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Calvert
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Calvert

marriage with Miss Bennell of Brixton he removed to London and attended the Royal Academy schools. Before long he made the acquaintance of William Blake, and joined a little band of artists who reverenced Blake as their chief, including Samuel Palmer, Linnell the elder, and George Richmond. Blake's designs exercised considerable influence over Calvert. He was one of the few friends who attended Blake's interment in 1827. His first exhibited picture was at the Royal Academy in 1825. It was called ‘Nymphs,’ and excited much warm admiration. At the same gallery he exhibited in 1827 his picture ‘A Shepherdess.’ In 1829 he sent ‘Morning’ to the exhibition of the Society of British Artists, Suffolk Street. Another poetic landscape with the same title was exhibited by him at the Royal Academy in 1832, and a third in 1835. His last contribution to the Academy exhibition was in 1836, when his picture illustrated Milton's ‘Eve.’ Calvert produced many woodcuts and plates of singular beauty, which were privately printed by himself at his successive residences in Brixton and Paddington. He was extremely fastidious, and, though incessantly at work, was always dissatisfied with the result and destroyed some of his blocks and plates. Of his woodcuts the ‘Christian Ploughing the last Furrow of Life’ and the ‘Cider Press’ are described as very like Blake's. Calvert was a thorough student of anatomy, and also spent some time in St. Thomas's Hospital during the cholera of 1830. He was an enthusiast for Greek art, and once visited Greece, returning with many sketches. Among his intimate friends were Derwent Coleridge and Francis Oliver Finch, the landscape-painter. In honour of the latter he wrote an éloge, which is printed in the ‘Memorials’ of that artist published in 1865.

Calvert died at Hackney on 14 July 1883, in his eighty-fourth year, and was buried at Abney Park cemetery.

[Athenæum, 18 and 25 Aug. 1883, the latter notice by George Richmond, R.A.; Gilchrist's Life of W. Blake, 1880, i. 343, 407; Graves's Dict. of Artists, 1760–1880; Royal Academy Catalogues; private information through Mr. John Richmond.]

C. W. S.

CALVERT, FREDERICK, seventh Lord Baltimore (1731–1771), eldest son of Charles, sixth lord, by Mary, youngest daughter of Sir Theodore Janssen, was born in 1731. In 1753 he married Diana Egerton, youngest daughter of the Duke of Bridgewater. In 1768 he was tried at Kingston on a charge of rape, but acquitted (Report of trial in Gent. Mag. xxxviii. 180–8). He died at Naples on 14 Sept. 1771, without legitimate children. His remains were brought to England in order to be interred in the family vault at Epsom, and for some time lay in state in Exeter Exchange, Strand. The moment his body was removed the populace plundered the room where it had lain (ib. xlii. 44). The title became extinct on his death, and by his will he bequeathed the province of Maryland, in America, to Henry Harford, a child, and the remainder of his estates in fee to his younger sister. Carlyle, in his ‘Life of Frederick the Great,’ refers to Baltimore in 1739 as ‘something of a fool, to judge by the face of him in portraits, and by some of his doings in the world,’ and Winckelmann characterises him as ‘one of those worn-out beings, a hipped Englishman, who had lost all moral and physical taste.’ He was the author of a ‘Tour in the East in the years 1763 and 1764, with Remarks on the City of Constantinople and the Turks. Also Select Pieces of Oriental Wit, Poetry, and Wisdom,’ regarding which Lord Orford declared it ‘no more deserved to be published than his bills on the road for post-horses.’ In 1769 he printed at Augsburg ten copies of a book entitled ‘Gaudia Poetica Latina, Anglica, et Gallica Lingua composita.’ It forms a volume of 120 pages, beautifully printed, and richly decorated with head and tail pieces. It consists of a Latin poem translated into English and French, with some smaller pieces, and several letters which had passed between him and Linnæus, to whom he had dedicated the volume. Linnæus had been so much flattered by the dedication that he refers to the book in extraordinary terms of eulogy, and designates it an ‘immortal work.’ Baltimore also published ‘Cælestes et Inferi,’ Venice, 1771, 4to.

[Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors (Park), v. 278–82; Morris's The Lords Baltimore, 52–61.]

T. F. H.

CALVERT, FREDERICK BALTIMORE (1793–1877), actor and lecturer on elocution, son of Charles Calvert, steward of the Duke of Norfolk, at Glossop Hall, Derbyshire [see under Calvert, Charles], was baptised on 11 April 1793, and entered Manchester school on 12 Jan. 1804. Thence he was sent to the Roman catholic college at Old Hall Green, Hertfordshire, with a view to receiving holy orders; but he took to the stage, and in the course of his career alternated leading parts with the elder Kean, Macready, and the elder Vandenhoff. In 1824 he published ‘A Defence of the Drama,’ which had an extensive circulation, and was read by John Fawcett to the members of the