From Bloomsbury to the Downs

Celebrating Batsford books

Bradley Thomas Batsford opened his doors as a London bookseller in 1843 and by the end of the century was one of this country’s most prominent publishers. B. T. Batsford was a family firm, steered in those early decades by its founder and his three sons, who built up a reputation as general publishers with a particular strength in architecture and the arts. These were the subjects that they became particularly known for, although their list was strong in other areas, from science to theology (many of the early customers in the bookshop were clergymen). The expertise in selecting and reproducing illustrations that they developed for their books on the arts continued to grow in the 20th century, when they produced many striking and popular illustrated books on history, arts, crafts, architecture, and, at the junction of all these subjects, the heritage of the British Isles.*

Batsford was also notable for producing series of books that readers wanted to collect – the Batsford Heritage Series (begun in the 1930s) and the Face of Britain Series (starting during World War II) were pivotal. Batsford chose knowledgeable and often excellent authors for the books – in the Face of Britain Series you can find W. G. Hoskins writing about Midland England, M. W. Barley on Lincolnshire and the Fens, and Richard Wyndham on Southeast England. Another Batsford favourite of mine, is John Russell’s Shakespeare’s Country – it wasn’t published under the banner ‘The Face of Britain’ but is similar in format.

These series were instantly recognisable because they had covers illustrated in colour (in itself a stand-out feature back then) with distinctive cover artwork by Brian Cook, Bradley Thomas Batsford’s grandson and therefore the third generation in the family firm.† Brian Cook created a style that was boldly simple, and brightly coloured: were any book jackets back then as bright and colourful as his? Very few, I’d guess. To print them, he used the Jean Berté process, which employs water-based colours and rubber printing plates, one per colour, into which the artist cuts the design.§ In the right hands, the results are stunning, and books with Cook’s jackets are prized by collectors. I have a whole shelf of them, but most of mine are quite badly faded (as this was a watercolour process, the inks fade in the light). Catching sight of one that has preserved its originally vivid palette is like being warmed by a ray of sunshine from another age.¶

The long history of Batsford, from those beginnings as a bookseller to the name’s current life as an imprint of Pavilion Books (still producing good books, in artistic and historical subjects especially) is charted in a small exhibition currently in Holborn Library, Theobalds Road. It’s good to see the imprint commemorated in this way and if you’re near that part of London the exhibition is worth a look.‡

There have been other celebrations. A notable one, which also marks 80 years since the outbreak of World War II, is a reprint of one of the Face of Britain series with a Brian Cook illustration on the cover. This is the volume originally called Southeastern Survey, by Richard Wyndham. It has been reissued this year with a new title, Sussex, Kent & Surrey 1939, with an introduction by Peter Ashley. Wyndham’s text is one of the better ones in the series and, written in 1939 and published in 1940, it marks that moment when the war began and people increasingly reached for books about the Britain they were fighting for. All of Britain was vulnerable of course, but these counties close to London felt that vulnerability as much as any. And books about England had another urgency. The war made foreign travel impossible for most, and few inland journeys were undertaken lightly. Authors like Wyndham reminded people what they’d got, and what, on these brief journeys, they might see.

The author, designer and photographer Peter Ashley, who’ll be no stranger to many readers of this blog, is an excellent person to introduce the book. Peter is a Batsford collector and is knowledgeable both about England’s places and the books that have described them. I’ll certainly be shelving a brightly covered copy next to my faded first edition of the book: it’s a worthy companion.

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* Quite early in my life I realised that the books on English historic architecture I was taking out of the local library to inform and develop my new interest were published by Batsford: in the 1960s, they were dominating the field.

† Brian Cook changed his name to Brian Batsford Cook, adopting his mother’s maiden name to emphasize his family connection to the firm.

§ The French printer Jean Berté (1883–1981) patented his method in 1926, so Cook was on to something quite new when he started using the Jean Berté process soon after 1930.

¶ For more on the early history of Batsford, see Hector Bolitho, A Batsford Century (B. T. Batsford, 1943)

‡ Batsford: 175 Years of a Bloomsbury Publisher is at Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre, Holborn Library, Theobalds Road, until 28 June.

The top image is Brian Cook’s depiction of Kersey, Suffolk, for The Villages of England (Batsford, 1932).

Seeing, drawing, teaching

John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing
An exhibition at Two Temple Place, London
Curated by Sheffield Museums and the Guild of St George

‘Is Mr Ruskin living too long?’ asked the architect E. W. Godwin in a piece written in 1878.* Godwin had revered the great Victorian sage and been inspired by his book The Stones of Venice, but now Ruskin was embroiled in a controversy with the artist Whistler; Whistler seemed the latest great thing in art and Ruskin suddenly seemed old hat. Just under a hundred years later, when I was at university, Quentin Bell, art historian and biographer (and nephew) of Virginia Woolf came to persuade us that it was still worth reading Ruskin: few of us can ever have read more than a page or two of the great man, who seemed a distant figure indeed.

In the 21st century, Ruskin can seem yet more remote: a Victorian who wrote interminable books with impenetrable titles,† who promoted a kind of architecture – Gothic – that harks back to the Middle Ages, who had a famously disastrous marriage, who was active in so many areas that it’s hard to pin him down. And yet his influence has been profound. The proto-socialism of his book Unto This Last, attacking free-market economics, guided pioneers of the Labour party, inspired Gandhi to found a newspaper on which everyone was paid equally, and has been said to prefigure some of the ideas of the Green movement. His writings, especially the vast Modern Painters, gave Turner (among the greatest of all English artists) his due for the first time. He developed a new appreciation of Venice and its architecture – as well as a sense of that city’s fragility – in The Stones of Venice, a book that also made an eloquent case for Gothic architecture. He presented art and history in exciting, if sometimes baffling, new ways in works such as Fors Clavigera, his absorbing series of polymathic letters to the working men of England. There’s more? There’s more. He could draw like an angel. He lectured tirelessly. And he gave away much of his inherited wealth to promote educational projects, such as his museum (it has been called a ‘people’s museum’) in Sheffield, and schemes that taught people how to live a better life, like his Guild of St George.

John Ruskin, Study of Moss, Fern and Wood-Sorrel, upon a Rocky River Bank, 1875–79. © Collection of the Guild of St George / Museums Sheffield

Most of what Ruskin wrote and did was animated by this educational mission, and he went at it with the zeal of a prophet. That’s one of the things that comes across vividly in the exhibition John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing at Two Temple Place in London. This show features drawings and watercolours that Ruskin did that show people how to see – minute studies of leaves or the surfaces of rocks, of mosses and ferns, of glaciers, of a peacock’s breast feather, delineations of architectural details, landscapes inspired by works of Turner and by Ruskin’s incessant travelling. But the exhibition is also stuffed with things that he collected, for his museum and to show anyone (students at Oxford, members of the public who attended his many lectures) how too look at nature – specimen rocks and minerals, botanical drawings, paintings of birds by Audubon and Edward Lear, old master paintings, architectural carvings.

This commitment to education is something that shines through the exhibition. Most of what Ruskin drew or collected seems to have been drawn or acquired for a practical, instructional purpose – to reproduce in books (works like The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice are full of wonderful prints from his drawings of buildings), to illustrate lectures, to add to the museum.  Ruskin is talking to us through these objects – revealing tiny worlds among the mosses and ferns, showing the effect of light on a carving, demonstrating the use of ornament or different coloured stones on a building, explaining how an artist like Turner saw and painted the St Gothard Pass. It’s a wonderfully varied exhibition, because, as he said, ‘The teaching of art, as I understand it, is the teaching of all things’.

Because art, for Ruskin, is at the heart off all things, this makes The Power of Seeing a very serious exhibition. This does not make it dull, though. Far from it. The interest and quality of what’s on display justifies the seriousness, and makes it worth one’s while waiting to get close to some of the watercolours so that one can take in the minute detail. But there is amusement to be had too. A couple of large panels display quotations from his writings under the heading ‘Fifteen Things Heartily Loathed by John Ruskin’. What does he loathe? The Renaissance buildings of Venice (‘amongst the worst and basest ever built by the hands of men’), lawyers (‘Not one of them shall ever have so much as a crooked sixpence of mine’), Palladio, Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, railway stations, cycling, being photographed, Victorian church statuary (‘A gross of kings sent down from Kensington’), and more. Out of step with his time? And with our own? In part, perhaps. But no less absorbing for that and still, at Two Temple Place, very much alive and kicking.

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Top illustration: John Ruskin, Santa Maria della Spina, East End, Pisa, Italy, 1845 © Collection of the Guild of St George / Museums Sheffield

* Ruskin was to live until 1900, but by the time Godwin asked his question much of Ruskin’s greatest works were written, with the exception of the later numbers of Fors Clavigera and his autobiography, Praeterita.

† What do all these Latin or Latinate titles mean? Praeterita means ‘Of past things’; Fors Clavigera is difficult to translate, and its author wanted it understood in several parallel ways – you just have to read it.

Photographers’ Gallery, London

The street where you lived

There are still a few weeks for anyone within striking distance of London to see the current exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of the work of British photographer Roger Mayne (1929–2014). Mayne is remembered particularly for his images of street life – notably of young people – in London in the 1950s and 1960s. He is especially associated with this point in British history, when children still played in city streets, when local communities were tightly knit, and when the first generation to be known as teenagers were making their mark.

His most famous sequences of photographs was taken in West London’s Southam Street, which soon after he made the pictures was flattened to make way for Ernö Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower. The exhibition shows these images, as well as others taken in Leeds, and a group showing young workers in the Raleigh Cycle factory in Nottingham. Some of the images were used on the covers of Penguin and Pelican books, of which a selection are included too. One can see why Penguin chose Mayne's images: he nails his subjects decisively, time after time.

Roger Mayne, Park Hill Estate, Sheffield 
Photograph © Roger Mayne / Mary Evans Picture Library

Another group, which appeared in the magazine Architectural Design in September 1963, capture Sheffield’s Park Hill estate, which was designed in the early-1960s as a council estate in one huge building, by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, working in Sheffield Corporation’s City Architect’s department under J. L. Womersley. What’s striking about these images is the way they rewrite the rules of architectural photography. Instead of pristine buildings in a setting empty of human life, Mayne’s pictures have people everywhere – chatting on walkways, sauntering on pavements, playing outdoors. They’re refreshing and lively, in a way that so many photographs of new buildings are not.

The final part of the exhibition contains an installation, a whole exhibition in itself, called The British At Leisure. This was made for the Milan Triennale in 1964 and consists of 310 colour photographs projected on to screens, to the accompaniment of a specially written jazz score and the constant clacking and clunking of five Carousel slide projectors. Here are people playing every imaginable sport from cricket to cycling, people relaxing in parks and cafés, at the opera or art gallery, fishing, gardening, motoring, enjoying Christmas and November 5th, sunning themselves on the beach, sailing model boats, riding, showing dogs, and so on and on. It’s a kaleidoscope of British life in the early-1960s, and I was riveted.

This is a terrific exhibition of work by a man who insisted that photography is an art and who proved it in image after image, who portrayed a time in British history like no one else, and whose work endures for its ability, again and again, to capture decisive moments.

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The images are © Roger Mayne / Mary Evans Picture Library
The exhibition ends on 11 June.

Piccadilly, London

The Ais have it

I suppose if I added them up, I’d find I’d spent quite a few hours, over the years, in the courtyard of Burlington House, the Royal Academy's building in London’s Piccadilly. Waiting for friends, waiting in particular for a friend who’s a member and sometimes gets me in free as his guest, waiting for my son, queuing for a ticket. Fortunately, I always find something to look at: bits of relief carving, the statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds, a memorable red telephone box, and the building itself, naturally. On Sunday all this was put into the shade by Tree, a large, site-specific work of art by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Tree is made up of sections of actual trees that have died in China. The artist buys these bits and then pieces them together to make whole trees. Except that they’re not, of course, whole trees: they consist of trunks and large branches, but have no roots, leaves, or twigs, and they are bolted together very obviously (how things are put together is a constant fascination of this artist’s work). And yet the forms Ai Weiwei has made are unmistakably tree-like, are the essence of tree as it were, and the trees thus made form an absorbing grove around the Reynolds statue, through which visitors wander, and look, and take photographs. The contrast between the classical architecture and this curious and woody construction is thought-provoking and when I was there, dozens of people were pausing, and looking, and having their thoughts provoked, and smiling in an engaged but rather wistful way.

It was much the same inside. Eleven rooms of Burlington House are full of Ai Weiwei’s work. A lot of it is assemblages of found objects – bits of trees, stools joined to one another that seem animated because they are set at such precarious angles, reinforcing bars from the concrete structure of a school destroyed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, recycled masonry from Ai’s studio and gallery that was bulldozed by order of the Chinese authorities. All of this has huge visual power, as do some of the pieces made in other ways: 1 x 1 x1 metre cubes fashioned from rosewood or impacted tea, for example, like a standard measure of compressed Chinese culture, ordered from the sculptor’s yard and deposited in place on a beautifully crafted delivery palette.

As we walked around the galleries, alternately smiling at the loving way in which these items have been put together and frowning at the stories of trauma (the earthquake, Ai’s own imprisonment recreated in a suite of particularly disturbing dioramas that you view through tiny apertures*) evoked in these works, my son and I realised we were seeing something we’d always remember. It was partly that we were appreciating the material on so many levels – visual, constructional, in terms of its meaning, as metaphor of China, as objective correlative for Ai's life, and so on. And it was partly that this kind of art, conceived by the artist and then made or assembled by someone else, so familiar and sometimes so exasperating in art today, can take on a new meaning when it involved an artist who in the past hasn't even been allowed to leave China† and supervise the planning and assembling of his exhibitions. Stepping out into the sunshine and walking through the trees again, the world seemed a different place.

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*Reviewers and writers keep mentioning Marcel Duchamp in terms of the Ai Weiwei’s readymade pieces. Fair enough: Ai does too. But has anyone talked about how the dioramas relate to Duchamp’s last, disturbing work?

†The artist has now been issued with a passport (and, finally, a visa for the UK) and was able to travel to London for the installation of this show. Thanks to the readers who have pointed this out and added links such as this one. I hope Ai Weiwei continues to be granted freedom of movement.

Ai Weiwei is at the Royal Academy until 19 December.

Portland Place, London

The essence of place

‘Who,’ people sometimes ask me, ‘is your favourite photographer?’ Maybe Eugène Atget, with his photographs of Paris, hailed as pioneering works of documentary but with an atmospheric stillness that helps them transcend that label. Or Henri Cartier-Bresson with his decisive moments. Or Walker Evans, especially his images of run-down buildings, usually empty of people but full of their former presence. But great as all these are, I keep a special place for British photographer Edwin Smith, whose work I’ve loved for years.

Much of Smith’s work was architectural, and was commissioned to illustrate books on subjects such as parish churches, cottages and farmhouses. Smith’s wife Olive Cook often wrote the text and publishers Thames and Hudson ensured that Smith’s images got the airing they deserved. His work was in other places, too, from Vogue to the Shell Guides. And yet Smith, who worked between the 1930s and 1960s, is not that well known today – his photography seems to have been overshadowed by the contrasting kinds of work (street photography, different modes of documentary) that came along in the 1960s and 1970s. All to the good, then, that the RIBA, who hold Smith’s vast archive (20,000 prints, 60,000 negatives), have put on an exhibition of his photographs.

Ordinary Beauty: The Photography of Edwin Smith looks good in the RIBA’s new architecture gallery at 66, Portland Place. It embraces his early commissioned work (some fashion shots, portraits, wonderful photographs of the circus), but is soon on to the typical stuff, the images of places and buildings that he made from the 1950s onwards, using old large- and medium-format cameras and black and white film. They reveal his obvious virtues and talents – a flair for composition, an eye for detail, a penchant for capturing the way shafts of sunlight illuminate things and make us look anew.

More important, though, is Smith’s genius for showing us the essence of a place. Similar qualities to those that I try to hold up for examination and comment on this blog – the texture of stone and its regional variations, the differing qualities of walls and fences, the lettering on an old Irish shop front, or the regional variations of roofing (slate, stone, tile…) – fascinated Smith. And above all the unregarded details that summon up a place and seem to paint a portrait of it. How typical, for example, that Smith should turn his back on the lovely Georgian box pews in a church like Didmarton and produce a photograph of the transept with its wooden stair. Likewise how moving that he should photograph, as well, no doubt, as the statuary and garden buildings at Rousham, some nettles growing through the slats of a bench – they make a beguiling pattern of leaf and timber.

For Smith, this portrayal of places was the heart of the matter. It was the kind of thing, he felt, that we needed, if we were to save things from the planners. In the 1950s, when Britain was being rebuilt after World War II, such bits of local distinctiveness and traditional craftsmanship were vanishing, fast. A raft of movements and publications, from the Victorian Society to Pevsner’s Buildings of England books, were coming along in the 1950s to put the case for preservation. Smith was there, alongside them, with his bellows cameras. Robert Elwall, author of the excellent book Evocations of Place: The Photography of Edwin Smith, put it well:

‘The recurring themes of Edwin Smith’s work – a concern for the fragility of the environment, both natural and man-made; an acute appreciation of the need to combat cultural homogenisation by safeguarding regional diversity; and, above all, a conviction that architecture should be rooted in time and place – are as pressing today as when Smith first framed them in his elegantly precise compositions.’

That message is tied up, not just with the great compositions, but also with the telling details. Often, these are human traces – washing on a line, farm equipment in a barn, a milk bottle on the table in Furlongs, Peggy Angus’s house in Sussex – traces of people who, apparently, have just walked out of shot. They’re humble traces – ‘Ordinary Beauty’ indeed – but full of significance, and they produce an effect that’s not dissimilar to that in some of Eugène Atget’s Parisian photographs: a generosity, a lost past captured, a haunting presence hinted at, a gentle but revealing light. Atget’s was the one photographic influence Smith would admit to. I can see why.

Top photograph: Edwin Smith, Great Coxwell Barn, Berkshire
Lower photograph: Edwin Smith, Didmarton, Gloucestershire
Note: These images are taken from books. Readers should refer to original prints – in the exhibition and in the RIBA Library – to appreciate the true quality of the work. Smith's photographs are
© Edwin Smith / RIBA Library Photographs Collection


Ordinary Beauty: The Photography of Edwin Smith is at the Architecture Gallery, RIBA, 66 Portland Place, London W1, from 10 September to 6 December 2014.

Shakescenes

Christmas books: 5

My last Christmas book came out as an adjunct to a remarkable exhibition in the British Museum. Shakespeare Staging the World concerns itself not just with Shakespeare's plays but with their context, ranging from contemporary views of Venice to maps of Tudor Warwickshire. Like the exhibition, the accompanying book is a feast...

Jonathan Bate and Dora Thornton, Shakespeare Staging the World
Published by The British Museum Press

This is the book of the British Museum exhibition of the same name, which puts Shakespeare into his contemporary context by bringing together a host of objects gathered around a couple of handfuls of crucial Shakespearian themes (London, "Country, County and Custom", Kingship and the English nation, Rome, Venice, the Noble Moor, Scotland, the "Matter of Britain", the "Brave new world"). The authors, Jonathan Bate (one of the foremost literary scholars of his generation and the general editor of the excellent RSC edition of Shakespeare) and Dora Thornton (curator of Renaissance Europe at the British Museum) weave narratives around the themes and exhibits, so that we get the key information about the objects, some account of their historical importance, and an explanation of how their relevance to Shakespeare's life and works.

The book is gripping on several levels. First, we get the chance to look at nearly 200 objects, mostly from the 16th and 17th centuries, mostly fascinating in their own right. Second, we discover how they illuminate Shakespeare. The illuminations can be very specific. For example, near the beginning of the book we are shown a document bearing Shakespeare's witness statement in a court case of 1612. The case concerns the Mountjoy family, with whom Shakespeare was a lodger. The Mountjoys were tire makers (makers of clothing or headgear) who had made "tires" for the queen; Shakespeare wrote plays for the royal court. Mrs Mountjoy consulted the astrologer Simon Forman; Forman went to see Shakespeare's plays and wrote about some of them in his diary. Another witness in the case was George Wilkins, who co-wrote Pericles with Shakespeare. The Mountjoys were Huguenots; Shakespeare wrote speeches for Huguenot asylum-seekers in his contribution to the multi-author play Sir Thomas More, a contribution that we know from the only literary manuscript in the poet's own handwriting that has survived – which is another illustration in the book.

Most of the exhibits are contextual. These are not objects that belonged to the poet, but they are the kind of thing he would have owned, or handled, or known about, or they illustrate things that go on his his plays. A strip of tapestry designed to go around the top of a four-poster bed is woven with scenes of country life – people hunting, chatting, canoodling, playing the bagpipes – it could be the Forest of Arden. A calf-s heart stuck with pins looks like the kind of thing the witches in Macbeth might have used. A rapier with a blade made in Toledo recalls Othello's choice of suicide weapon, "a sword of Spain" – Othello has selected a weapon that is sharp and well made but also beautiful and obviously an object of quality; his choice of sword is almost a fashion-statement.

Pictures of wild men who could be Calibans; a schoolboy's caricature of his teacher recalling the schoolmaster in The Merry Wives of Windsor harping on the "focative" case; Henry V's saddle (or, as the book carefully says, "Early fifteenth-century saddle, perhaps associated with the funeral of Henry V in 1422"); boar-shaped badges of followers of Richard III ("the most deadly boar"); a glass enamelled with masquerade figures including a "lean and slippered pantaloon" who could be a relative of the one Jacques speaks of in his "Seven ages of man" speech in As You Like It. These are the kinds of objects we encounter in this book.

In the exhibition there were videos of actors speaking chunks of the plays. The book quotes the plays a lot, and we are never far away from the scenes and characters that inspired this whole exercise in the first place. Perhaps the imagery in the book, and its arguments about their contextual relevance to Shakespeare, work best when several examples illuminate a specific part of the Tudor world. The glass with the pantaloon is marvellous, but when there are multiple images and examples – the varied portraits of people of colour, for example, and those of Jews, the depictions of London (some familiar, some less so), the oaks, stagshorns, watering pots and tapestries from the English countryside, and the images of kingship, I feel I am back in the rich and ambiguous world that Shakespeare staged.

Arlingham, Gloucestershire

River works

If you’re familiar with the map of England you’ll know how the country’s largest river, the Severn, curves its way through Gloucestershire, its most dramatic set of bends almost forming an oxbow lake about eight miles below Gloucester. Inside the neck of land enclosed by these bends is the village of Arlingham, and if you go through Arlingham you find Passage Road, a mile of narrow, low-lying roadway, bounded on either side by meadows and ditches, running arrow-straight towards the river. At the point where the road ends is the Old Passage, an early 19th-century house, now a very good seafood restaurant. The exterior of the building is painted a curious colour on the borders of blue and green, which either blends into the surrounding landscape or stands out brightly, according to the light and the time of day.

The large windows of the Old Passage look out across the Severn to the small town of Newnham on the opposite bank. This was once the site of a ford across the river. These days on the Ordnance Survey map about half the width of the river at this point is marked as “Mud and Sand”, but I wouldn’t want to try and walk across this dangerous river with its huge tidal range (I’ve written more about the Severn and its banks here). The building’s large windows also make for a light interior, good for displaying pictures and on Sunday I was there for the private view of the art exhibition “earth.wind.water.sky” – an inspiring collection of prints, paintings, photographs, and other works hanging on the walls of the restaurant. The exhibition, which includes many works that portray the river or take inspiration from its water, light, and atmosphere, runs to the end of the month and is well worth a visit for anyone in striking distance.

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill

Readers within striking distance of London still have about three weeks to see the exhibition Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Horace Walpole, writer, collector, letter-writer, and man of taste, bought his house, Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, in 1749 and rebuilt and extended it over the next 17 years. In doing so, he created one of the most influential of all English buildings, the house that kick-started the Gothic revival.

Strawberry Hill is a very special house with a very special atmosphere, built in a Gothic style that draws on a range of different sources – a chimneypiece based on a tomb in Westminster Abbey, bookcases inspired by a screen in Old St Paul’s Cathedral, and so on. Its variously shaped rooms, decorated with medieval stained glass and 18th-century imitation-Gothic vaulted ceilings, are impossible to recreate in an exhibition, but the V & A designers and curators have done a good job with a sequence of irregularly sized and shaped spaces decorated in a way that evokes Walpole’s ideal combination of glom and warmth which he christened ‘gloomth’.

But what makes the exhibition memorable are the objects from Walpole’s collection. Strawberry Hill was furnished like the most precious cabinet of curiosities, but the collection was disposed of in a great sale in 1842 and its constituent items have been dispersed around the world. Many of them have been brought together again for the exhibition, and these rooms in the V & A once more give an idea of what this outsize cabinet of curiosities must have been like.

There are paintings of course (including a stunning Eworth) and books about architecture, portraiture, antique sculpture, heraldry, and even the symbols with which ‘swan-uppers’ marked the beaks of their captives. There are objects with interesting historical or artistic associations – John Dee’s mirror, Cardinal Wolsey’s hat, a vase bearing the arms of the Medici. There are designs for different parts of the house – a tentative drawing of an elevation by Chute, a finely worked design for a Gothic ceiling by Robert Adam. Personal memorabilia abound, from Walpole’s wooden cravat carved by Grinling Gibbons to the goldfish pot in which his cat (celebrated by the poet Gray as ‘Demurest of the tabby race’) was drowned.

Drawings and examples of furniture give an idea of the house as it grew, thanks to designs by Walpole’s friends Chute and Bentley, as well as Adam and Walpole himself. And there are hints of Walpole’s other achievements, such as his modestly titled Some Anecdotes of Painting in England, in fact a compendious work still used by art historians.

As for the house itself, it is currently being restored and will reopen to the public later this year. Walpole characterized the fragility of its filigree Gothic when he called it a ‘paper house’. The restoration (marked by a tantalizingly brief video in the exhibition) shows that it has actually proved rather robust. But in another way Walpole was right. It is one of the most written about of all houses, celebrated for its pioneering Gothic asymmetry, its remarkable guidebook (probably the first for a private house), its expression of its owner’s character, and its lasting influence. We’ll carry on writing about it for generations to come.

There is more about the exhibition, which continues until 4 July, here.

Strawberry Hill, interior, from Chambers Book of Days