Shugborough, Staffordshire, and more

Retrospective (3): Feline tales

It has been said à propos of social media that, having invented the most sophisticated form of communication yet devised by humankind, we use it for sharing pictures of cats. I offer no apologies, though, for this short selection of cat posts, offered as my third retrospective to celebrate a decade of this blog. These, after all, are architectural cats, and the image of the feline form, used as an embellishment on or near buildings, says something about our fascination with these intriguing, beautiful, and sometimes infuriating creatures.* My handful of posts contains cats from the mid-18th to the late-20th century, but which show artistic influences stretching back thousands of years. And that is proof enough that not just our relationship with cats but also our artistic engagement with them is far, far older than the internet.

A sea-going cat in Staffordshire

A church cat in the Cotswolds

A museum mouser in Hereford

A landmark cat in...Catford

The Egyptian-style cats of Mornington Crescent

A ginger tom in Thaxted.

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* The novelist Raymond Chandler referred to his cat Taki as his 'secretary' because whenever Chandler tried to write anything, the creature would drape itself over his notepad or sit on the copy he wanted to revise. I have had this experience with a cat myself and have found it beguiling and maddening by turns.

Shugborough, Staffordshire

'Get a cat' again

In a post a couple of years ago I recalled the lovely story in Patrick Leigh Fermor's Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese about a Greek ship's captain whose boat was troubled with rats. The captain called in a priest, who duly carried out the rituals for casting out vermin – chants, incense, holy water, the lot. As the clergyman prepared to take his fee and depart, he assured the seaman that he would have no trouble now: the rites always worked. 'One more thing,' the priest added. 'Get a cat.' And Paddy remarks: 'Since then the phrase "getting a cat" means, in maritime circles, making surety doubly sure.'

My original post on this theme was about a church in Gloucestershire that got a cat and memorialized the creature in the churchyard. Now here is another of the remarkable garden structures at Shugborough, a monument to what may have been a genuine maritime feline. According to one account of the monument, this is a memorial to a family pet. But another story says that it commemorates the cat that accompanied Admiral George Anson on his ship the Centurion in 1740–44, when Anson undertook an expedition to the Pacific with the aim of seizing a Spanish treasure ship.

Anson's expedition was so poorly planned that one wouldn't have given it a chance. There were eight ships and the motley crew of 1,000 included 259 Chelsea pensioners (average age just under 70) and 210 untrained recruits. Ill winds and navigational errors played havoc with the expedition. At one point they mistook a fleet of Spanish warships for cargo vessels and had to make a hasty retreat. Disease killed hundreds of the men, supplies ran low, and at least one ill-repaired vessel simply broke up. Anson and his remaining 200 men pushed on, finally found a (heavily armed) Spanish galleon, attacked it, and relieved it of its cargo of treasure. Limping into the Chinese port of Canton, for a rest presumably, they found the place on fire and had to lend a hand putting out the flames. They eventually sailed home and Anson's share of the treasure helped rebuild Shugborough.

By the time he got home, Anson had circumnavigated the globe. I like to think that the cat did too, and that it is remembered with this imposing monument of the late 1740s, in its tranquil glade, surrounded by shrubs and a sea of green grass.

Shugborough, Staffordshire

Chinoiserie

I might have given the impression in my recent post about the 18th-century garden buildings at Shugborough that the dominant style of these structures was the Greek revival idiom developed by James 'Athenian' Stuart. While it's true that there are memorable Greek revival buildings at Shugborough –  a Doric temple and a building based on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates as well as the Tower of the Winds that I posted – this is not the whole story. Just when you think you have the place worked out, you come across this: the Chinese House.

This small pavilion of c. 1747, carefully set on a low mound near water, has the concave curving roof, pagoda-like finial, and patterned glazing bars that mark it out straight away as a building in the Chinese taste. It was originally painted blue and set on an island flanked by two bridges, but the layout of the terrain was altered after flooding in 1795. When first built it was not the only Chinese building in the garden: there was also a pagoda, which is long gone – it was apparently destroyed in the 1795 floods.

1747 is quite early for a Chinese-style building in England – the famous pagoda in Kew Gardens, designed by Sir William Chambers, was completed in 1762. Shugborough owes this early Chinese structure in part to Commodore (later Admiral) George Anson, the younger brother of Thomas Anson, the owner of the house. George Anson made a fortune by capturing a Spanish galleon loaded with gold and silver; he had also visited China.

There is a lot more about the Chinese buildings at Shugborough on the East India Company at Home website and the National Trust Treasure Hunt blog. Both of these point out the paradox that the Admiral who provided much of the money to create Shugborough and its gardens didn't much like the Chinese or their taste. They suggest the possibility that George's wife, Elizabeth, was the family member most closely involved with the Chinese House. Chinoiserie, apparently, was an area of decorative design that found many female enthusiasts in the 18th century: perhaps Shugborough's Chinese House is an example of this feminine influence.

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I include links to posts from the National Trust Treasure Hunt blog in Historic Buildings Round-up, my daily digest of news from the around the web.

Shugborough, Staffordshire

Quite Athenian, rather British

The landscape garden at Shugborough, the ancestral home of the Earls of Lichfield, has an impressive collection of buildings designed by James 'Athenian' Stuart, the man who measured and drew Greek architecture and, with Nicholas Revett, published accurate drawings of The Antiquities of Athens in the 18th century. Stuart's work inspired British architects to design classical buildings more closely similar to Athenian ones than before, leading to country houses that looked like Greek temples – and to garden buildings that in some cases resembled these temples very closely.

One of the most prominent of the garden buildings at Shugborough is the Tower of the Winds, an octagonal structure of 1765. The main room, on the upper floor, was designed as a banqueting room. In the 19th century, the downstairs was used as a dairy while the upstairs room apparently became a gambling den presided over by the 1st earl.

The tower at Shugborough is similar in general form to the Greek original, a structure on the agora in Athens bearing a weather vane and various sundials and originally containing a water clock. The Shugborough version is octagonal, and has two entrances and a stair tower. But it is missing the frieze (the original has relief carvings of the deities of the winds) and the sundials that adorn the Athenian tower. The sash windows are of course a very English addition. And inside, there is a ceiling based not an Athenian model but on one from Nero's Golden House in Rome. The little entrance porticoes, however, were designed with a close eye on the original. The capitals are a version of Corinthian, with acanthus leaves but no spiral volutes, that are often now known as Tower of the Winds Corinthian.

Tower of the Winds Corinthian

So this little building is by no means a reproduction of the Greek structure that inspired it and that Stuart and Revett had reproduced so carefully in The Antiquities of Athens. Stuart adapted it to his client's needs, to make a useful building (whether for diners, gamblers, or dairymaids) that was also an ornament in the park. A very British compromise.