Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

History of Art Faculty Research and Scholarship History of Art

1999 Review of The Fall and Rise of the Stately House, by Peter Mandler David Cast Bryn Mawr College, [email protected]

Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy . Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/hart_pubs Part of the History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons

Custom Citation Cast, David. Review of The Fall and Rise of the Stately House, by Peter Mandler. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58 (1999): 76-77, doi: 10.2307/991440.

This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. http://repository.brynmawr.edu/hart_pubs/5

For more information, please contact [email protected]. Books

ENGLAND

Peter Mandler so forth, but for Mandler politics and his- such history aside, as models of the kinds THE FALLAND RISE OF THE STATELY tory, as much as morality,marked the idea of houses the new middle classes could HOUSE of .the stately home. The idea itself was afford. Mandler notes that the magazine indeed of comparatively recent invention CountryLife survived with the financial sup- New Haven: Yale University Press, from about 1800, as seen in the notion of port of the estate agents Knight Frank & 1998, 523 pp., 100 illus. $45.00 (cloth). "Old " and in the late medieval Rutley,founded in 1896 to market country ISBN 0-300-06703-8. and Tudor houses illustrated by Joseph homes, and they support it still together This is a rich and fascinating book. Over Nash and Samuel Carter Hall and in jour- with other firms like Jackson-Stops& Staff, the years there have been innumerable nals like the IllustratedLondon News, The Fox and Sons, Alfred Savill, Curtis and studies of the history and fortunes of the PennyMagazine, and TheLeisure Hour. This Henson. stately home, but as the nicely graded ca- was also the time when a new class of Despite the efforts of Hussey and oth- dence of his title suggests, Mandler tells a tourists visited country houses--80,000 in ers, the 1920s and 1930s were, by all mea- particular part of this story, what he calls one year at Chatsworth, and equal num- sures, the low moment in the fortunes of the invention and reinvention of the idea bers at Belvoir and WarwickCastle. And if these houses, unloved by their owners and of the country house as the buildings were this was possible, it came about as the closed to the public. But after World War transformed from symbols of authority to result of a largely tacit compromise worked II, the establishment of the Historic Build- become museums, stripped of all but the out after Reform and Chartism, by which, ing Committee of the National Trustserved merest traces of the political power they as Mandler notes, owners were left gener- to define a new interest in them, set in a once so defiantly embodied. Perhaps we ally unmolested as long as they appeared countryside now far more firmly regulated knew much of this, but Mandler's history is to exercise their vast privileges less exclu- by planners and politicians. If once John so complex and filled with interesting de- sively. But the agricultural depression of Summerson had been chased away from tails, it is as if he is writing here about a new the 1870s disturbed such a balance, lead- Blickling Hall by the police, now owners topic. The book also abounds in subtle ing to agitation for taxation of all ground were grateful for any interest in their contradictions, as in the opening pages rents and land values, resulting in 1894 in houses. In 1946, the 28th of Crawford, where Mandler notes that, if the idea of the introduction of a consolidated death then Chairman of the National Trust, and the country house has not always hung duty, the Estate Tax, or what the Duke of Hugh Dalton, Chancellor of the Exche- over us, it is not a fiction imposed on a Devonshire disparagingly referred to as quer in the postwar government of Clem- merely passive people, and the social con- "democratic finance." ent Attlee, set up the National Land Fund, text of the country house idea was not one A new appreciation of these houses also with a dowry of ?50 million, to be used to of simple continuity but of sometimes re- appeared at this time. The Arts and Crafts acquire land deemed by the Chancellor to morseless change that led, in ways not Movement was hardly concerned with be in the public interest.The country house equaled perhaps in the other European them, but in 1897 the first issue of Country was now safe; and if there could be out- countries, to neglect and even contempt Life Illustrated(later simply CountryLife), breaks still of old class hostilities, the finan- for the past of which these buildings were edited by Edward Hutton, featured pro- cial revival of the aristocracy in the late so evidently a part. files of these houses written by H. Avray 1950s onward, derived from the rise in the The term "country house" appeared Tipping, illustrated with lavish plates, and market value of properties, and the inter- first in English in 1592, as a rendering of printed with the latest technology. In the est of the aristocracy in repairing their the Italian "casa rurestra" in Richard 1920s, Tipping was followed by Chris- often neglected fabrics ushered in a new Dallington's translationof the Hypnerotoma- topher Hussey; out of concern for the fate chapter in the story of the survival of the chia Poliphili. But not until 1664 do we of these houses, he called for a sense of country house. Note, for example, that encounter the common usage, when responsibility from the landed elite, "a ri- Chatsworth had been empty until 1952, Samuel Pepys describes someone going sorgimento of the squires," while offering Castle Howard until 1959. Typical of this "to his country house," that is to say, a a new account of what this history could new age were Lord Montague of Beaulieu house not in the city. Such rural retreats mean. Country houses were now to be and the duke of Bedford, who opened up for the rich have long been associated with taken as a crucial and continuous part of their homes to motor museums, zoos, and the Arcadian myth and invested with a English life, yet also the best of them-if nudist congresses. The rest is history,and if notion of the disinterested contemplation not his own home, Scotney Castle, "the Margaret Thatcher's vision of a new Brit- of God and nature, the rural Socrates, and dearjumble ofa house"-might also stand, ain opposed anything about heritage or

76 JSAH / 58:1, 1999 even anything commercial, like LauraAsh- ward the houses that they shared with many The most valuable aspect of his study is ley, that was based on an idea of this old who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s. But three chapters examining the influence of England, cultural forces larger than Wittkower,a new arrival,was able to turn a Continental prints on masonry, plaster- Thatcher were on the march. When the more dispassionate eye upon them, pick- work, and joinery and carving. There is National Trust was founded in 1929, it had ing out from the history, even amid the also a final chapter on the significance of a mere 1,000 members; by 1980 it had 1 darkest days of the war, the part that espe- prints for the decoration of the Elizabe- million members and by 1990, 2 million. cially tied things English to the cultural than houses of Chatsworthand Hardwick. BridesheadRevisited was filmed at Castle traditions of Europe; think here of the Painstaking attention to minutiae has al- Howard, and in 1986 TheTreasure Houses of exhibition he organized in 1941 with Fritz lowed Wells-Cole to go beyond previous Britain, an exhibition at the National Gal- Saxl, EnglishArt and the Mediterranean,for attempts in tracing the paper sources for lery of Art in Washington, D.C., organized the Council for Encouragement of Music architectural motifs in a book to consult by Gervase Jackson-Stops of the firm of and the Arts. How Wittkower was first re- rather than to read. Nevertheless, broader estate agents, unleashed a storm of unhis- ceived is not clear; I recall a rather slight- issues do emerge, as when, for example, torical rhetoric about the wonders of these ing reference to him in the anecdotes of prints are shown to inspire the ground houses, the objects within, and the discrimi- James Lees-Milne, a stalwart of the Na- plan of an entire building and notjust the nating taste of their owners. In the 1920s tional Trust in the postwar years. But it is arabesques on its newel posts. A Thorpe the duke of Westminster,an obviouslyinter- especially interesting to think of Wittkow- elevation in the Soane Museum comes from ested party, had called the country house er's work as a mark of gratitude toward his a plate from Jacques Perret's Architecturaet the greatest contribution of England to the new home-as were also the compilations perspectiva(Oppenheim, 1613), a print Gir- visual arts, "an association of beauty, art of Nikolaus Pevsner, based on Georg De- ouard intriguingly suggested was itself in- and nature-the achievement often of cen- hio's Handbuch der deutschenKunstdenk- spired by the design of Wollaton ( Mark turies of effort-which is irreplaceable, and maler-yet set within the parts of the more Girouard, RobertSmythson and the Architec- has seldom, if ever, been equalled in the general political and social history Man- ture of theElizabethan Country House, [New history of civilisation" (343). Yetyears later, dler lays out here. History is history; but it Haven and London, 1983], 86). Evidently even Robert Venturi, amid his happy re- is rarelyjust history. prints were not merely devoted to the art marksat the announcement of the commis- - David Cast of applique. Their sheer range as source sion for the National Gallery, London, BrynMawr College material for craftsmen in as well hinted at the same idea when he said that as England suggests an aesthetic, different the project combined his two loves, Italian but arguably no less sophisticated, than and architecture. painting English Antony Wells-Cole those prevailingin earlymodern Continen- All this and much more-death duties, ART ANDDECORATION IN ELIZABETHAN tal Europe. The overmantel panels from transfer taxes, of the capital graphs pat- AND the richly carved chimneypiece of 1636 in terns of JACOBEANENGLAND demolitions and of visitings-are the Guildhall at Newcastle-upon-Tyneare Yale University Press: New Haven and the materials of this book. Accompanying closely based on two prints after Rubens. the text is a series London, 1997, xii + 336 365 illus. of plates, familiar and pp., Not only does this represent a transcrip- ISBN unfamiliar; the drawings of Georges du $75.00 (cloth). 0-300-06651-1. tion into sculpture of that most painterly of Maurierfrom the 1890s;images of wartime painters, an and Michael Snodin and Maurice Howard, unexpected daring evacuations; many postwar cartoons from achievement unlooked for in a editors metropoli- Punch; even some nicely staged photo- tan let alone a provincialcontext, but these of the OOPRNAMENT:A SOCIAL HISTORY SINCE graphs aristocracy welcoming visi- reliefs demonstrate a fair stab at getting tors or 1450 arguing against increases in capital the spirit of the originals by craftsmen a la as did the earl taxation, of March in 1975 Yale University Press: New Haven and page with the most versatile designer in in a of himself in photograph one of the London, 1996, 232 pp., 241 illus., 139 in Europe. Such alertness combined with the rooms at Goodwood, stripped of all furnish- color. $45.00 (cloth). enormous range of material consulted in The wealth ings. of materials is remark- ISBN 0-300-06455-1. the century after the Reformation suggests able, and the result, to borrow a phrase it is a serious misconception to assume that used all too often now, is a book that will John Ingamells Elizabethan architects were trying to be become the standard account of its subject. A DICTIONARYOF BRITISHAND IRISH classical in the manner ofJones and Webb At a more the book in- personal level, TRAVELLERSIN ITALY 1701-1800 in the next generation. Rather, they de- vites us to fit ourselves within this I history. YaleUniversity Press: New Haven and lighted in the same exuberance and vitality first studied English architecture in New as the builders of the Decorated and Per- London, 1997, lii + 1,070 pp. $75.00 York, at Columbia University, under Ru- pendicular churches of the late Middle (cloth). ISBN 0-300-07165-5. dolfWittkower. In fact, I had been born in Ages. There is more in common between a England, but my parents had never taken Anthony Wells-Cole has made an impor- Perpendicular reredos and the Middle me to see these buildings, perhaps from tant contribution to a recent spate of books Temple screen (1570s) than between the some residue of socialist discomfort, per- devoted to the influence of the printed latter and Palladio's choir screen in the haps also from the dismissive attitudes to- image on early modern culture in Britain. Redentore. Insofar as there is any sort of

BOOKS 77