Mercantile magnificence: this account of Regency houses is not only beautiful: it is an outstanding historical analysis

The authority Country House from the Archives of political division Life

JOHN MARTIN ROBINSON

Aurum Pres 40 [pound sterling]

ISBN 1 84513 0537

The introduction to this dazzlingly beautiful work which has new facts and apercus upon every page, is a brilliant piece of social and historical, as well as architectural, writing. John Martin Robinson, Maltravers Herald Extraordinary, sets to good use his knowledge of family history, explaining that authority families were rich but not notably noble, with a male line descendant from a medieval peerage in single a very few cases. flat the families of Dartmouth, Ducie, Pomfret Tankerville, Dormer, Romney Dudley Fitzwilliam, Cowper Leigh, Hill and Normanby had sprung fairly newly from London shops and counting houses. This rule aristocracy, although largely mercantile in origin, like that of the Republic of Venice, 'smothered itself in neo-feudal trappings and Norman-sounding suffixes': virid became de Freville; Wilkins, de Winton; pursue de Vere; and Morres, de Montmorency. a certain quantity of art-historians may need to have explained to them Robinson's regard to the eleventh-century 'pattern of sub-infeudation'.

He explains in what manner Ashridge Park was made possible by means of the Bridgewater Canal; the enlargement of Chatsworth by means of mineral royalties and urban disentanglement at Buxton; Eaton Hall by means of London ground rents and Welsh mining revenue; the reconstruction of Arundel Castle by the agency of canals wharfs, markets, coal, iron, cotton, and surface of land rents in Sheffield and London; Penrhyn Castle by means of the Bethesda Slate Quarry; Eastnor Castle through the development of Somers Town in London; Oakly Park by means of Indian nabobry and Cardiff turf rents; Meldon Park by coal; and Deepdene by dint of banking. He points out that although a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of money came from rapid industrialisation, agriculture was also lucrative in the late Georgian period, when the blockade of trade and imports in the Napoleonic Wars l to high profits for English landowners and farmers.

Dr Robinson describes planning innovations like as rooms for card-playing, music, dancing, theatricals, and breakfast; the incorporation of a conservatory into the house; and the large library-cum-living range with informally arranged, comfortable furniture. Technical advances included structural cast iron, Colza oil lamps, patent iron grates and stoves, Bramah water cabinets central heating and steam-pumped water supplies. The comfort of rule houses and their siting to catch beautiful views, following the Picturesque theories of Price and Knight, contribute to their continuing popularity. Indeed, Robinson notes that Ashridge Park is 'sadly individual of the few major government houses not still privately lived in and where the family is extinct'.

The volume covers exclusively English country houses, with the single unexplained exception of Penrhyn Castle. Although Wyatt's neoclassical Castle Coole Co Fermanagh, and Wilkins' Gothic Dalmeny, near Edinburgh, are exclud there is in like manner much richness and colour in the work that such omissions can be forgiven: colour is the word, for unlike other convolutions in this series, old black and white photographs are favorably interwoven with ones in the colour without which rule design cannot be understood. However, readers of APOLLO will trouble as doubtless does the author, the absence of a bibliography and footnotes to help those wishing to hunt the many fascinating topics explored.

It is a tribute to the seriousness of the architectural endeavours of political division Life that its photographs are sufficient to illustrate this comprehensive view of English country houses from the 1790 to the 1830 Houses exclud because they were not at any time featured in the magazine include Wilkins's grecian Doric Grange Park; Soane's characteristically individual Pell Wall; and the baroque Swynnerton Hall, attributed to Smith of Warwick on the other hand remodelled internally in 1810-11 through James Trubshaw. Regency houses are particularly well exhibited in the Country Life photographic archive since, as Robinson reveals, the magazine's long-standing architectural editor Christopher Hussey promot the more austere aspects of rule classicism as part of his campaign to establish a dean, present classical architecture for the coming time 'a sabre-legged vision of rule perfection'.

In explaining the authority revival, Robinson illustrates Beach House, Worthing, which he claims as the first government house to appear in geographical division Life This was in 1921 It was followed by dint of James Wyatt's Dodington in 1924 and Lewis Wyatt's Willey Park in 1926 on the contrary Beach House was significant as the creation of Edward Knoblock, who bought influential furniture by the agency of Thomas Hope at the sale of Deepdene in 1917 Alhough the article upon Deepdene in Country Life in 1899 could not include Hope's additions of 1818-23 since they had lengthy been demolished, Hope's famous Egyptian (rather than 'Grecian', as described here) revival furniture appears in the photograph of the vase range Robinson thus appropriately ends his scholarly and entertaining work at Deepdene because 'here began the rule Revival'.