Buckridge [Buckeridge], Bainbrigg [Baynbrigg]

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[Baynbrigg]

(b Northall, Herts, 1668; d Hackney, Middx, Jan 1, 1733).

English writer and painter. The son of an East India Company merchant, he graduated from St John’s College, Oxford, in 1695, intending to be a physician. Instead he took up drawing and painting and travelled to the Netherlands to pursue his interest in art. He was later employed by John Sheffield, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (1648–1721), but the nature of his work is unknown. In 1704 he wrote a poem praising the Duke’s pictures at his newly built Buckingham House, London; he addressed another to Antonio Verrio, suggesting a decorative programme for Blenheim Palace, Oxon, to be built for John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, and begun by John Vanbrugh the following year (see Poems, v, pp. 158–76). Buckridge’s most important contribution to art is his collection of lives of painters, published in 1706 as part of the first English translation of Roger de Piles’s Abrégé de la vie des peintres...