Houghton Revisited: Masterpieces from the Hermitage reunites a large portion of Sir Robert Walpole’s spectacular painting collection with the palatial Palladian-Baroque mansion he first raised to house it. Throughout his decades-long tenure as George I and George II’s Prime Minister avant la lettre (1721-42), Walpole deployed exponentially expanding funds, the Grand Tours of three clever sons, and a unique position at the crucible of British power to amass a collection of international standing. With the nation’s economy and its art market gathering pace, masterpieces from the esteemed European schools were becoming ever more obtainable via London’s proliferation of agents, dealers, and auctioneers. All the while, the political behemoth’s increasingly evident desire to distinguish himself as a major collector prompted grandees to surrender treasured pieces of aristocratic patrimony in pursuit of favour and advancement. During this period of accumulation, most of the art works were distributed throughout the capital city’s constellation of Walpole residences, notably at the townhouse now known as no. 10 Downing Street. The current installation however sets its sight on the period between the demise of Sir Robert’s regime in 1742 and the great sale of paintings to Catherine the Great of Russia in 1779, during which time the greater part of the collection came to rest amidst Houghton’s expansive parklands and William Kent’s sumptuous furnishings: a supposedly enduring monument to the golden age of the house of Walpole.

 

In addition to the fact that Catherine’s acquisition has been handed down largely intact through successive Russian regimes, the current spectacle (curated by Thierry Morel) owes much to extensive recent scholarship on the subject, especially that of Andrew Moore and Larissa Dukelskaya who offer useful digests of their research in a handsome new catalogue. An important exhibition at Norwich Castle and Kenwood House back in 1996-7, together with a companion volume (ed. Moore), set out the groundwork for modern research. Five years later a comprehensive catalogue of the Russian state’s Walpole holdings (eds. Moore and Dukelskaya) was timed to coincide with a display of core works at the London Hermitage Rooms (2003-4). On a broader front, Houghton Revisited is the latest product of a growing curatorial-scholarly interest in historical forms of display; a trend which, in the field of eighteenth-century studies, has famously seen the reconstruction of an early Royal Academy exhibition at its purpose-built Somerset House apartments (2001-2) and, just recently, a digital recreation of the British Institution’s seminal Joshua Reynolds retrospective of 1813 (see review for BSECS by Richard de Ritter).

The main event of the installation at Houghton occurs in the opulently appointed piano nobile state apartments that parade enfilade around the Stone Hall’s vast cube. The cool grandeur of that sculpture-dominated, largely monochrome entrance area opens in three directions onto a contrasting decorative and pictorial realm, rich in colour and precious materials, and beset on all sides by crowding, fantastical forms. Armed with an informative pamphlet, visitors are first ushered into the Common Parlour that gave access to Sir Robert’s personal apartments (although only the Common Parlour and the mahogany-lined library are open for Houghton Revisited). In this relatively plainly appointed room are collected a densely-hung assortment of paintings selected to reflect the room’s original, dual emphasis on Baroque English and Netherlandish portraits, genre pieces, and the fertile territory that lay between the two. The familiar faces of Isaac Newton, Grinling Gibbons, and Inigo Jones mingle with a dashing Frans Hals gentleman whose identity has been lost, a large tronie then identified as Rembrandt’s decrepit wife, and a ravishing bust-length picture of one of Rubens’ ideal beauties. The procession of state rooms proper commences straight across the Stone Hall with the Marble Parlour (one of the earliest examples of an English dining room), in which full-length van Dyck portraits face each other across the length of the room while two pairs of brooding Campidoglio still lifes and small Venetian histories serve as ‘overdoors’. Tapestry dominates the subsequent suite of two bedchambers and a dressing room although in each instance chimneypieces and doorways are adorned by imposing examples of French Baroque Classicism. Bringing the main display to a stylish close are two further densely-hung rooms: the Carlo Maratta Drawing Room, that showcases Sir Robert’s particular predilection for the works of the seicento master, and the very large Saloon, in which the largest, most grandiloquent masterpieces of the Italian, French, and Spanish schools are shown amidst gilt and crimson splendour. Back on the ground floor, three small final rooms have been arranged to display family portraits from the era of Sir Robert’s ascendance, contemporary documents and drawings concerning the house and its hanging scheme, and original silverware from the Metropolitan Museum, New York. 

 

The return of so many important works to Houghton sheds fresh light on this thoroughly researched collection and its definitive home from several directions. Firstly, viewed in an essentially domestic space manifestly accomplished in a single rush of lavish expenditure, the pictures bring home the impression of an individual collector’s forceful presence. In addition to observing prevailing notions of what constituted fine taste and the canon of great art, the collection’s particular strength in Carlo Maratta, for instance, or in images of artists and their families raises it above the generic or the random to an even higher plane of opulence and personal display. Secondly, the installation tells us with particular conviction that agglomerations of grand manner history painting in such contexts far exceeded the clichéd qualities of generalised nobility and high morality accorded to that genre in contemporary classical art theory. In the larger-than-life nudes, forceful gestures, and grandly draped forms hung in the upper reaches of Saloon, an imposing sensuousness and an overwhelming impression of exciting, operatic drama seem equally if not more important. Irrespective of the familiarity or otherwise of the subjects featured, the grand ‘machines’ of Rosa, Giordano, Le Brun, Murillo and so on conspire to establish a fabulous world within a world, in which extraordinary things – divine mysteries, heroic tragedies, miraculous inventions – are seen urgently, glamorously, and simultaneously to unfold. 

By some extraordinary feat of organisation, a beautiful set of photographs of the installation has been taken in time for publication in the catalogue. A note of caution, however, ought to be sounded for scholars seeking to make use of this beguiling resource. The exhibition represents approximately a third of what was once here and the restoration is complete and authentic only in a small minority of rooms, most notably the Marble Parlour. Furthermore, extremely close reading of the catalogue and vigilant cross-reference to the 2003-4 volume is required to establish what has and has not been restored to its original position.

Without qualification however, Houghton Revisited offers a rare and stunning spectacle, an astonishing feat of organisation with a great sense of occasion, and a moment of culmination for the first, highly fruitful phase of modern Houghton studies. Importantly, though, it has also opened fresh avenues for the investigation of a crucial phase of British art history. It is evident, for example, that the relationship remains far from clear between the display techniques practised at these seminal Palladian treasure houses and those found in earlier phases of British collecting or, indeed, in comparable French and Italian mansions, which one assumes served as an important model. What is more, since the spaces at Houghton designated specifically for picture-viewing – the Gallery and the Cabinet – have undergone modifications and catastrophes so as to render them unsuitable for reconstruction, this installation throws special emphasis onto the question of the particular relationship between princely collecting and stately decoration in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. As the iconographic content of new grand interiors grew in coherence (Peace, Love, and Plenty hold joint dominion at Houghton), how did the inevitable randomness involved in the collection of ready-made art objects enhance or conflict with such schemes? And how did hanging schemes and selection processes seek to diminish or accentuate the potential for such essentially un-decorative qualities as physical ugliness in a picture or compositional imbalance? In short, what modes of looking and displaying were engendered in this period when a masterpiece of painting became also an ornament? With these questions and other fascinating issues abounding, Houghton Revisited opens fresh territory for enquiry into early eighteenth-century elite visual culture as surely as it marks a triumph for scholars of this magnificent special case. 

‘Houghton Revisited: Masterpieces from the Hermitage’ is at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, from 17 May to 29 September 2013.