In the Carlisle Journal in 1890 it states that Thomas Nelson was responsible for “the erection of Eden Grove, the residence of Mr Carruthers”.

This house is set back from the main road on the Carlisle side of Crosby on Eden.

The house featured in a 1989 Country Life article, Angus Taylor writing that Eden Grove “derives from a villa design by Soane”.

This he described as “a severe Grecian design of about 1839”, thinking the architect was Peter Nicholson.

Taylor gave a description, “From the south, Eden Grove appears to be a three-bay house ... of only one storey, but on the other side it has, owing to a sharp drop in the land, two floors”.

The only evidence that Taylor could find for his attribution was that Richard Carruthers subscribed to the monument to Peter Nicholson in Carlisle cemetery and therefore “it is tempting to believe that at the end of his life Nicholson designed Carruthers’ house”.

But Taylor was unaware of Thomas Nelson who had set up as a builder in Carlisle in 1830, and having trained in an architect’s office in London, would be aware of Soane’s Sketches In Architecture from which the design originates.

While Peter Nicholson briefly lived in Carlisle between 1808 and 1810 he did not return until 1841 so it would seem unlikely he was designing Carruthers’ house.

Having been born at Highfield Moor near Crosby on Eden on September 24 1792, Richard Carruthers showed an early talent for painting.

He entered the Royal Academy Schools obtaining a second prize for painting in 1816 and a first in 1817.

While in London he exhibited at the RA from an address in Gracechurch Street from 1816 to 1819.

One of those to sit for him was William Wordsworth in 1817.

A copy painted “when a student in Italy” and “a portrait of an Italian lady” in 1819, suggests a visit there.

In Carruthers’ obituary it states that he “began life as an artist but was obliged in his youth to seek health in the warmer climates of Lisbon and South America where he amassed a considerable fortune in mercantile pursuits”.

He made occasional visits home, submitted in 1825 a portrait of John Hodgson, the Mayor, to the Carlisle Academy.

Carruthers remembered a visit to Wordsworth “at Rydal Mount in 1827 on my return from Rio de Janeiro”, confirming his final homecoming.

Construction must have started on Eden Grove in 1828, built on the site of a farm called Grove, as the Journal reported on a storm in January 1839 when “an extensive wall, at the mansion now being erected at the Grove for Richard Carruthers, was entirely blown down and several windows in the house broken”.

Carruthers went on to live there for the rest of his life, dying in 1876.

He left “a self portrait as a fisherman”, but when speaking to the Carlisle Angling Association in March 1860 he said he was “not an angler but interested in fisheries”.

Although paying for repairs and improvements at Crosby Church in 1873 it was not there that he was buried but at Kirklinton alongside his parents.