Cast, David

English

Scholarship;  Research;  and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

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, dcast@brynmawr.edu
Let us know how access to this document benefits you.
Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/hart_pubs
Part of the History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons
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 repository@brynmawr.edu.
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.
Books 
ENGLAND 
Peter Mandler 
THE FALL AND RISE OF THE STATELY 
HOUSE 
New Haven: Yale University Press, 
1998, 523 pp., 100 illus. $45.00 (cloth). 
ISBN 0-300-06703-8. 
This is a rich and fascinating book. Over 
the years there have been innumerable 
studies of the history and fortunes of the 
stately home, but as the nicely graded ca- 
dence of his title suggests, Mandler tells a 
particular part of this story, what he calls 
the invention and reinvention of the idea 
of the country house as the buildings were 
transformed from symbols of authority to 
become museums, stripped of all but the 
merest traces of the political power they 
once so defiantly embodied. Perhaps we 
knew much of this, but Mandler's history is 
so complex and filled with interesting de- 
tails, it is as if he is writing here about a new 
topic. The book also abounds in subtle 
contradictions, as in the opening pages 
where Mandler notes that, if the idea of 
the country house has not always hung 
over us, it is not a fiction imposed on a 
merely passive people, and the social con- 
text of the country house idea was not one 
of simple continuity but of sometimes re- 
morseless change that led, in ways not 
equaled perhaps in the other European 
countries, to neglect and even contempt 
for the past of which these buildings were 
so evidently a part. 
The term "country house" appeared 
first in English in 1592, as a rendering of 
the Italian "casa rurestra" in Richard 
Dallington's translation of the Hypnerotoma- 
chia Poliphili. But not until 1664 do we 
encounter the common usage, when 
Samuel Pepys describes someone going 
"to his country house," that is to say, a 
house not in the city. Such rural retreats 
for the rich have long been associated with 
the Arcadian myth and invested with a 
notion of the disinterested contemplation 
of God and nature, the rural Socrates, and 
so forth, but for Mandler politics and his- 
tory, as much as morality, marked the idea 
of .the stately home. The idea itself was 
indeed of comparatively recent invention 
from about 1800, as seen in the notion of 
"Old England" and in the late medieval 
and Tudor houses illustrated by Joseph 
Nash and Samuel Carter Hall and in jour- 
nals like the Illustrated London News, The 
Penny Magazine, and The Leisure Hour. This 
was also the time when a new class of 
tourists visited country houses--80,000 in 
one year at Chatsworth, and equal num- 
bers at Belvoir and Warwick Castle. And if 
this was possible, it came about as the 
result of a largely tacit compromise worked 
out after Reform and Chartism, by which, 
as Mandler notes, owners were left gener- 
ally unmolested as long as they appeared 
to exercise their vast privileges less exclu- 
sively. But the agricultural depression of 
the 1870s disturbed such a balance, lead- 
ing to agitation for taxation of all ground 
rents and land values, resulting in 1894 in 
the introduction of a consolidated death 
duty, the Estate Tax, or what the Duke of 
Devonshire disparagingly referred to as 
"democratic finance." 
A new appreciation of these houses also 
appeared at this time. The Arts and Crafts 
Movement was hardly concerned with 
them, but in 1897 the first issue of Country 
Life Illustrated (later simply Country Life), 
edited by Edward Hutton, featured pro- 
files of these houses written by H. Avray 
Tipping, illustrated with lavish plates, and 
printed with the latest technology. In the 
1920s, Tipping was followed by Chris- 
topher Hussey; out of concern for the fate 
of these houses, he called for a sense of 
responsibility from the landed elite, "a ri- 
sorgimento of the squires," while offering 
a new account of what this history could 
mean. Country houses were now to be 
taken as a crucial and continuous part of 
English life, yet also the best of them-if 
not his own home, Scotney Castle, "the 
dearjumble ofa house"-might also stand, 
such history aside, as models of the kinds 
of houses the new middle classes could 
afford. Mandler notes that the magazine 
Country Life survived with the financial sup- 
port of the estate agents Knight Frank & 
Rutley, founded in 1896 to market country 
homes, and they support it still together 
with other firms like Jackson-Stops & Staff, 
Fox and Sons, Alfred Savill, Curtis and 
Henson. 
Despite the efforts of Hussey and oth- 
ers, the 1920s and 1930s were, by all mea- 
sures, the low moment in the fortunes of 
these houses, unloved by their owners and 
closed to the public. But after World War 
II, the establishment of the Historic Build- 
ing Committee of the National Trust served 
to define a new interest in them, set in a 
countryside now far more firmly regulated 
by planners and politicians. If once John 
Summerson had been chased away from 
Blickling Hall by the police, now owners 
were grateful for any interest in their 
houses. In 1946, the 28th earl of Crawford, 
then Chairman of the National Trust, and 
Hugh Dalton, Chancellor of the Exche- 
quer in the postwar government of Clem- 
ent Attlee, set up the National Land Fund, 
with a dowry of ?50 million, to be used to 
acquire land deemed by the Chancellor to 
be in the public interest. The country house 
was now safe; and if there could be out- 
breaks still of old class hostilities, the finan- 
cial revival of the aristocracy in the late 
1950s onward, derived from the rise in the 
market value of properties, and the inter- 
est of the aristocracy in repairing their 
often neglected fabrics ushered in a new 
chapter in the story of the survival of the 
country house. Note, for example, that 
Chatsworth had been empty until 1952, 
Castle Howard until 1959. Typical of this 
new age were Lord Montague of Beaulieu 
and the duke of Bedford, who opened up 
their homes to motor museums, zoos, and 
nudist congresses. The rest is history, and if 
Margaret Thatcher's vision of a new Brit- 
ain opposed anything about heritage or 
76 JSAH / 58:1, MARCH 1999 
even anything commercial, like Laura Ash- 
ley, that was based on an idea of this old 
England, cultural forces larger than 
Thatcher were on the march. When the 
National Trust was founded in 1929, it had 
a mere 1,000 members; by 1980 it had 1 
million members and by 1990, 2 million. 
Brideshead Revisited was filmed at Castle 
Howard, and in 1986 The Treasure Houses of 
Britain, an exhibition at the National Gal- 
lery of Art in Washington, D.C., organized 
by Gervase Jackson-Stops of the firm of 
estate agents, unleashed a storm of unhis- 
torical rhetoric about the wonders of these 
houses, the objects within, and the discrimi- 
nating taste of their owners. In the 1920s 
the duke of Westminster, an obviously inter- 
ested party, had called the country house 
the greatest contribution of England to the 
visual arts, "an association of beauty, art 
and nature-the achievement often of cen- 
turies of effort-which is irreplaceable, and 
has seldom, if ever, been equalled in the 
history of civilisation" (343). Yet years later, 
even Robert Venturi, amid his happy re- 
marks at the announcement of the commis- 
sion for the National Gallery, London, 
hinted at the same idea when he said that 
the project combined his two loves, Italian 
painting and English architecture. 
All this and much more-death duties, 
capital transfer taxes, graphs of the pat- 
terns of demolitions and of visitings-are 
the materials of this book. Accompanying 
the text is a series of plates, familiar and 
unfamiliar; the drawings of Georges du 
Maurier from the 1890s; images of wartime 
evacuations; many postwar cartoons from 
Punch; even some nicely staged photo- 
graphs of the aristocracy welcoming visi- 
tors or arguing against increases in capital 
taxation, as did the earl of March in 1975 
in a photograph of himself in one of the 
rooms at Goodwood, stripped of all furnish- 
ings. The wealth of materials is remark- 
able, and the result, to borrow a phrase 
used all too often now, is a book that will 
become the standard account of its subject. 
At a more personal level, the book in- 
vites us to fit ourselves within this history. I 
first studied English architecture in New 
York, at Columbia University, under Ru- 
dolfWittkower. In fact, I had been born in 
England, but my parents had never taken 
me to see these buildings, perhaps from 
some residue of socialist discomfort, per- 
haps also from the dismissive attitudes to- 
ward the houses that they shared with many 
who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s. But 
Wittkower, a new arrival, was able to turn a 
more dispassionate eye upon them, pick- 
ing out from the history, even amid the 
darkest days of the war, the part that espe- 
cially tied things English to the cultural 
traditions of Europe; think here of the 
exhibition he organized in 1941 with Fritz 
Saxl, English Art and the Mediterranean, for 
the Council for Encouragement of Music 
and the Arts. How Wittkower was first re- 
ceived is not clear; I recall a rather slight- 
ing reference to him in the anecdotes of 
James Lees-Milne, a stalwart of the Na- 
tional Trust in the postwar years. But it is 
especially interesting to think of Wittkow- 
er's work as a mark of gratitude toward his 
new home-as were also the compilations 
of Nikolaus Pevsner, based on Georg De- 
hio's Handbuch der deutschen Kunstdenk- 
maler-yet set within the parts of the more 
general political and social history Man- 
dler lays out here. History is history; but it 
is rarelyjust history. 
- David Cast 
Bryn Mawr College 
Antony Wells-Cole 
ART AND DECORATION IN ELIZABETHAN 
AND JACOBEAN ENGLAND 
Yale University Press: New Haven and 
London, 1997, xii + 336 pp., 365 illus. 
$75.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-300-06651-1. 
Michael Snodin and Maurice Howard, 
editors 
OOPRNAMENT: A SOCIAL HISTORY SINCE 
1450 
Yale University Press: New Haven and 
London, 1996, 232 pp., 241 illus., 139 in 
color. $45.00 (cloth). 
ISBN 0-300-06455-1. 
John Ingamells 
A DICTIONARY OF BRITISH AND IRISH 
TRAVELLERS IN ITALY 1701-1800 
Yale University Press: New Haven and 
London, 1997, lii + 1,070 pp. $75.00 
(cloth). ISBN 0-300-07165-5. 
Anthony Wells-Cole has made an impor- 
tant contribution to a recent spate of books 
devoted to the influence of the printed 
image on early modern culture in Britain. 
The most valuable aspect of his study is 
three chapters examining the influence of 
Continental prints on masonry, plaster- 
work, and joinery and carving. There is 
also a final chapter on the significance of 
prints for the decoration of the Elizabe- 
than houses of Chatsworth and Hardwick. 
Painstaking attention to minutiae has al- 
lowed Wells-Cole to go beyond previous 
attempts in tracing the paper sources for 
architectural motifs in a book to consult 
rather than to read. Nevertheless, broader 
issues do emerge, as when, for example, 
prints are shown to inspire the ground 
plan of an entire building and notjust the 
arabesques on its newel posts. A Thorpe 
elevation in the Soane Museum comes from 
a plate from Jacques Perret's Architectura et 
perspectiva (Oppenheim, 1613), a print Gir- 
ouard intriguingly suggested was itself in- 
spired by the design of Wollaton ( Mark 
Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Architec- 
ture of the Elizabethan Country House, [New 
Haven and London, 1983], 86). Evidently 
prints were not merely devoted to the art 
of applique. Their sheer range as source 
material for craftsmen in Scotland as well 
as England suggests an aesthetic, different 
but arguably no less sophisticated, than 
those prevailing in early modern Continen- 
tal Europe. The overmantel panels from 
the richly carved chimneypiece of 1636 in 
the Guildhall at Newcastle-upon-Tyne are 
closely based on two prints after Rubens. 
Not only does this represent a transcrip- 
tion into sculpture of that most painterly of 
painters, an unexpected and daring 
achievement unlooked for in a metropoli- 
tan let alone a provincial context, but these 
reliefs demonstrate a fair stab at getting 
the spirit of the originals by craftsmen a la 
page with the most versatile designer in 
Europe. Such alertness combined with the 
enormous range of material consulted in 
the century after the Reformation suggests 
it is a serious misconception to assume that 
Elizabethan architects were trying to be 
classical in the manner ofJones and Webb 
in the next generation. Rather, they de- 
lighted in the same exuberance and vitality 
as the builders of the Decorated and Per- 
pendicular churches of the late Middle 
Ages. There is more in common between a 
Perpendicular reredos and the Middle 
Temple screen (1570s) than between the 
latter and Palladio's choir screen in the 
Redentore. Insofar as there is any sort of 
BOOKS 77 


Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Fall and Rise of the Stately House\u3c/i\u3e, by Peter Mandler

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

Bryn Mawr CollegeScholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn MawrCollegeHistory of Art Faculty Research and Scholarship History of Art1999Review of The Fall and Rise of the Stately House, byPeter MandlerDavid CastBryn Mawr College, dcast@brynmawr.eduLet us know how access to this document benefits you.Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/hart_pubsPart of the History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology CommonsThis paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. http://repository.brynmawr.edu/hart_pubs/5For more information, please contact repository@brynmawr.edu.Custom CitationCast, 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.Books ENGLAND Peter Mandler THE FALL AND RISE OF THE STATELY HOUSE New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, 523 pp., 100 illus. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-300-06703-8. This is a rich and fascinating book. Over the years there have been innumerable studies of the history and fortunes of the stately home, but as the nicely graded ca- dence of his title suggests, Mandler tells a particular part of this story, what he calls the invention and reinvention of the idea of the country house as the buildings were transformed from symbols of authority to become museums, stripped of all but the merest traces of the political power they once so defiantly embodied. Perhaps we knew much of this, but Mandler's history is so complex and filled with interesting de- tails, it is as if he is writing here about a new topic. The book also abounds in subtle contradictions, as in the opening pages where Mandler notes that, if the idea of the country house has not always hung over us, it is not a fiction imposed on a merely passive people, and the social con- text of the country house idea was not one of simple continuity but of sometimes re- morseless change that led, in ways not equaled perhaps in the other European countries, to neglect and even contempt for the past of which these buildings were so evidently a part. The term "country house" appeared first in English in 1592, as a rendering of the Italian "casa rurestra" in Richard Dallington's translation of the Hypnerotoma- chia Poliphili. But not until 1664 do we encounter the common usage, when Samuel Pepys describes someone going "to his country house," that is to say, a house not in the city. Such rural retreats for the rich have long been associated with the Arcadian myth and invested with a notion of the disinterested contemplation of God and nature, the rural Socrates, and so forth, but for Mandler politics and his- tory, as much as morality, marked the idea of .the stately home. The idea itself was indeed of comparatively recent invention from about 1800, as seen in the notion of "Old England" and in the late medieval and Tudor houses illustrated by Joseph Nash and Samuel Carter Hall and in jour- nals like the Illustrated London News, The Penny Magazine, and The Leisure Hour. This was also the time when a new class of tourists visited country houses--80,000 in one year at Chatsworth, and equal num- bers at Belvoir and Warwick Castle. And if this was possible, it came about as the result of a largely tacit compromise worked out after Reform and Chartism, by which, as Mandler notes, owners were left gener- ally unmolested as long as they appeared to exercise their vast privileges less exclu- sively. But the agricultural depression of the 1870s disturbed such a balance, lead- ing to agitation for taxation of all ground rents and land values, resulting in 1894 in the introduction of a consolidated death duty, the Estate Tax, or what the Duke of Devonshire disparagingly referred to as "democratic finance." A new appreciation of these houses also appeared at this time. The Arts and Crafts Movement was hardly concerned with them, but in 1897 the first issue of Country Life Illustrated (later simply Country Life), edited by Edward Hutton, featured pro- files of these houses written by H. Avray Tipping, illustrated with lavish plates, and printed with the latest technology. In the 1920s, Tipping was followed by Chris- topher Hussey; out of concern for the fate of these houses, he called for a sense of responsibility from the landed elite, "a ri- sorgimento of the squires," while offering a new account of what this history could mean. Country houses were now to be taken as a crucial and continuous part of English life, yet also the best of them-if not his own home, Scotney Castle, "the dearjumble ofa house"-might also stand, such history aside, as models of the kinds of houses the new middle classes could afford. Mandler notes that the magazine Country Life survived with the financial sup- port of the estate agents Knight Frank & Rutley, founded in 1896 to market country homes, and they support it still together with other firms like Jackson-Stops & Staff, Fox and Sons, Alfred Savill, Curtis and Henson. Despite the efforts of Hussey and oth- ers, the 1920s and 1930s were, by all mea- sures, the low moment in the fortunes of these houses, unloved by their owners and closed to the public. But after World War II, the establishment of the Historic Build- ing Committee of the National Trust served to define a new interest in them, set in a countryside now far more firmly regulated by planners and politicians. If once John Summerson had been chased away from Blickling Hall by the police, now owners were grateful for any interest in their houses. In 1946, the 28th earl of Crawford, then Chairman of the National Trust, and Hugh Dalton, Chancellor of the Exche- quer in the postwar government of Clem- ent Attlee, set up the National Land Fund, with a dowry of ?50 million, to be used to acquire land deemed by the Chancellor to be in the public interest. The country house was now safe; and if there could be out- breaks still of old class hostilities, the finan- cial revival of the aristocracy in the late 1950s onward, derived from the rise in the market value of properties, and the inter- est of the aristocracy in repairing their often neglected fabrics ushered in a new chapter in the story of the survival of the country house. Note, for example, that Chatsworth had been empty until 1952, Castle Howard until 1959. Typical of this new age were Lord Montague of Beaulieu and the duke of Bedford, who opened up their homes to motor museums, zoos, and nudist congresses. The rest is history, and if Margaret Thatcher's vision of a new Brit- ain opposed anything about heritage or 76 JSAH / 58:1, MARCH 1999 even anything commercial, like Laura Ash- ley, that was based on an idea of this old England, cultural forces larger than Thatcher were on the march. When the National Trust was founded in 1929, it had a mere 1,000 members; by 1980 it had 1 million members and by 1990, 2 million. Brideshead Revisited was filmed at Castle Howard, and in 1986 The Treasure Houses of Britain, an exhibition at the National Gal- lery of Art in Washington, D.C., organized by Gervase Jackson-Stops of the firm of estate agents, unleashed a storm of unhis- torical rhetoric about the wonders of these houses, the objects within, and the discrimi- nating taste of their owners. In the 1920s the duke of Westminster, an obviously inter- ested party, had called the country house the greatest contribution of England to the visual arts, "an association of beauty, art and nature-the achievement often of cen- turies of effort-which is irreplaceable, and has seldom, if ever, been equalled in the history of civilisation" (343). Yet years later, even Robert Venturi, amid his happy re- marks at the announcement of the commis- sion for the National Gallery, London, hinted at the same idea when he said that the project combined his two loves, Italian painting and English architecture. All this and much more-death duties, capital transfer taxes, graphs of the pat- terns of demolitions and of visitings-are the materials of this book. Accompanying the text is a series of plates, familiar and unfamiliar; the drawings of Georges du Maurier from the 1890s; images of wartime evacuations; many postwar cartoons from Punch; even some nicely staged photo- graphs of the aristocracy welcoming visi- tors or arguing against increases in capital taxation, as did the earl of March in 1975 in a photograph of himself in one of the rooms at Goodwood, stripped of all furnish- ings. The wealth of materials is remark- able, and the result, to borrow a phrase used all too often now, is a book that will become the standard account of its subject. At a more personal level, the book in- vites us to fit ourselves within this history. I first studied English architecture in New York, at Columbia University, under Ru- dolfWittkower. In fact, I had been born in England, but my parents had never taken me to see these buildings, perhaps from some residue of socialist discomfort, per- haps also from the dismissive attitudes to- ward the houses that they shared with many who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s. But Wittkower, a new arrival, was able to turn a more dispassionate eye upon them, pick- ing out from the history, even amid the darkest days of the war, the part that espe- cially tied things English to the cultural traditions of Europe; think here of the exhibition he organized in 1941 with Fritz Saxl, English Art and the Mediterranean, for the Council for Encouragement of Music and the Arts. How Wittkower was first re- ceived is not clear; I recall a rather slight- ing reference to him in the anecdotes of James Lees-Milne, a stalwart of the Na- tional Trust in the postwar years. But it is especially interesting to think of Wittkow- er's work as a mark of gratitude toward his new home-as were also the compilations of Nikolaus Pevsner, based on Georg De- hio's Handbuch der deutschen Kunstdenk- maler-yet set within the parts of the more general political and social history Man- dler lays out here. History is history; but it is rarelyjust history. - David Cast Bryn Mawr College Antony Wells-Cole ART AND DECORATION IN ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN ENGLAND Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1997, xii + 336 pp., 365 illus. $75.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-300-06651-1. Michael Snodin and Maurice Howard, editors OOPRNAMENT: A SOCIAL HISTORY SINCE 1450 Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1996, 232 pp., 241 illus., 139 in color. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-300-06455-1. John Ingamells A DICTIONARY OF BRITISH AND IRISH TRAVELLERS IN ITALY 1701-1800 Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1997, lii + 1,070 pp. $75.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-300-07165-5. Anthony Wells-Cole has made an impor- tant contribution to a recent spate of books devoted to the influence of the printed image on early modern culture in Britain. The most valuable aspect of his study is three chapters examining the influence of Continental prints on masonry, plaster- work, and joinery and carving. There is also a final chapter on the significance of prints for the decoration of the Elizabe- than houses of Chatsworth and Hardwick. Painstaking attention to minutiae has al- lowed Wells-Cole to go beyond previous attempts in tracing the paper sources for architectural motifs in a book to consult rather than to read. Nevertheless, broader issues do emerge, as when, for example, prints are shown to inspire the ground plan of an entire building and notjust the arabesques on its newel posts. A Thorpe elevation in the Soane Museum comes from a plate from Jacques Perret's Architectura et perspectiva (Oppenheim, 1613), a print Gir- ouard intriguingly suggested was itself in- spired by the design of Wollaton ( Mark Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Architec- ture of the Elizabethan Country House, [New Haven and London, 1983], 86). Evidently prints were not merely devoted to the art of applique. Their sheer range as source material for craftsmen in Scotland as well as England suggests an aesthetic, different but arguably no less sophisticated, than those prevailing in early modern Continen- tal Europe. The overmantel panels from the richly carved chimneypiece of 1636 in the Guildhall at Newcastle-upon-Tyne are closely based on two prints after Rubens. Not only does this represent a transcrip- tion into sculpture of that most painterly of painters, an unexpected and daring achievement unlooked for in a metropoli- tan let alone a provincial context, but these reliefs demonstrate a fair stab at getting the spirit of the originals by craftsmen a la page with the most versatile designer in Europe. Such alertness combined with the enormous range of material consulted in the century after the Reformation suggests it is a serious misconception to assume that Elizabethan architects were trying to be classical in the manner ofJones and Webb in the next generation. Rather, they de- lighted in the same exuberance and vitality as the builders of the Decorated and Per- pendicular churches of the late Middle Ages. There is more in common between a Perpendicular reredos and the Middle Temple screen (1570s) than between the latter and Palladio's choir screen in the Redentore. Insofar as there is any sort of BOOKS 77 

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Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Fall and Rise of the Stately House\u3c/i\u3e, by Peter Mandler

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