Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron le Despencer, PC, FRS was an English politician and rake, Chancellor of the Exchequer and founder of the Hellfire Club.
Francis Baron le Despencer by Nathaniel Dance Holland
Portrait by William Hogarth from the late 1750s, parodying Renaissance images of Francis of Assisi. The bible has been replaced by a copy of the erotic novel Elegantiae Latini sermonis, and the profile of his friend Lord Sandwich peers from the halo.
West Wycombe Park
West Wycombe Park
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West Wycombe Park is a country house built between 1740 and 1800 near the village of West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, England. It was conceived as a pleasure palace for the 18th-century libertine and
Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron le Despencer
…governments. In 1747 he introduced a poor-relief bill that recommended commissioning public works (such as the Hellfire Caves he later had excavated at West Wycombe Park) to combat unemployment. The bill failed. Dashwood was re-elected for New Romney on 26 June 1747, and in January 1751 disavowed Jacobitism, of which…
The double, superimposed colonnade on the south front of West Wycombe. It has a Tuscan order ground floor and Corinthian upper floor with a central projecting pediment, very unusual in English architecture. (Marked M on plan below)
Palazzo Chiericati in Vicenza in Italy by Palladio (c.1550) has a superposed colonnade similar to that at West Wycombe, but the inspiration for the south front may have been Palladio's reconstruction of Vitruvius's Roman villa illustrated in his Quattro Libri.
Palladio's Villa Capra detta La Rotonda was the inspiration for Mereworth Castle in Kent, the home of Dashwood's uncle, Lord Westmorland. West Wycombe's east portico was in turn built as a homage to Westmorland's artistic taste at Mereworth.
Frescoes in the Villa Farnesina (c.1510) inspired the decoration of West Wycombe's interior.