Today marks the 299th anniversary of the death of  that remarkable Englishman John Evelyn, diarist, connoisseur, scholar, classicist, pedagogue and pioneerimng horticulturalist – or “planter of coleworts”, as he sometimes modestly styled himself. So this week’s picture is Robert Walker’s portrait of him, with his hand resting on a skull. It was painted in 1647, when Evelyn was in his twenty-eighth year, and may be found at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

 

Evelyn was the epitome of the seventeenth-century intellectual amateur, or virtuoso. He was born in 1620 at Wotton near Dorking in Surrey, the second son of a wealthy landed gentleman. The family, which was able to trace its ancestry back to the fifteenth century, had risen to prominence during the reign of Elizabeth I. Evelyn’s great-grandfather, whose Christian name was also John, had brought the invention to gunpowder to England and had been one of the first men to produce it in quantity. The Evelyn family continued to own the patent for the manufacture for gunpowder until the start of the English Civil War. The money thus accrued meant that Evelyn, despite being only a second son, was able to devote his life to his multifarious intellectual pursuits.

 

Evelyn was educated at the free school in Southover until he was seventeen and then went to Balliol College, Oxford. He later complained that he had received an inadequate education at the hands of his schoolmaster, Edward Snatt, and that his tutors at university had failed to make good the defect. It was to this combination of circumstances that he ascribed his lifelong didacticism.

 
Evelyn’s father died in 1640. In 1642 the Civil War broke out. The following year, Evelyn briefly rallied to the service of the king. He was...

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