Context 158 - March 2019

46 C O N T E X T 1 5 8 : M A R C H 2 0 1 9 work was not much further advanced. Richard Fountaine’s biography, and the connections in his will, had proved elusive. Most of the stories that were thought to be fact proved to be the creation of a romantic novelist Halliwell Sutcliffe. Snippets of information Michael had found about Fountaine’s life could not be substantiated. There were no links among Fountaine’s connections to architects of note. Two things had emerged, however. One was that it was apparently not Fountaine himself who determined the style and architect of his Hospital. Fountaine’s will is lengthy, and pre- scriptive on many matters. But he leaves the decisions about the design of his memorial to others. The only instruction in his will was that the building should be ‘built in such a decent manner and proportion as the [trustees] shall seem (sic) meet and convenient.’ It also had emerged from a history of the village written by the noted topographer TD Whitaker in 1805 that Vanbrugh was unlikely to have been the architect. Whitaker says that the Hospital is in ‘Sir John Vanbrugh’s style’. Whitaker knew Linton very well – he had lived there for a time in the 1770s as a young man being prepared for Cambridge by the Rev Sheepshanks of Grassington. At that time, just 50 years after the Hospital’s construction, there would still have been people alive in the village who had witnessed its creation, and would certainly have recalled if the famous charismatic Vanbrugh had definitely been its author. Vanbrugh was, by this omission, almost certainly eliminated as architect. In late 2015, Michael therefore re-evaluated the research. He was also seriously ill, with a terminal diagnosis, and thought hard about whether to continue. He decided that, with my help, it was worth further effort. We divided the tasks between us, with him concentrating on the architectural study; I took on the biographical, social and legal research. For the architectural work, Michael undertook a detailed study of the main candidate architects – to look at where they were working, for whom and when – to see if the chronology, social con- text and geography made sense. Finally, he did a forensic, but perhaps old-fashioned, analysis of the elements of the building, to see if the hand of one particular practitioner could be perceived. The analysis of the elements of the building demonstrated that the author was probably one of the main suspects – Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor, Wakefield and William Etty – but it could have been any one of the four, or a combination of more than one. Study of their work between 1722 to the late 1720s proved more fruitful – Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor were active in the north of England then, but they were also extremely busy on other major projects in the south, and the involvement of either in what was an architectural miniature for a merchant family was likely to have been no more than initial ideas, and occasional input. Wakefield was a gentleman architect, who was not known ever to have designed for a client of lower social status than aristocracy or upper gentry; he was unlikely to have accepted a minor commission from a merchant family, and he would have worked, like Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor, with an executant architect. William Etty ofYork was of the highly respect- ed Etty dynasty of architects and builders. He worked with Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor at Castle Howard, with Vanbrugh at Seaton Delaval Hall, and with Wakefield on numerous projects. Etty was a respected architect in his own right, and was often delegated significant design tasks by his more famous collaborators. Etty emerged from this study as the most likely candidate. On the biographical and social research, Michael had held back from paying fees for new material from archives, because the initial searches had been so unproductive. Now we paid for two pieces of material, which looked unpromising but which turned out to resolve a number of enigmas. The first piece of paid material was an analysis, done by the College of Arms, of Fountaine’s coat of arms which was on his grave slab.This, in pass- ing, confirmed from legal records Fountaine’s William Etty’s Moot Hall, Briggate, Leeds. Built in 1711, it was demolished in 1824. William Etty’s Holy Trinity Church, Boar Lane, Leeds