Note 367 — A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY (continued 3)

This singular character, whose real name was Henry Constantine Jennings (1731-1819), died within the Rules of the King’s Bench, after spending one fortune on works of art and losing another on the turf. About 1778 he brought to England the antique sculpture known as Alcibiades’ Dog (now at Duncombe Park, Yorkshire), whence he had his nickname, “Dog Jennings.” His purchase of this work for a thousand guineas was the subject of one of Dr. Johnson’s conversations, recorded by Boswell. Jennings lived in the most easterly of the five houses into which Lindsey House, Chelsea, was divided in 1760. In Smith’s Nollekens he appears as a little man in a brown coat walking in Marylebone Fields, where Nollekens was for giving him twopence, mistaking him for a pauper.

Jennings was twice married, and at one time laid claim to a lapsed peerage. At Chelsea, where he maintained his house and grounds in a state of luxurious neglect, it was his custom twice a day to exercise himself with a ponderous lead-tipped broadsword: then (to use his own words), “mount my chaise horse, composed of leather and inflated with wind like a pair of bellows, on which I take exactly one thousand gallops.” Among his treasures was a statue of Venus, which he prized so highly, that for the first six months after acquiring it he had it placed during dinner at the head of his table, with two footmen in laced liveries in attendance on it—a situation that to-day would be worthy of Mr. Anstey’s humour.