“Bot at the Sale of the great VIRTUOSO, Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford:” a title inscribed proudly by Horatio Rodd, a nineteenth-century art dealer, onto a simple seventeenth-century oak box with iron hinges. The item was indeed bought the object at the auction of Walpole’s belongings in 1842. By ending Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill, an exhibition shown both in London and New Haven, with this artefact, curators Michael Snodin of the Victoria and Albert Museum and Cynthia Roman of Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library stress their theme for the participating historians and visitors. The box, with a provenance back to the Round Tower at Strawberry Hill, transformed into a relic symbolising the importance of Horace Walpole in the tradition of art collecting in Britain.
The son of Robert Walpole, Britain’s first Prime Minister from 1721 to 1742, Horace Walpole (1747-1797) attended Eton and Cambridge and embarked on the Grand Tour: the typical checklist for a youth of great prospects. Known in the academic world for the extensive mass of correspondence he assimilated with members of eighteenth-century society, Walpole has long been considered a vital link for comprehending Georgian England. Renewed scholarship, undoubtedly connected to the restoration of the site of Strawberry Hill itself added by the World Monuments Watch to the list of 100 Most Endangered Sites List, encourages one to think of the man in context of his home in Twickenham and collection as well as his writing. The home, empty of its contents, is scheduled to reopen in early autumn 2010, restored to its previous state after the wear and tear of more than a hundred years of other owners.
The neo-medieval castle, built from a small cottage purchased in 1747, which Walpole himself expressed would doubtfully survive ten years after his death, is now reconstructed through its contents at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The curators had to battle to create a visual atmosphere for a man admired in the present day for words rather than images. Who was Horace Walpole? What did he do, feel, and believe? And how did he show it?
Entering the show, after a short introduction and view of the first stage of Strawberry Hill’s development in 1756, the viewer proceeds to admire a glass case with three objects from Walpole’s collection. One, a framed picture of Alexander Pope’s house also in Twickenham, the second a Chinese porcelain fish bowl in which Walpole’s cat drowned, and the third a French statuette that greeted visitors entering Strawberry Hill’s Oratory in the eighteenth century. This visually unappealing combination embodies the tensions intrinsic to setting up this exhibition.
First of all, each of the very different looking objects comes from a collections scattered around the world, after the 1842 sale of Strawberry Hill’s contents. Moreover, collaboration between major constituents had to take place for this exhibition to occur. On one side, research by historians such as Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis (1895-1979) at Yale covered the importance of Walpole’s documentation of Georgian Society, the advent of Gothic Novels out of The Castle of Otranto (1764), and Walpole’s connections to men like Alexander Pope. Contrastingly, the Victoria and Albert Museum focuses on the history of visual language and design. The bronze sculpture in this first glass case, that Walpole named a “Saint,” attests to the visual scholarship provided by this institution to prove it to actually be a French fifteenth-century Figure of an Angel. Finally, Walpole’s interesting British character is admired for its high society anecdotal significance, and the fish bowl is now owned by the Honourable Earl of Derby.
These three strands of interest, scholarship, and pride braided into the display also have to be conscious not to reproduce the house, but glorify the significance of its contents. To top it all off, Walpole’s own voice recurs as red text on the wall labels, quoted from A Description of Strawberry Hill, the first illustrated guide to a British home written by the owner himself. The excitement of bringing back together so many items causes visual and curatorial contradictions, seemingly overlooked here by focusing on enthusiasm for the research.
The visitor first faces the objects related to the public persona of Walpole, then a summary of the Strawberry Hill’s different quarters, and an overview of his impact. An official painted portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds (the only object not originally in Walpole’s collection) accompanied by wall text describing the man as a “politician, antiquarian, man of letters, social commentator and collector…” greets the viewer upon entry. Prints and watercolours of the exteriors of Strawberry Hill on the well-transited road to Hampton Court, portraits of his family in Baroque poses within pompous gold frames, self-published books on his collection, and strict entry tickets for visitors, characterise Walpole within British estate owner tradition.
But the hints provided by the fun ode to a drowned cat, a description of a great group of four friends, and the gothic tracery patterned background design ushers the viewer on to expect new aspects of Walpole’s multifaceted personality. The next two rooms, aptly titled “The Antiquarian Interior” and “Animating History” include fascinating antiques and books collected by Walpole, along with objects his group of friends, the “Strawberry Committee,” used to portray a certain mood. An early watercolour by Richard Bentley of the hall and stairway, as well as designs for a glass lantern and furniture with gold and black, provide insight to the ‘gloomth’ the friends were trying to recreate. This Gothick style of design collaborates with treasures collected with “great emphasis on ‘pedigree’ of the objects;” this included a rare and beautiful 1538 Limoges horn, a suit of parade armour Walpole believed belonged to Francis I, a black mirror used by Queen Elizabeth’s conjurer, Dr. Dee, and Cardinal Wolsey’s hat.
After the antiquarian section and a marvellous exhibition of the Holbein chamber, the exhibition climaxes as the space literally turns the visitor around a corner, entering the section on the 1780 extension of the house. The new rooms, including the Stately Apartment, are smartly introduced by a watercolour of the room itself and Walpole’s diagram of picture-hanging strategies. Walpole embraces the crafts of his time, including a royal French ébaniste such as André-Charles Boulle (1642-1732) or a pair of Sèvres vases, but the curators show his quirky ideas, placing a fine piece of colourful Italian maiolica upon a Japanese-inspired lacquer commode next to a piece of Neoclassical furniture upholstered in red damask.
Another exciting aspect the curators exalt is the eccentricity of teaming a characteristic designer as Robert Adam with the colourful style preferred by Walpole. A 360-degree turn from the “gloomth” of the first chambers, Walpole appears to admit that he is a man of his times and not a medieval knight. The more British set up of a long gallery and French-inspired furniture aligned with a wonderful collection of portraits and landscapes, combined with Walpole’s twists are a more subtle rebellion to the traditional country-house formula, including his father’s villa at Houghton House in Bedfordshire.
But Horace, described post-mortum as a virtuoso, was also very proud of his sprezzatura, or nonchalance. After the display of “The Gallery” and “The Great North Bedchamber,” the show turns again to a more private, modest Walpole. “The Tribuna,” named after the treasure room in the Uffizi, was indeed Walpole’s treasure chamber, but also a type of personal chapel dedicated to the arts. The pieces, mainly miniatures and small valuables, introduce the man here headlined to be “England’s Vasari,” after the Italian Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), often considered the first art historian. Annotating drawings and prints he collected, Walpole conjugated the stories of many artists otherwise ignored by history. Here again, the paradox of Walpole’s public and private face: while serious about his heraldic history and portraits, he informally names his book Anecdotes of Painting in England. The man who would wear a Grinling Gibbons wooden carved cravat and gloves of a 17th-century gentleman to greet guests at a party, decides to publish his personal work at a private press rather than at his alma mater in Cambridge. The man who so lovingly crafted letters to ladies and gentlemen, never seems to have been seriously romantic with anyone. The man who worked hard for a collection that would take 32 days to auction, still considered his ‘paper’ house able to disappear ten years after his death. These characteristics and more described within the 280 objects in this exhibition, spotlight Horace Walpole as the eighteenth-century man of mystery.
