Doyne Bell

Doyne Courtenay Bell (3 August 1830 ― 26 March 1888) was an English court servant, antiquary, and composer. Early life Bell was born in Gower Street, Bloomsbury, the son of a wine merchant. After University College School and King’s College, London, he went to live in the Duchy of Brunswick to learn German, which he mastered. On his return to England, a clergyman uncle, George Hamilton, recommended him to Sir William Reid, who took him on as an assistant in the preparations for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Work While the Exhibition was ongoing, Prince Albert, impressed by Bell’s abilities, hired him to work in the royal household to help with Privy Purse correspondence. Bell struck up a friendship with George Scharf, director of the National Portrait Gallery, a fellow Old Gower, and built up a good knowledge of historic portraits, not least those in the Royal Collection. Bell was also Secretary of the committee which after Prince Albert’s death in 1861 planned the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park, finally completed in 1872. Dating from 1876, his setting to music of Blake’s “Can I see another’s woe”, from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, is the earliest such work inspired by Blake