, Sussex, where he died at his home on Clarence Place on 22 Dec. 1834. He was buried in the graveyard of St. Nicholas, Chislehurst, Kent, on 1 Jan 1835. (ODNB 23 Aug. 2022; findmypast.com 23 Aug. 2022; LES 25 Dec. 1834; Bell’s New Weekly Messenger 28 Dec. 1834) HJ