Sir Watkin Williams Wynn and the Rutgers Handel Collection

Abstract

A chance visit in January, 1991, to the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff drew my attention to a portrait in their collection of the young Sir Watkin Williams Wynn( 1749-89) painted on a visit he made to Italy in 1768. (Pl. 1) I had previously encountered his name as that of an enthusiast and collector of art and music, particularly music by Handel, some of which had found its way into Special Collections and Archives of the Rutgers University Libraries in New Brunswick, New Jersey. That visit has led me to the present attempt to explore Sir Watkins relationship to art and music, and especially to Handel and the Handel collection at Rutgers. In the December 1965 issue of this Journal I described a collection of prints and manuscripts of music by George Frideric Handel housed in Special Collections and Archives of the Alexander Library of Rutgers in New Brunswick. It was explained there that part of the collection was acquired by Rutgers around 1950 as a result of a purchase by the Dana Library of Rutgers in Newark that had been recommended by Professor Alfred Mann, a distinguished Handel scholar, now emeritus. Some time after this purchase, which included eleven manuscript volumes described in my article cited above, the materials were transferred to Special Collections in New Brunswick. At that time the provenance of the Handel manuscripts was largely a mystery, although it is clear that they were once part of a single collection, being uniformly bound in leather and numbered consecutively from I to IX, lacking vol. IV but including an "Appendix Vol. I" and two unnumbered volumes. All the numbered volumes are devoted to Anthems, while the unnumbered ones contain An Ode for Queen Anne's Birthday and Italian Duettos and Trios? Since the publication of my article, the collection, and particularly the manuscripts, have been cited in the relevant literature, including studies by Larsen, Dean, and Beeks, the Handel thematic catalogue by Baselt, and the edition of Anthems in the Hallische HandelAusgabe.