Andrew Balfour 1630-1694

Sir Andrew BALFOUR 1630-1694

Biographical Note

Balfour was born at Balfour Castle, Denmiln, Fife, on 18 January 1630, the fifth son of Sir Michael Balfour of Denmiln and Jane Durham. Sir James Balfour was his brother. After attending the local Abdie parish school, he enrolled at St Andrews University where he gained his MA around 1650. Thereafter, he studied medicine, travelling to England and then France where he studied at Paris and Montpellier. He was made an MD of Caen University in 1661. He then became tutor to the young Earl of Rochester on his Grand Tour, 1661-1664, and used this continental opportunity to buy books and objets d’art. In 1667 he was in St Andrews practising as a physician but soon moved to Edinburgh, becoming associated with Sir Robert Sibbald, a distant cousin, in founding a botanic garden. James Sutherland was employed as its first Intendant. Balfour also helped to found the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1683. He gained a knighthood (the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography claims a baronetcy) in 1682 and died on 10 January 1694.

Books

Balfour’s collection of books was posthumously auctioned in Edinburgh in 1695, and thus scattered. There were 3480 lots of printed books and thirty-one of manuscripts, making it the largest individual library to have been sold in Scotland by auction at that date. Further items owned by both Andrew and James Balfour were auctioned in 1699. The extent of Balfour’s library must have made it one of Scotland’s biggest private libraries of its day, and certainly the biggest founded by a non-landed professional.

Not surprisingly, the library was particularly strong in works on medicine and natural history (1473 lots listed in 1695, plus additional items grouped under language headings), but the arrangement of the 1695 catalogue shows books on many subjects – theology, coins and books of portraits, philosophy, science and mathematics, and the humanities. Books in French, Italian and Spanish were present as well as in English (but less than a hundred lots of these) and the still ubiquitous Latin.

Characteristic Markings

Balfour did not use any regular system of marking his books, but ones bearing his writing are known.

Sources

Bibliotheca Balfouriana, sive catalogus librorum … D. Andreae Balfourii M.D. & Equitis Aurati, quorum auctio habebitur Edinburgi in aedibus Balfourianis, anno 1695: quarto die mensis Februarii … (Edinburgh: ab haeredibus ac successoribus Andreae Anderson, 1695). ESTC R232412.
Catalogus selectissimorum …librorum, quorum maxima pars pertinebat ad clarissimos fratres D.D. Balfourios, Jacobum … et Andream … quorum auctio habebitur duodecimo die Junii, 1669 [sic]… (Edinburgh: excudebant haeredes & Successores Andreae Anderson, 1699). ESTC R21994.
Browne, Janet ‘Balfour, Sir Andrew, first baronet (1630-1694), botanist and antiquary’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Ovenden, Richard, ‘Sir James Balfour (1600-1657) and Sir Andrew Balfour (18 January 1630-10 January 1694’, in Pre-Nineteenth-Century British Book Collectors and Bibliographers, edited by William Baker and Kenneth Womack [Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 213] (Detroit: Gale Group, 1999), pp.12-20.
Information from Murray Simpson.