Search FNL grants since 1931

This handwritten receipt by Thomas Gainsborough is for the sum of 15 guineas received for a half-length portrait (which was 50 x 40 inches canvas). The portrait, now lost, was painted during the period he was living in Ipswich in the 1750s.

Malcolm Elwin was born in 1903, the son of a Nottingham businessman.  He was privately educated (possibly on health grounds) and became a student at University College, Oxford, but seems to have left without a degree in order to embark on a literary career.  As that career progressed during the 1

an important collection of military diaries, memoirs and letters written by two generations of the Morant family from 1845 to 1919.

The family and estate archive of the Pendarves family had been held on deposit at Cornwall Record Office in Truro since November 1953.

An edition of the complete works of the Latin grammarian Priscian, whose writings were used as the basis for the teaching of Latin grammar until the fifteenth century and as a source for extracts from classical authors whose works have otherwise been lost. Edited by Benedictus Brognolus, the well-known Venetian editor of classical texts and teacher of grammar, rhetoric and philosophy, and printed in Venice by Filippo Pinzi in 1492, it is currently recorded in only four UK libraries. The book is bound in contemporary blind-stamped calf over wooden boards, utilising a series of tools which have long been attributed to a bookbinder, or possibly bookseller, active in Cambridge in the fifteenth century. The binder, referred to as W.G. after the monogram found on his most distinctive tool, was active in Cambridge between c.1478 and 1507, indicating that the Priscian was in use in Cambridge within fifteen years of its printing.

In February 1842, Charlotte and Emily Brontë became students at the Pensionnat Héger in Brussels. For the next nine months they worked unrelentingly, producing a series of devoirs (homework essays) in response to instructions given by their tutor, Constantin Héger.

The last significant portion of material that remained in private hands relating to Henry Talbot, pioneer of photography.

a late autograph draft manuscript of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ celebrated poem 'Binsey Poplars'. The last known major Hopkins manuscript to have been in private hands, ‘Binsey Poplars’ was the most significant Hopkins item to have come to the market in over forty years. 

The bulk of the collection consists of letters written by William, Percy and Sydney Spencer, three of the brothers of Stanley Spencer, the artist, mostly written to their sister Florence Image (aunt of Pamela, to whom they ultimately descended).

This volume from the library of William Beckford (1760-1844) is bound with the distinctive Beckford Fonthill binding, which combines two motifs from Beckford’s coat of arms on the spine. Tipped in to face the title-page is a fine wash drawing of Amiens Cathedral with the pencil note below: ‘after a finished Sketch by W[illiam] B[eckford]’. Beckford was known to have been in France during 1806, the year Rivoire’s work was published, and the intriguing notation to the sketch of the building found in this volume invites speculation as to whether he visited and recorded the building using this work as a guide.

The possibility of this visit is made more significant because in 1806 Beckford was immersed in the construction of his Gothic Revival masterpiece Fonthill Abbey.

Beckford’s Tower and Museum currently has twenty-four volumes once belonging to Beckford, fourteen of which have Fonthill bindings. The acquisition of this volume adds to this small but significant element of the museum’s collection, which is displayed in cabinets originally designed by Beckford and the architect of the Tower for that purpose.