Author: Michael Chappell

The Spencer House sale is history, some impressive results, very nearly all of it well in excess of what would require any of the pieces to get government permission to leave England. How much of it was purchased by Lord Rothschild for placement back into Spencer House we will know in the fullness of time.

A minute ago, I had a brief word with one our craftspeople, describing his onsite repair to a period piece of furniture within an expensively designed interior he pithily characterized as ‘boring’. Naturally, and conveniently I might add, this put me in mind of my blog yesterday. Say what you want, Vardy’s work at Spencer House might be called lots of things, but boring couldn’t possibly be one of them. Realizing that, aesthetically speaking, English rococo isn’t everyone’s tasse de thé, Vardy’s Palm Room nevertheless achieves an ultimate classicism, defined within this context as a canonical mid-18th century expression of material culture.

And, for contemporary designers, what more can a body, either interior designer or client, aspire to? Not to say that every 18th century interior is as effectively wrought, but very many are, and I would find it illuminating, in this age of houses all around the world that are extreme examples of wealthy effulgentia, to see an economic comparison made between what’s laid out now, and what was laid out in the 18th century, for domestic architecture and design.

Whatever such a comparison demonstrates, it so often appears that, with the likes of so many masters of architecture and design- Adam, Kent, Chambers, Carr, Holland- the list goes on and on- the ‘quality’ of two centuries ago got more for their money. Within the larger consideration of material culture, the rubric of art and architectural history considers as its primary focus a search for a site of meaning. And so many 18th century interiors are fraught with meaning on so many levels. For the Spencers, with John Vardy as their medium, the expression of Palladianism meant much more than a fashion, a prominent advertisement of knowledge and sophistication gained from the Grand Tour, but more basically a celebration of an Augustan Britain, with classic architecture a visible link to an Arcadian golden age.  Think the Acropolis transplanted to St James’s.

Amidst the buzz about the Althorp clear-out, it might possibly be that the focus is on the celebrity of the Spencer family. A pity, as the notoriety about the family and its possessions occludes the splendor of Spencer House, which survives in its now thankfully restored glory.

Its Green Park façade survives in its originality, designed in the 1750’s by John Vardy in the Palladian manner. Interesting, though, to see the crossed palm fronds in the pediment, placed beneath and thereby giving rather unusual emphasis to the ocular window.

With the demolition of so many aristocratic London great houses in the 1920’s, Spencer House is a rare survival. Nevertheless, for most of the 20th century, it was put to hard use, for over thirty years as offices for The Economist, complete with suspended acoustical ceilings in the interior and other institutional detritus. Its restoration began with the acquisition of the property in 1985 by a consortium headed by Lord Rothschild. Astonishingly, significant portions of the interior remained virtually intact. Although in the interior realization Vardy was early on replaced by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, Vardy’s Palm Room wildly celebrates the aforementioned motif used, albeit with considerable restraint, in the façade.

With the rooms of state all aesthetically fairly exuberant, it might be difficult to discern the segue from the rococo of Vardy to the archeologically accurate neoclassicism of Stuart. Placed directly over the Palm Room, Stuart’s neoclassicism finds expression in the Painted Room. With its complement of damask and gilt, it is some distance removed from the restraint one might expect if one were to gauge from the illustrations in Stuart’s 1762 Antiquities of Athens.

While it is the various works of Vardy and Stuart at Spencer House that are especially acclaimed, the contribution of interior designer David Mlinaric in providing guidance for the restoration of the rooms of state and the successful integration of the lesser rooms to make the entire interior a contiguous whole that arguably constitutes a feat almost as notable as that of those 18th century worthies.  Although Mlinaric’s design firm carries on, M. Mlinaric is largely retired, but his years of activity contributed a wonderful legacy in a number of historic interiors. Indeed, Lord Rothschild used Mlinaric in another project to great effect, the design of the rooms in the Bachelor’s Wing at Waddesdon Manor, a Rothschild house in Buckinghamshire.

Open to the public virtually and actually engenders response, consequently, from distant quarters, as my last blog entry did. One of my closest friends, an English gentleman, took exception to what he took to be my denigration of London as an 18th century style centre, or more accurately, my favorable characterization of Paris. Well, this would be an irritant since, as my gentle friend has so often told me, the French are the traditional enemies of the English. I hadn’t realized how recent the battle of Agincourt actually was. Fresh in English consciousness, at any rate.

This, of course, put me in mind of English nationalism expressed in material form in, you guessed it, the chair. Ironic, too, that in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Napoleonic Wars would be a crucial vector for design motifs.  With the classical world of Greece and Rome providing a framework for design in the last quarter of the 18th century, antiquarianism spread a bit further to the south toward the end and beginning of the century following, with the motifs of ancient Egypt becoming particularly fashionable. It is a bit tidier to presume that busy designers like George Smith, and more famously Thomas Hope were at work popularizing lion’s head monopedia, but a more immediate cause was Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign that terminated with Nelson’s victory over the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in 1798.

I don’t know of too very many events in history met as ecstatically as Nelson’s Nile victory, but it is dwarfed by the public acclaim the result of Nelson’s subsequent victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. All things Nelson became a mania in England, with the victory instantly incorporated into chairs with the use of a rope twist motif, emblematic of Lord Nelson’s flagship, HMS ‘Victory’.

It would be difficult to make a case for the English 18th century chair as any singular paradigm for the development of style, but that it was continually reflective of contemporary taste there is no question.

With England’s wresting of exclusive trade with the Far East from the Dutch, significantly more, and significantly cheaper, export type items made their way into the English market. The increased prevalence of Chinese screens, bits of small furniture, and lacquer ware made orientalia an affordable vogue by the middle of the 18th century. This mid-18th century mahogany lattice back chair, though of a vaguely oriental appearance, is thoroughly in the mainstream of English fashion, derived from a published design of Thomas Chippendale.   Parenthetically, I have to admit to my gentle readers that, when we acquired this chair a number of years ago, it was with particular excitement. It is with the passing of time and our experience in the business that we have seen enough examples of these chairs, including innumerable late 19th century Chippendale revival pieces, to know that this is and was an extremely popular model. At the time, the chair made such an impression on us that we reproduced the Chippendale design in our trade card, a design we maintain to this day.

If we can frame stylistic trends in terms of a dialectic, as the reaction from the rococo begat the neo-classical, so the reaction from far eastern exoticism begat Gothicism. Simplistic, but not entirely inaccurate, n’est-ce pas? So in the very teeth of exoticism, chairs began to reflect a truly endemic national style.   It’s interesting to consider that the high style Gothic tracery of the back splat and the linen-fold carving to the legs are all rendered upon exotic mahogany timber. How, I wonder, would Horace Walpole and his Committee of Taste rationalize this? That said, it is pretty generally accepted that that efflorescence of Georgian Gothicism, Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, is very much more a confection than it is any focused attempt at recapturing England’s medieval past.

Given Walpole’s extradinary breadth of both wealth, intellect and personal experience, it is unreasonable to assume all these wouldn’t significantly inform his aesthetic. And, of course, that England was paramount in its worldwide political, economic, and military hegemony, it is not then surprising to find pervasive internationalism in high style, certainly amongst that which found particuar appeal for the quality. One reads occasionally of manifestations of le gôut anglaise in Paris, but no one can possibly maintain that Paris was not the preeminent centre of fashion, with London a nearly slavish mimic. Though constructed with the utmost skill by John Linnell, it would be futile to claim that this pair of George III giltwood armchairs were anything other than French inspired.

The trade in English antiques has been replete with palaver about the London season, with a number of my colleagues contributing to the general anxiety with printed debates about the failings of fair promoters, other dealers, and the buying public generally. Although personally no stranger to controversy, there is the old expression about discretion being the better part of valour. Or, as my mother would have it, if you can’t say anything good about someone, say nothing at all.

Shall we fill in the time with a lively discussion about something we all use but seldom consider? The chair, essential to any posterior, and available in countless incarnations, would seem a natural adjunct to any domestic interior. Surprising then to consider that the chair came into fairly common use only in the 18th century. The use of the term ‘backstool’ to describe the earliest chair designs provides an obvious indication of from whence the chair descended.  With vertical backs formed from stiles that ran directly from the ground to the top rail, the backstool was arguably built more for the display of its upholstery than for the comfort of the sitter.

That a chair might fit some approximation of the seated human form is a gradual innovation, perhaps due to greater market demand the result of the general prosperity in the Georgian England of the early 18th century. With all that, it shouldn’t be assumed that innovation in chair design is easily wrought. The chair pictured looks simple enough with its unadorned, vase-shaped splat, until one realizes the splat is bowed outward to conform to the convexity of the sitter’s back.  And the concavity of the splat is achieved with a rectangular plank that must be vertical at the top with two tenons to fit into corresponding mortises in the top rail, carefully hand shaped in the center to a concave form, and returned to vertical at its base with a tenon to fit into the ‘shoe’ above the rear seat rail.

By the second decade of the 18th century, the expert joinery associated with chair making is probably on a par with the joiner’s essential facility with geometry, to accomplish the basic components of a comfortable chair. Despite the invariable inclusion of chair designs in virtually all furniture design compendia, chair making was often its own specialty. Robert Manwaring was pleased to advertise his own artful facility with the publication in 1765 of his, he said ‘original and not piratical’ designs in The Cabinet and Chair-Maker’s Real Friend and Companion.