Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

information. By 1825 De la Rue, who was still in Caen, working on his counter-arguments about
the Bayeux Tapestry as well as his history of minstrels, was reporting to Douce that ‘un jeune
homme secretaire de notre societe des antiquaries de normandie’ [a young man who is secretary
of our society of antiquaries of Normandy] was working with a colleague on a study of historic
monuments. 103
Figure 29 E H Langlois, self-portrait engraved by Mary Turner
The young man was Arcisse de Caumont (1801-1873). He had been largely instrumental
in founding the Society of Antiquaries of Normandy the previous year. Modelled on the London
Society it soon recruited many British members including A C Pugin, Britton and Douce. De
Caumont translated Gally Knight’s Tour in Normandy and noted in 1832 that he had entertained
‘M Wewhel and M Riekmann’. 104 His Cours D’Antiquités Montumentales began appearing in
1830. A synthesiser rather than an original mind de Caumont was highly effective in organising
men and materials. 105 He was also able, as Turner noted, to take advantage of the mechanisms of
the post-war, Napoleonic state. Born more than a decade after the storming of the Bastille de
Caumont was part of what Turner identified as ‘a new generation…to whom the horrors of the
revolution live only in the page of history. But its advantages are daily felt in the equal nature
103
Douce/de la Rue letters, f168, 22 September, 1825.
104
Lewis, ‘Les rapports avec les antiquaires anglais’, p. 273.
105
See Frankl, The Gothic, pp.519-22.
132