But he was also a superlative correspondent and memoirist, England’s first major art historian, and above all, the kind of culture-shifting tastemaker who comes along but once every 100 years.
All these achievements, but particularly Walpole’s role as tastemaker, are celebrated in a richly intriguing show at the Yale Center for British Art, “Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill.’’ A collaboration between Yale University’s Lewis Walpole Library, the Yale Center for British Art, and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, this landmark exhibition is the outcome of years of research. It is complemented by a superb catalog edited by Michael Snodin, a senior research fellow at the V&A and chair of the Strawberry Hill Trust.
Walpole’s father was Robert Walpole, a longtime British prime minister and one of the most influential politicians of the 18th century. The son - “thin, slight, and pallid, with brilliant eyes,’’ as Peter Sabor describes him in the catalog - had a weak constitution and a mincing gait. “He always entered a room . . . knees bent, and feet on tip-toe as if afraid of a wet floor,’’ wrote one female contemporary.
He was almost certainly gay. One contributor to the catalog, George Haggerty, believes it “unlikely that, except perhaps for schoolboy high jinks, Horace Walpole had sexual relations with other men.’’ Exactly how historians come to such conclusions is quite beyond me, but Haggerty does convincingly claim that Walpole was the originator of a kind of “proto-camp,’’ which found expression not only in his marvelously bitchy and uninhibited letters, but in Strawberry Hill, his renowned Gothic-revival house in Twickenham, outside London.
At Eton, where he went to school, and on the Grand Tour he embarked on as a young man, he consolidated friendships with similarly inclined young bachelors (they were disparagingly labeled “finger-twirlers’’ by one contemporary), including the architect John Chute, the poet Thomas Gray, and the illustrator Richard Bentley.
