5493. Robert Eyres Landor to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 180.
Birlingham
Pershore
Novr 29– 64
My dear Sir
I will not trouble you with a repetition of my thanks for so much kindness—well knowing, from long experience, that your only gratification consists in conferring favors and in declining the acknowledgment of them. They are not felt less sensibly on that account, nor will be remembered less gratefully. I should have esteemed the privilege of communicating with you as no transient honor if the subject had been unconnected with my poor Brother—and you will be remembered long by a great many more important people—by none more sinc[e]rely than by myself.
I enclose the 6. 18– due to you—and must express my surprise that the Husband of a Lady for whom the Pictures were intended, should have seen anything in them more alarming than necessarily arose from the subject. [1] Without valuing the Allori [2] at fifteen hundred guineas, I am much pleased with it as a work of art, and more as the last thing descending to me from My Brother. I possess one of his earliest pictures—purchased by him almost sixty years ago—and it is remarkable that the two—though well worth two thousand eight hundred guineas were purchased by me for less than twenty.
Believe me to be ever very truly and gratefully–
Robert E Landor
Address: Robert Browning Esq / 19. Warwick Crescent / Upper Westbourne Terrace / London.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Yale University.
1. This view is incorrect, as RB explains in letter 5501.
2. See letter 5023, note 4. Although, W.S. Landor had thought his painting “The Last Judgement” by Michelangelo (see letter 5107), R. Landor’s attribution of the work to Alessandro Allori, with which RB concurs in letter 5501, seems to be the correct one.
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