Exhibition
Roger White applauds the opportunity to see some of the lost treasures of Strawberry Hill reunited in their collector’s celebrated Thames-side villa
It does not fall to many buildings to give their name to a whole architectural style. that, however, can be claimed by Strawberry Hill at twickenham, even if—as was argued in ‘true Gothic taste’, Country Life, March 21, 2012—the appellation of ‘Strawberry Hill Gothic’ is somewhat misleading.
Horace Walpole’s toy castle on the thames evolved very gradually after his purchase of an unremarkable existing building in 1749, by which time what is perhaps more properly called Georgian Gothic had been under way in one form or another for several decades.
Walpole might be said to have hijacked the idiom, ignoring or rubbishing the prior contributions of people such as Wren, Hawksmoor, Kent and Batty Langley and asserting primacy for his own house on the basis of spurious claims of ‘authenticity’. Arguably more important as an exemplar than the choice of Gothic was the building’s gradual evolution into a precociously asymmetrical forerunner of the Picturesque taste in architectural composition.
As a younger son of Sir Robert Walpole, Horace had the advantages of birth, wealth and connections and he was also, moreover, a brilliant self-publicist.
With a prominent location upstream of London, Strawberry Hill was much talked about and increasingly visited, although hardly on the scale of a 21stcentury historic house open to the public.
What fuelled the interest of contemporaries, however, was not only the building, which didn’t reach its definitive form until the 1770s, but equally its contents.
Walpole was an inveterate collector in the magpie mode. His father had, of course, built a great Palladian mansion at Houghton in Norfolk and did his best to acquire antique or Renaissance artefacts, as well as near-contemporary Italian Baroque art, via agents in Italy and his three Grand Touring sons.
A certain element of this taste rubbed off on Horace, as evidenced by a 1st century AD eagle on a Roman altar base or a basalt bust of Jupiter Serapis.
Like other contemporaries, he was interested in acquiring coins, medals, cameos and prints—all aspects of a basically Classical culture such as would have been recognised and shared by wellbred contemporaries throughout Europe.
However, his own interests developed much more variously so that, by the time of his death, Strawberry Hill was crammed to bursting with objects ranging from a Dürer watercolour of a stag beetle to the Cosmati shrine to Santa Faustina (about 1300); from Cardinal Wolsey’s supposed hat to a limewood cravat carved by Grinling Gibbons; from ebony furniture from the Coromandel coast of India to Sèvres porcelain; from an Aztec mirror that had belonged to the 16th-century necromancer Dr John Dee to the 12th-century comb of Queen Bertha.
Walpole was a keen purchaser when existing aristocratic collections were dispersed at auction. Whether he foresaw a similar fate for his own, one cannot know, but, in 1774, he published a detailed description of Strawberry Hill and its bewilderingly varied treasures.
He died in 1797 and the collection survived in the hands of Waldegrave relatives until it all went under the hammer in 1842, in an epic sale lasting 24 days.
Thus emptied out, the somewhat gimcrack building tottered on, increasingly dog-eared and fragile, until a splendid restoration project was carried out in 2007–12. This returned Strawberry Hill pretty closely to its late-18th-century condition.
What has seemed conspicuously absent until now is much of a sense of how the rooms might have looked with their contents. The Strawberry Hill Trust has had notable successes in reacquiring departed items or getting them back on loan. However, the current exhibition, curated by Silvia Davoli and Michael Snodin, goes much further, borrowing many additional items from collections at home and abroad.
Chief among these is probably the collection at Farmington, Connecticut, in the USA, which was amassed by the Walpole devotee Wilmarth Lewis.
Other notable lenders include the Royal Collection (a wonderful clock given by Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn was acquired for Queen Victoria at the 1842 sale), the Earl of Derby (for instance, the Chinese porcelain goldfish tub in which Walpole’s cat Selima accidentally drowned), the V&A and the Waldegrave estate. Chief among the loans from the latter is the great album compiled in about 1794 to document the house and contents. Although open at the page recording two items of Gothick furniture currently on display in the Parlour, it includes many other objects that left in 1842 and have yet to be tracked down. How satisfying it would be if this fascinating exhibition were to lead to further notable discoveries— that basalt bust of Jupiter Serapis, for a start. ‘The Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill: Masterpieces from Horace Walpole’s Collection’ is at Strawberry Hill, 268, Waldegrave Road, Twickenham, London TW1, until February 24, 2019 (020–8744 1241; www.strawberryhillhouse. org.uk/losttreasures) Next week Gainsborough: early life, family and theatre
Horace Walpole was an inveterate collector in the magpie mode