page_title: Hugh Walpole
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Hugh Walpole / Biography / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Watercolour: "Jesus washing Peter's feet"
context_page_description: Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, CBE was an English novelist. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman, intended for a career in the church but drawn instead to writing. Among those who encouraged him were the authors Henry James and Arnold Bennett. His skill at scene-setting and vivid plots, as well as his high profile as a lecturer, brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. He was a best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s but has been largely neglected since his death.
  After his first novel, The Wooden Horse, in 1909, Walpole wrote prolifically, producing at least one book every year. He was a spontaneous story-teller, writing quickly to get all his ideas on paper, seldom revising. His first novel to achieve major success was his third, Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, a tragicomic story of a fatal clash between two schoolmasters. During the First World War he served in the Red Cross on the Russian-Austrian front, and worked in British propaganda in Petrograd and London. In the 1920s and 1930s Walpole was much in demand not only as a novelist but also as a lecturer on literature, making four exceptionally well-paid tours of North America.
context_section_description: Walpole was a keen and discerning collector of art. Sir Kenneth Clark called him "one of the three or four real patrons of art in this country, and of that small body he was perhaps the most generous and the most discriminating." He left fourteen works to the Tate Gallery and Fitzwilliam Museum, including paintings by Cézanne, Manet, Augustus John, Tissot and Renoir.
   Other artists represented in Walpole's collection were Epstein, Picasso, Gauguin, Sickert and Utrillo. After his death the finest works in his collection, other than those bequeathed, were exhibited in London during April and May 1945; the exhibition also included works by Constable, Turner and Rodin.
  Sadleir notes how Walpole's considerable income enabled him to indulge not only his love of art and of old books and manuscripts, but also philanthropy, particularly towards younger writers. Although Walpole enjoyed the limelight, he was secretive about his many acts of generosity to younger writers, with both encouragement and financial help. After his death some idea of the scale of his generosity was discovered. Osbert Sitwell commented, "I don't think there was any younger writer of any worth who has not at one time or another received kindness of an active kind, and at a crucial moment, from Hugh". Hart-Davis lists thirty-eight authors from whom letters of gratitude were found among Walpole's correspondence; Sadleir writes of Walpole's "generous kindness to literary aspirants and to writers fallen on evil days ... by immediate financial assistance, by prefaces freely supplied or by collaboration volunteered, by introductions and recommendations to likely publishers, Walpole relieved the distresses of authorship to a degree which will never be fully known." Agate, though himself the recipient of Walpole's generosity on occasion, thought it sometimes went too far: "Mr Walpole's large-heartedness gets him into all kinds of trouble. He is an inveterate patter. He pats on the back young men whom sterner critics would knock down, because even in fantastic incompetence he perceives the good intention. No art or artist is safe from Mr Walpole's benevolence".
  In his adopted home of Keswick a section of the town museum was dedicated to Walpole's memory in 1949, with manuscripts, correspondence, paintings and sculpture from Brackenburn, donated by his sister and brother.
caption: Part of Walpole's bequests to the nation: Ford Madox Brown's Jesus washing Peter's feet
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