Overlooked Britain Lucinda Lambton
Looking for all the world as if it is about to set sail across the water, there stands a Chinese fishing temple of 1772 in what were once the grounds of Alresford Hall in Essex. Known as ‘The Quarters’, it was built on the edge of woods of the same name – said to have originated from Cromwell’s troops having been quartered there during the Civil War. The little pavilion was originally built with its veranda over the water for easy angling, and with – now a sad loss – Chinese railings embracing more of the building. As well as fishing from this elegant architectural arrangement, you could step inside to a groined and arched windowed passage leading you forth into an octagonal banqueting room.
Boating from this exotic confection, was a bonus. The ‘Estimate for the Building of Chinese Temple for Colonel Rebow’ survives, drawn up by Richard Woods, a landscape designer and architect of ornamental garden buildings, which tells us that this evocation of the East in Essex cost £343 13s 4d. Such ‘Chinese’ architectural adventures were
to appear all over the United Kingdom by the mid-1770s. ‘The country wears a new face’, wrote Horace Walpole in a letter to Sir Horatio Mann, ‘with a whimsical air of novelty that is very pleasing.’
There was, though, much mockery for such extremes: Chinese pigsties were appearing and there was even ‘Thatch in the Chinese Style’, while the Dairy at Woburn Abbey still shines to this day with a multitude of Chinese delights. Even Jean Pillement, the French ornamentiste whose fantastical and influential Chinoiserie designs led the taste for the style throughout Europe,
wrote that it was all going too far. In The Ladies Amusement or the Whole Art of
Japanning made Easy of the late 1700s, he opined that with ‘Indian and Chinese subjects great liberties are taken, because luxuriance of fancy recommends their Productions more than Propriety, for in them is often seen a butterfly supporting an elephant, or Things equally absurd.’ No such criticism could apply to Alresford, which is sensibly restrained compared with such wild flights of fancy. With its ‘coolie hat’-like roof perched over the banqueting room, the little building is as pretty as a picture; and in July 1816, it was in fact to be painted by no less a figure than John Constable.
He had been commissioned by his first patron, a Major General Francis Slater Rebow, who owned Alresford Hall and who as well as admiring the impoverished young artist’s work was keen that he should be able to afford to marry his fiancée, Maria Bicknell or, as Constable wrote to Maria, ‘that we may soon want a little ready money’. They married within six weeks.
Constable had also been asked to paint Wivenhoe Park, Rebow’s other estate nearby, producing a parkscape that is widely acknowledged as the great seminal work in Constable’s progress of ‘natural painture’.
Writing to Maria that she would think him ‘the greatest egoist in the world ... but [that] you desired me to write without reserve’, he proudly proclaimed that Colonel Rebow had said that ‘much as I had gratified him as an artist he was much pleased with me as a gentleman and a man’. It was happy collaboration that resulted in two very different paintings: one a grand sweep of a parkscape, the other an exquisite little building.
‘Wivenhoe Park, Essex’ is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, USA. ‘The Quarters behind Alresford Hall’ is in The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.