National Trust acquisitions 2002-2003

The National Trust has been particularly active in its acquisition of works of art in 2002-2003, and on three major fronts: at Nostell Priory, Yorkshire; Penrhyn Castle, North Wales; and Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire. These purchases and in lieu settlements are described below, together with briefer accounts of major purchases for Uppark, West Sussex, and Carlyle's House, London. This is not the whole story, however, for there have also been acquisitions of family portrait miniatures for Killerton, Devon; a painting by Oliver Messel (1904-78) for Nymans, West Sussex; contents at Croft Castle, Herefordshire; and a View of Venice by Ebenezer Wake Cook (1843-1926) for Cragside, Northumberland. There was also the acceptance-in-lieu of furniture and chattels from the estate of the late Sir George Labouchere, for display at Dudmaston, Shropshire.

In making acquisitions, the Trust has been dependent upon the support and generosity of several public and charitable funds, notably the National Heritage Memoria] Fund (NHMF), the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the National Art Collections Fund (NACF), as well on as private donations from National Trust supporters.

2002-2003 has also seen the acquisition of Tyntesfield, the great Victorian estate near Bristol-with the assistance of an unprecedented 17.4 million [pounds sterling] grant from the NHMF, and a very generous response to our public appeal (which raised no less than 8.2m [pounds sterling])--and of Red House, Kent, designed for William Morris (1834-96) by the architect Philip Webb (1831-1915). Both these new properties will be the subject of further coverage in APOLLO.

The successes of 2002-2003, however, should be seen in the more sombre context of an increasing level of sales of privately-owned chattels from National Trust properties. The enormous rise in the value of works of art, high levels of taxation and the absence of any but the most basic incentives for tax-deductible giving, mean that the National Trust will inevitably have to make some stark decisions about the feasibility of securing indigenous pictures, furniture and other chattels in the coming years-indeed, it is doing so already. Unlike most museums and art galleries, the National Trust's responsibilities extend beyond works of art to buildings, gardens, and natural and designed landscape. The HLF-funded acquisition of pictures and furniture for Nostell Priory, for example, which is discussed in more detail below, forms only one component of a much larger negotiation involving garden, parkland, and important historic estate buildings--which will enable the opening up of this great estate in West Yorkshire for the inspiration and engagement of visitors.

For their help in the preparation of this and the following notes, I am grateful to David Adshead; Andrew Barber; Caroline Bowyer; Roger Carr-Whitworth; Sophie Chessum; Oliver Fairclough, Keeper of Art at the National Museum and Gallery of Wales, Cardiff; Jane Gallagher; John Hardy, Christie's; Tim Knox; Alastair Laing; Isobel Latchford; Jill McNaught-Davis; Mark Purcell; Sophie Raikes; and Charles Truman of C.L. Burman.

Christopher Rowell has recently been appointed Furniture Curator to the National Trust, having previously been the Trust's Historic Buildings Representative for the Southern Region, with particular responsibility for Petworth House.

Nostell Priory

Nostell Priory is rightly famous for its superb collection of documented furniture by Thomas Chippendale (1718-79), as well as its rococo and neo-classical interiors--in turn the work of James Paine (1717-89 and Robert Adam (1728-92). Much of that furniture was acquired by the National Trust in 1986, with the aid of a grant of 6.1 million [pounds sterling] from the NHMF. As is the case with so many of the National Trust's most important properties, the gift of the house, in 1954, was not accompanied by the gift of the contents, which still remain partly in family ownership. In such cases, the Trust and the families have worked together to ensure that the collections stay together, as sales--or set elements in lieu of tax--have become necessary.

Recent acquisitions mark another important step in the gradual process of saving the contents of Nostell for the nation. This time it has not been furniture by Chippendale which has been acquired, but rather one hundred and forty-eight hectares of historic parkland, Adam's Obelisk Lodge and the Stables, various garden and park buildings, together with important pictures, books and other chattels that came to Nostell by inheritance, commission or purchase in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This has been made possible largely thanks to a generous grant from the HLF of 4.2 million [pounds sterling]. The NACF also very generously provided a grant of 294,029 [pounds sterling]--100% of the cost (after tax remission)--for the purchase of the painting by Hogarth discussed below (Fig. 2).

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The pictures include four of particular importance, the earliest of which is one of the icons, not only of Nostell Priory, but of the early history of British portraiture. This is the famous copy (1592) by Rowland Lockey (active 1581-1616) of the lost painting by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) of c. 152% representing Sir Thomas More and his family. Lockey was extensively employed by Bess of Hardwick and the Cavendishes (of Hardwick and Chatsworth), and painted another version in oil of Holbein's group portrait of the More family, which is now in the National Portrait Gallery. The Nostell picture has been in the possession of the Winns since 172% when Sir Rowland Winn (1706-65), 4th Bt., the builder of Nostell, married Susanna Henshaw, a direct descendant of Sir Thomas More's grandson, Thomas Roper, who had commissioned Lockey's painting.

The Scene from Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act 1, Scene II by William Hogarth (1697-1764) (Fig. 2) is the first depiction in British art of a scene from one of Shakespeare's plays, and is one of only two documented pictures at Nostell to have been acquired by Sir Rowland Winn (1739-85), 5th Bt., the patron of Robert Adam at Nostell and of artists such as Hugh Douglas Hamilton (1736-1808). The Hogarth is distinguished by its sparkling, painterly handling, and by its invention, notably in such details as Miranda's shell-backed and coral-encrusted throne, although the numerous pentimenti are evidence of Hogarth's problems in resolving the somewhat awkward composition. This was one of Sir Rowland's first artistic purchases, and was acquired in 1766 (together with the lease of his house in St James's Square) from Dorothy Nesbitt, Dowager Countess of Macclesfield.

Another masterpiece of eighteenth-century British subject painting--The artist hesitating between the arts of Music and Painting by Angelica Kauffman (1740-1807) (Fig. 3)--has not been at Nostell for nearly as long (it was acquired in 1908, by the 2nd Lord St Oswald, to balance Lockey's copy of Holbein's More family in the Top Hall), but it fits in with the history of the great eighteenth-century house, not only in terms of its elegant interpretation of an elevated subject, but also because Angelica's husband, Antonio Zucchi (1726-95), was responsible for many of the decorative paintings set into the Robert Adam plasterwork at Nostell.

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Angelica Kauffman was one of only two inaugural female members of the Royal Academy, and was highly regarded both as an artist and as a woman of considerable charm. This picture was painted in Rome in 1791 or 1794, and was no doubt principally inspired by Nicolas Poussin's (1594-1664) Choice of Hercules of c. 1636-37 (now at Stourhead, Wiltshire)--but also by Angelica's friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds's (1723-1792) Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy of 1761 (on loan to the National Trust at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire). It is also a personal record, for the young Angelica chose to be a painter rather than an opera singer, attaining the Temple of Fame pointed out by the Genius of Painting in her Nostell picture.

The fourth painting recently acquired for Nostell has not previously been on show, having been hung in the family's private apartments. It was probably acquired for Nostell by Charles Winn (1795-1874), whose considerable contribution as a collector is described by Sophie Raikes elsewhere in this issue. Still life with the makings of a banquet (Fig. 1), is signed and dated 1640 by Pieter Claesz (1597/98-1660), who worked in Haarlem, specialising in such banketjestukken (or 'small banquet-pieces'). The Nostell picture, with its almost Caravaggesque realism and elegance, depicts the trappings of sybaritic consumption. The frame is an exact copy of earlier neo-classical frames made by Chippendale for Charles Winn's grandfather, Sir Rowland Winn, 5th Bt.

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Other purchases made for Nostell include English, continental and oriental furniture in a variety of different types and styles, ranging from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinets in walnut, lacquer and painted 'marquetry' (Fig. 4), via mid-eighteenth century and George IV seat furniture and console tables, to the painted breakfront bookcases (possibly by Adam) in the Muniment Room. Most extraordinary of all is a colossal pair of tortoiseshell and ivory globular vases and covers, probably made as exhibition pieces (Fig. 5). They are mounted on ebonised, marbled and gilded supports in the form of four crouching Nubian slaves. Tim Knox has recently discovered that they were acquired by Rowland Winn, 1st Lord St Oswald (1820-93), for whom the dealer A. Grindlay bid 165 guineas (173 [pounds sterling]-5s) at the famous sale in 1882 at Hamilton Palace, where they appear in old photographs of the Gallery, and in the sale catalogue as lot 667--'A Pair of large Venetian ornaments, formed as globular vases, with long necks and openwork wing handles, the surface encrusted with tortoiseshell inlaid with birds and patterns of engraved ivory, studded with gold picque work and coloured stones ... on stands formed as groups of negroes partly painted in colours and gilt'. Although they have been described as 'Spanish Colonial', their decoration--and the use of tortoiseshell and engraved ivory, as well as the style of the sculptural supports--suggests that the description of them in the Hamilton Palace sale catalogue as 'Venetian' may not be wide of the mark, given that they are reminiscent of the exotic tortoiseshell and ivory marquetry furniture and panelling of the Turin cabinetmaker, Pietro Piffetti (1700-77), whose distinctive style enjoyed a revival in the mid-nineteenth century. A set of thirteen mahogany chairs and a sofa, upholstered in crimson cut velvet, with carved cabriole legs, paw feet and distinctive fretted seat rails, is in the style of the London cabinetmaker, Giles Grendey (1693-1780). This set of c. 1760--and the Muniment Room bookcases of c. 1770--date from just before, and just after, the period when James Paine's house was beginning to be aggrandised by Robert Adam. The purchase of the latter will allow the Muniment Room to be opened for the first time. The remainder of this tranche of new furniture acquisitions came to Nostell as a result of Charles Winn's commissions to Gillow's of Lancaster, and of his purchases of antique pieces, which broadened the range of the furniture collections.

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The Trust has also acquired the magnificent Nostell library of some five and a half thousand volumes, one of the best collections of books in any English country house, together with the mahogany bookcases in the Billiard Room, which were probably--on the basis of their similarity to those at Tatton Park, Cheshire (National Trust)--supplied to Charles Winn by Gillow's in the 1820s. The history of the library dates back to the seventeenth century (the earliest volume was published in 1563), and includes books inherited from the Henshaw, Roper, and d'Hervart families. Thus, through Sabine d'Hervart, the Swiss wife of the 5th Baronet (they married in 1761), there is a collection of Swiss publications which is probably unique outside Switzerland. Otherwise, the content is varied, representing--in English, Latin and various foreign languages--coverage of history, local topography, science, numismatics, art and architecture, as well as a host of other subjects. The last major chapter is due to Charles Winn, who was a bibliophile, as well as a collector and antiquarian. His superb volumes of the Birds of the Himalayas (1832), Birds of Europe (1837), and Birds of Australia (1842), by John Gould (1804-81), with 1,128 hand-coloured plates in mint condition, were acquired directly from the author, with whom Winn conducted a correspondence. Such volumes are usually broken up and sold, but the purchase intact of the Winn books will allow Gould's magnificent aquatints to be displayed in showcases, with a changing exhibition of other volumes. This acquisition also includes a nationally important collection of tracts and pamphlets, with particular emphasis on religion, politics and Catholic Emancipation.

A Pynacker for Penrhyn and Cardiff

The high value Old Master paintings e now able to command makes their purchase daunting, but happily an important landscape by Adam Pynacker (c. 1620-73) (Fig. 6) has been secured for the Penrhyn Castle collection--one of the finest made in the nineteenth century, and still largely intact. Pynacker was one of the so-called Dutch Italianates--Dutch artists who travelled to Rome during the seventeenth century--and whose pictures were strongly influenced by Italian landscape and the golden light of southern skies. This has been achieved by means of a partnership with the National Museum and Gallery of Wales, Cardiff, and with a generous grant of 83,000 [pounds sterling] from the NACF. The total, shared cost after tax remission was 317,107 [pounds sterling]. This partnership will ensure that the picture is seen in both the north and south of the country (Penrhyn and the museum in Cardiff hold the two most important collections of Old Master pictures in Wales). Such partnerships are not unique: in 1990, the Trust and the Museum jointly purchased (also with NACF help) the bronze bust of Lord Herbert of Chirbury (1583-1648) by Hubert Le Sueur (c. 1590-after 1658) for Powis Castle from the Powis Estate.

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In 1951, when Penrhyn Castle was transferred to the National Trust in lieu of tax from the estate of the 4th Lord Penrhyn, it was not possible to settle contents in the same way, and although the extraordinary neo-Norman furniture designed for the vast pile in the 1820s by Thomas Hopper (1776-1856) remained on loan and in situ, the most important pictures were separated from the setting for which they were acquired, and were either hung in the family's house in the park, or loaned to the National Museum and Gallery of Wales in Cardiff. In 1984-85, the late Lady Janet Douglas Pennant generously made a substantial loan of these pictures to the National Trust for display in their original setting at Penrhyn. She and her husband (the late John Douglas Pennant) were delighted by the Trust's suggestion that the Breakfast Room should be hung with crimson silk to become--once again--one of the principal rooms in which pictures were displayed. Other contents were loaned by the family, including important items of silver, which were placed on the side tables and dining table in the cavernous Dining Room.

Lady Janet and John Douglas Pennant's strong feeling that the picture collection should be displayed to visitors at the Castle has been upheld by their sons, Richard and Edmond, who have made possible the acquisition of the Pynacker Landscape. Recently, there has also been a considerable transfer in lieu of tax of other important pictures (including works by, or attributed to, Palma Vecchio, Alonso Cano, Aert van der Neer, Guardi, Canaletto and Gainsborough), silver, books, and furniture, including the famous slate bed, used by Queen Victoria on her visit in 1859, and other important neo-Norman pieces--also previously on loan--designed by the Castle's architect, Thomas Hopper.

The formation of the picture collection at Penrhyn was anticipated by George Hay Dawkins-Pennant (1764-1840), who commissioned Hopper to design every aspect of the Castle in an extraordinary neo-Norman style--evident from the mass of the great Keep to the smallest detail of the gargantuan interiors which survive almost unchanged today, as is revealed by Hawkins's series of lithographs (1846). Having made a considerable fortune from the quarrying of slate, Dawkins Pennant 'expressly desired that a good collection should be made at Penrhyn by his heirs', a wish that his son-in-law, Edward Gordon Douglas-Pennant (1800-86), 1st Lord Penrhyn--who was 'particularly fond of the Dutch School'--was to fulfill. Lord Penrhyn was advised by the Belgian dealer, Nieuwenhuys, and the best of the pictures--such as the Pynacker--are distinguished not only by their quality but by their excellent condition. The Pynacker will be hung in the Breakfast Room--as in 1901--accompanied by Rembrandt's great Portrait of Caterina Hooghsaet, in its elaborate Louis XV-style frame, and Jan Wouvermans's Conversion of St Hubert. Lord Penrhyn had a particular love of landscape pictures, and the collection contains examples by Ruysdael, Wijnants and Van der Neer, as well as Gainsborough's Landscape with a wooded glade and cart, which was accepted in lieu of tax in 2002.

Adam Pynacker painted the newly-acquired Penrhyn Landscape in about 1654, after his return from three years in Italy (probably 1645-48), and when he was living once again in his native Schiedam, a harbour town on the Nieuwe Maas, just west of Rotterdam, where his family owned a shipping and wine business. At this time, he was particularly influenced by Jan Both (c. 1618-52) and Jan Asselijn (c. 1615-52). The Penrhyn Pynacker has a distinguished provenance, having belonged to the painter, Benjamin West, PRA (1738-1820), and then to the Six family (whose ancestors had been among Rembrandt's patrons), before being purchased for Penrhyn in about 1865. At that time, almost half of Pynacker's known works were in Britain and he is still represented mainly in British private collections, as well as in museums such as the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Wallace Collection. The joint purchase of the painting by the Trust and the National Museum and Gallery of Wales will allow the painting to be appreciated in contrasting settings, both in the well-illuminated context of a major public gallery, and as an element of the historic arrangement at Penrhyn. It is envisaged that the painting will alternate between the Castle and the Museum at five-yearly intervals.

Furniture, silver and miscellanea for Kedleston

The most important of the numerous purchases at auction for Kedleston in 2002 were three pieces of mid-eighteenth-century furniture: a pair of elegant oak side tables with grey-veined marble tops (Fig. 7), and an oval mahogany dropleaf dining table. The former are of a type introduced earlier in the eighteenth century, which was still being manufactured in the 1760s, and this pair may have been commissioned in the late 1750s for the Caesars' Hall at Kedleston by Sir Nathaniel Curzon, 5th Bt., later 1st Lord Scarsdale (1726-1804)--the great patron of Robert Adam--who succeeded to the title in 1758 and completed the house in 1765. The tables have been returned to their original positions in the Caesars' Hall. As for the oval dropleaf table, this was originally one of a pair of large folding dining tables, again probably commissioned in the late 1750s by Sir Nathaniel, and listed in the 1804 inventory of the Dining Room as 'two circular Mahogany dining tables'.

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The newly-acquired silver was also made for Sir Nathaniel, incorporating two pairs of circular salvers on paw feet, engraved with the Curzon arms, respectively by William Preston (1750) and Richard Rugg (1758), the latter pair being supplied in the year of Sir Nathaniel's marriage to Lady Caroline Colyear, whose arms impale those of her husband. The Trust has also purchased a miscellany of other items ranging from porcelain, sporting guns, objets d'art, and framed Islamic tiles to two enormous panoramic photographs (Fig. 8), by Bourne and Shepherd of Simla, taken at the Coronation Durbar of 1903. These will be displayed in the Housekeeper's Room this year as part of a special exhibition celebrating the centenary of the Durbar.

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Silver for Uppark

A pair of magnificent silver-gilt dishes (Fig. 9), commissioned or bought by Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh (1754-1846), friend and artistic adviser to the future George IV, has been purchased for Uppark with the aid of a grant from the NACF and other donations. It was originally displayed amongst a treasure-trove of silver, weighing twelve thousand and thirty-two ounces in all, in one of four mirrored buffets in the dining room at Uppark, designed in c. 1812-15 by Humphry Repton (1752-1818), but the silver collection was largely dispersed in 1972. Sir Harry and the Prince Regent were in the forefront of the newly fashionable taste for sixteenth--and seventeenth-century metalwork and plate, or, as in this case, modern silver in imitation of it. These dishes--of outstandingly high quality, particularly in the depth of the engraving, and in near mint condition--are, as Sophie Chessum has discovered, the earliest documented works (1824) of a comparatively little-known London silversmith, Edward Farrell (c. 1780-1850). Via the dealer Kensington Lewis (c. 1790-1854), Farrell supplied Sir Harry with no fewer than eighteen pieces--both altered-antique and contemporary. The centres of the Uppark dishes are engraved with the arms of Fetherstonhaugh within an elaborate cartouche--complete with a river god (probably representing the Arno) and a triton nestling among reeds--taken from an engraving by Stefano della Bella (1610-64), published in Paris in 1646.

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Despite the fire which ravaged Uppark in 1989, Repton's dining room there remains almost intact (the adjacent servery was unharmed), retaining its original furniture and paintings, and even its Frenchified white and gold decoration of c. 1815. In 1999, the Trust added a Sevres biscuit centrepiece of 1816, also bought back with the aid of the NACF. It is hoped that other pieces of display plate can be secured in order to restore one of the great early nineteenth-century collections of silver, whose original display was entirely in tune with that at Carlton House, devised for Sir Harry's quondam crony, the Prince Regent.

A sideboard returns to Carlyle's House

An ebony-inlaid mahogany Regency sideboard of c. 1815 (Fig. 10), bought at Sotheby's in New York (English Furniture, 26 October 2002, lot 1888) for $19,120, will return to the Back Dining Room of the Chelsea house of the great nineteenth-century writer, philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). The sideboard came from Jane Carlyle's maternal home in Scotland and was clearly much loved: it is referred to in several of the couple's letters, and was described in the 1895 'Carlyle's House Catalogue' as 'probably the handsomest piece of furniture in the house'. Its original position is shown in an engraving in the Catalogue and in Robert Tait's celebrated painting of the Carlyles at home (Fig. 11), where one end of the sideboard can be seen through the open doorway between the Sitting and Dining Rooms. It was placed beneath the various paintings of 'heroes' that Carlyle had assembled. The artist Helen Allingham (1848-1926)--whose husband William was a close friend of Carlyle--recorded the interiors of No. 5 (now No. 24) Cheyne Row in a series of watercolours and among them is a pencil study of the sideboard.

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