General Julian
Marshall
Male
England
1836-06-24
Headingley, England
1904-11-21
Hampstead, London,13 Belsize Avenue, England


About

From The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

By Arthur Searle

Julian Marshall was the youngest of the five children of John Marshall, (MP for Leeds from 1832-35) and his wife, Mary (daughter of Joseph Ballantyne Dykes of Dovenby Hall, Cockermouth). He was educated at the Reverend John Gilderdale’s private school at Walthamstow, and at Harrow School from 1852-54, where he was champion rackets player. His grandfather John Marshall of Headingley (MP for Yorkshire from 1826-30) had established flax-spinning factories at Leeds and Shrewsbury, and on leaving school Marshall reluctantly took part in the family business until 1861, soon after which he moved to London.

In Leeds, Marshall, an amateur musician, had sung in the choir of the Leeds Parish Church when, under the direction of S.S. Wesley, it was considered of a high standard. Marshall also served on the committee of the first music festival in 1858.

Marshall’s collection of prints, begun before he was twenty, included Italian, Dutch, German, and French as well as English items; catalogued by G. W. Reid of the British Museum, its sale at Sotheby’s in 1864 stretched over twelve days and raised well over £8000. Books on the technique of engraving and catalogues of earlier sales of prints were featured in a sale of items from Marshall’s library at Sotheby’s in 1870. Although he retained his interest in prints, he subsequently collected principally printed and manuscript music.
No catalogue of his collection as a whole exists, and its extent and nature are apparent only from his disposal of it.

He sold part of his Handel collection, comprising of early editions of printed music and librettos, to Arthur J. Balfour in 1876. These manuscripts are now in the National Library of Scotland. Marshall married Florence Ashton on October 7, 1864; they had three daughters. He and his wife were founding members of the Musical Association.

At a time when the Association wanted more attention given to music in the British Museum Library, Marshall began to sell music manuscripts to the museum. In 1878 and after protracted negotiations in 1880-81 the museum acquired well over 400 volumes of music from him. The manuscripts range from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries. They include substantial groups of English sixteenth-century sources and of Handel score copies, as well as autograph scores by Purcell, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (most notable, a major part of the sketchbook for the “Pastoral” Symphony).
Marshall also owned the autograph score of Mozart’s Fantasy and Piano Sonata in C minor now in the Mozarteum, Salzburg. In 1880, he attempted to buy the autograph score of Don Giovanni from Pauline Viardot. Letters of musicians from Marshall’s collection were sold in London in 1884; much of the remainder of his library was sold after his death in a two-day sale at Sotheby’s in 1904, and there was a further sale in 1922.

The most important of Marshall’s writings about games is The Annals of Tennis (1878), which had first appeared as a series of articles in The Field in 1876-7. He was among the major contributors to A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which appeared under the editorship of Sir George Grove in 1879-89. The longest of his articles was the entry for Handel, and there, as in some of his other contributions, he drew information from items in his collection. The majority of his other contributions are for Italian singers of the baroque and classical periods, though he also contributed the article on the Mendelssohn Scholarships Foundation, of which he was secretary from 1871.
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Archive statistics 1877 - 1882
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14
10


Tournaments Exmouth - 1882 Cirencester Park Tournament - 1881 Yare Lawn Tennis Club - 1879 Wimbledon - 1877

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