Abstract
‘Some people drink to forget their unhappiness. I do not drink, I build.’ Architecture for Beckford was not only a means of escape from a hostile society into a total environment of fantasy; paradoxically, it also enabled him to express his life-long aspirations for social recognition. Fonthill Abbey was to become a legend in his lifetime as the ideal setting for his protean activities as an outstanding patron and collector — a veritable Palace of Art. In the uneasy collaboration with the wayward genius of James Wyatt, Beckford also developed an approach to design in which architecture assumed the romantic properties of landscape. The effects of this potent fusion of nature and artifice, sustained in his later creation of Lansdown Tower and its gardens, were to reverberate in English architecture until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
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