Antique Antlers
Shaun Castle 31 May 2006
Antlers, the idiosyncratic objects of glamour and desirability in the Victorian aesthetic retain their value in the decorative, whether for dramatic display, metaphysical referencing, or intrinsic beauty.
Prices range from £20-£50 for unmounted stag antlers, £400-£500 for a 19th century pair mounted and dated, through to £20,000 - £30,000 for rare and highly collectable antlers of extinct elk.
A number of antique stag antlers, mounted and unmounted, are available by private order. Please call 01228 516410. Links to this post
Camerton Hall - Orchestration of Arrival
Shaun Castle 30 May 2006
The approach to the hall can be seen as a prolonged introduction to the pleasures of the landscape. This of course is a recurrent theme in the development of the country house and its park. The drive allows a discursive, ruminative journey across the contours of the former estate: after leaving St Peter’s Church the track follows the curvature of the River Derwent to the west affording long range views of the southern elevations of the hall. These are abruptly denied as the drive bends to the north over the former Cockermouth & Workington railway escarpment towards the skyline before once again changing tack in joining the chase which now delivers an axial tree lined approach to the house and it’s entrance Portico. The visitor now enters the enclosure of the hall. In this space he is disconnected from the landscape prior to the denouement - the final revelation. This is the pastoral view to the south along the water-course of the Derwent towards the horizon. This view around the hall is organised as hidden from the visitor until he has arrived and been favoured with entry. In this way the hall acts as a camera - a view finder carefully set up to please occupants and visitors alike.
- Thematic Traditions in the Country House Links to this post
Concise Architectural History of the English Country House
Shaun Castle 25 May 2006
Its stylistic origins derived from the ville of Scamozzi and Palladio in the Veneto and this architectural lexicon was 200 years later adapted and filtered through the English sensibilities of Campbell and Kent into an altogether grander more disaggregated expression that became the house style of the new landowning Whig millionaires. The austerity and control of Georgian ne-classicism became dissipated in the invention and stylistic promiscuity of Victorian practice. The ville of the Veneto and the large C18th country houses were solipsistic inventions in which the owners were placed at the centre of an idealised world, apotheosised in murals and sculptures with the iconography of classicism recruited to flatter their vanity and legitimise their pretension. Landscape designers exploited radical geometries and ornate symmetries to place the house and its owner at the centre of this walled-in arcadia. The benign confidence that underpinned this conceit was eroded throughout the C19th until we see a far more fractured paradigm in the remote inaccessible fastnesses of Castle Drogo and Cragside. Here man is placed precariously against a wild terrain - nature cannot here be tamed and ordered. The classical world of Bacon and Alberti is exchanged for the introspective romanticism of Neitsche and Wagner. Links to this post
Carte de Visite
Shaun Castle 24 May 2006
Cartes de visite were popular from the 1850’s until 1900. They consisted of photos measuring about 3.5” x 2.25”, mounted on trade cards measuring about 4” x 2.5”.
Cartes were predominantly portraits, but also of mansions, landscapes and animals. The photography was composite, staged and reproducible.
For Walter Benjamin, this early photography was a powerful agent in the withering of ‘aura’ and its ultimate elimination in the age of mechanical reproduction. “It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty” (1955).
For Walter Benjamin, this was a process leading to a tremendous shattering of tradition, of historical testimony, and the presence of the mansion.
From a collection of Cartes found in an old espadrilles box in Cumbria. Links to this post
Tallantire Hall - 1894 Particulars
Shaun Castle 23 May 2006
These Particulars of Sale for the auction of Tallantire Hall Estate in 1894 offer an intriguing insight into a property then described as “one of the most beautiful and desirable properties in the North of England”. The property was purchased by James Duffield, Director of the shipbuilding firm Cammell Lairds and later Major of Workington.
Hall Life - Recollections of Harriett Browne
Shaun Castle 22 May 2006
"When I look back upon my early childhood it is always a mystery to me how my father and mother were able to live in the comfortable and hospitable manner they did, without a penny of debt, in a large old fashioned house with extensive grounds on an income never, I believe, exceeding £2,000 per annum. We kept a cook, a kitchen maid, housemaid, laundry maid, a dairy maid, a butler, a coachman and a page, and out of the house, a gardener and bailiff, a farm servant and a dairywoman, besides often additional workers in the grounds and on the farms. Also in the harvest season, a whole gang of Irish Reapers appeared, living entirely on potatoes and buttermilk.
We kept an old fashioned chariot, heavy and most uncomfortable for the three who had to sit as bodkin upright in the middle, or else sometimes on the stool “cap box” for 20 or 30 miles at a time. We also had an inside Irish Car a jaunting car as it was called, and a Tub for one horse.
A large empty round table and chairs round the walls and large high sofas in drawing rooms were the fashion no ornaments or flowers. We had a good deal of Chippendale furniture, which was considered of no account. Our elders slept in great four-post beds, on feather beds, and almost entirely surrounded by thick moreen curtains.
My father built a schoolhouse and my sister Catherine chose the school mistress and taught in the school every day for nearly 40 years. Girls from a distance were often boarded out in Tallantire so that they could go to Miss Brown’s school.
My mother, being advance of her time, took in the cheap literature Penny Magazine, Saturday Magazine and the Childrens Friend, and after stitching on strong brown paper jackets she lent them to the village. Our village of course formed an important part of our lives; we knew every man and woman and child and even to the very dogs and cats.
We wore French merino in winter , pretty prints and coloured muslins in summer, and for evening Farages and crepe de Lysle but for best, white muslin and sea muslin was always right with pretty lace or bugle “Berthe’s” and “Sahots”, or bright sash and natural flowers in the hair. Aunt Jane sometimes gave us a silk dress or a rich black scarf for out-door wear. Elder ladies wore turbans and wonderful erections of caps. We wore open white cotton stockings and sandalled shoes both indoors and out and white petticoats always. The first dresses I remember were napkin frocks and dark blue pelisses with beaver bonnets; afterwards we had mushroom coloured silk spencers from Brussels very pretty blue silk “Canzons” also a gift and worn with white frocks and gipsy hats. When I was in London close drawn silk bonnets were worn and I had a pink silk one with white heath underneath.
Our kitchen garden was not locked and we children could take any amount of common fruit - apricots we could not grow but our peaches and pears were magnificent. It was a prolific garden. We always suspected the gardener of helping our peacocks out of this world, especially a very fine white one, as they pecked holes in the hot house glass to get at the grapes - my father did not like flowers, but we had good borders of old fashioned perennials and beautiful flowering shrubs, also a wealth of snowdrops and polyanthus in the shrubberies.
We loved the walks to Bramble Wood, and to Dearham Gill, a tiny fairy glen of primroses (rather a rarity - though cowslips were abundant) to Roman Banks and Tallantire Hill, where we could see Mr. Dixon’s tall chimney in Carlisle 28 miles off - to the stepping stones and the farmeress, “Jenny Graham”, to the Westland Grange, the Hill, and the Low House Farms, and the summer evening walks with mama to mysterious woods with paths and stiles, to Argus Lane with its pink rose and honeysuckle and flutter of blue butterflies, and the “frogpond” and its brilliant dragon flies." Links to this post
Grade II Listed lamp-post
Shaun Castle 21 May 2006
This Grade II Listed lamp-post is an eloquent curiosity standing in the north-east grounds of Tallantire Hall. "None of the modern improvements have been a greater comfort", wrote Harriett Browne in her journal recalling the introduction of gas lighting "to the pitch darkness" of Tallantire Hall during the mid-19th century. Befitting this accolade, the cast iron lamp-post is exquisitely detailed with square plinth surmounted by open-winged birds supporting a draped urn, a shaft with leaf and flower pattern under two segmental-arm lights, and upright globe. The lamp-post was converted to electricity in the early 20th century. Links to this post