Sir Richard Colt Hoare, 2nd Baronet, was a landowner and antiquary who inherited the family estate at Stourhead. He married Hester Lyttelton (1762-1785) in 1783. The couple's only surviving child, Henry, was born on 17 September 1784, but Hester did not live to see his first birthday as she died on 22 August 1785. Deprived of his wife and needing 'new scenes and new occupations … to detach my mind from melancholy reflections', Colt Hoare left England and his young son and began his extensive travels abroad. He was away for almost six years.
In Rome he discovered the work of the Swiss watercolourist Louis Ducros (1748-1810) and he continued his grandfather's close association with the watercolourists Francis Nicholson and Samuel Woodforde. Sir John Leicester of Tabley introduced him to the young Turner, who copied one of Colt Hoare's own drawings for his oil of Lake Avernus with Aeneas and the Cumaean Sybil in 1815. In 1825 Colt Hoare gave his collection of Italian topographical and historical works to the British Museum and started collecting books on the history and topography of the British Isles.
