In 2019 artist Layla Khoo created and installed a participatory artwork at Nunnington Hall, a property owned by the National Trust, UK. The artwork, named Change in Attitudes, was a response to the ...taxidermy collection of hunting trophies displayed on site, all shot and collected by the last owner of the house, Colonel Ronald Fife. The work sought to encourage visitors to consider their thoughts on this difficult part of the collection, both in its historical context and in light of current societal norms, by inviting them to participate with the artwork through choice-making. This case study first analyzes the impact of this work on visitor engagement at the site, both in the participation methods intended by the artist and in the unexpected participation methods employed by the visitors as the installation evolved. The questions raised by this case study are then considered, as well as the research currently under way which seeks to answer them.
This article examines elite women's agency and participation in the literary life of the country house, focusing on the circle that centred on Jemima Marchioness Grey and her husband, Philip Yorke, ...at Wrest Park in Bedfordshire. The "Society at Wrest" was an exclusive group of close friends and family that included Grey's childhood friends, Mary Gregory (née Grey) and Catherine Talbot, as well as her sisters-in-law, Elizabeth Anson and Margaret Heathcote (née Yorke). Most members of the Wrest Circle were careful about publishing their works, yet they found a cerebral escape in the shades of "Vacuna" - the name they affectionately gave to Wrest - as they created private literary compositions. Although Grey did not contribute to her friends' literary compositions, she did, as hostess, play an invaluable role in providing a space at Wrest Park that facilitated and nurtured their intellectual and artistic endeavours. Disrupting the scholarly emphasis on public-facing female intellectuals, this article argues that for some elite women, the value of belonging to a coterie was not about attracting literary fame but rather having access to a permissive environment in which they could embark on private literary pursuits and belong to an exclusive and supportive intellectual network.
Could country house museums be indispensable sites for learning about both science as well as history? Given current logistical constraints, would it be worthwhile for school teachers to arrange ...student visits to such places to learn about STEM subjects? At first sight such epitomes of British heritage do not appear to offer much to such audiences. However, recent research shows that some country houses were once key sites of technological innovation, especially in the Victorian invention of electric lighting. Our collaborative work with staff at Cragside, Lotherton Hall and Standen demonstrates their capacity and enthusiasm to use such insights to present more STEM-related content to visitors within the context of their existing historical offers. Drawing on the results of an AHRC-funded impact and engagement project, we show how co-produced stories of household electrification can supply fresh inter-disciplinary ways of engaging STEM audiences with the historic country house.
This article examines John Ruskin’s role in the enclosure and decoration of the Central Hall at Wallington, Northumberland, a project set in motion from 1852 by Lady Pauline Jermyn Trevelyan, artist, ...intellect, and patron of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. It challenges the frequent limitation of Ruskin’s involvement, through examining the project’s wider context. Originally intended itself as a private museum, the Hall was developed during a rich period which witnessed the linked genesis of the Oxford Museum, along with the publication of some of Ruskin’s key works, read and reviewed by Lady Trevelyan. The three principles upon which Ruskin believed the Oxford Museum should be built, published in 1859, are employed as a lens through which to compare Lady Trevelyan’s Central Hall. Finally, the Wallington project is interrogated in relation to Ruskin’s views on art education, particularly considering the opportunities it provided for female practitioners.
The renewed interest in English country houses in the 1980s was part of a focus on the idea of “English heritage,” and it was accompanied by a flourishing of historical novels and costume dramas. In ...the twenty-first century, scholars have investigated the links between country houses and the British Empire. A careful reading of Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party (1980), Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1988), and V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987) shows that these writers took a critical view of the myth of the English country house. Each of them in some way addresses the colonial and imperial connections of the country house, and they each extend a venerable literary tradition in a manner that addresses the concerns of the late twentieth century and anticipates those of the twenty-first. The three novelists make use of a variety of perspectives in their representation of the country house, with significant attention to the experience of servants. Colegate writes out of a personal knowledge of the upper class from her own family background, while Ishiguro and Naipaul are English writers who were born in other parts of the world, giving them distinctive standpoints from which to consider English history and society.
This paper approaches Derzhavin’s poem To Evgenii. Life at Zvanka from three angles: 1. Its relation to Horace’s II epode Beatus ille…. 2. The contrasting backdrop which is established in the first ...stanzas of the poem: the imperial court of Saint-Petersburg. 3. A further backdrop of this kind, which is implicit in the poem: a contemporary disdain for gentry landowners. In the light of Peter I’s reforms, their lifestyle was perceived as a backward relic of medieval Russia. From this point of view, Derzhavin’s idealized picture of country life is not only a criticism of court life, but also a didactic attempt to bring the country gentry’s way of life into accord with contemporary Russian culture: Zvanka was supposed to serve as a model to emulate.
The English Country House happens to be one of the most iconic topoi in English literary studies. Since narratologists have long privileged time over space, narrative space remained a relatively ...unexplored territory until the twentieth century, which intensified the interest in the house as the thematic fulcrum of literary works. British novelist Sarah Waters’s first venture into the realm of the sub-genre of English Country House fiction, The Little Stranger (2009) is a befitting discourse that appropriates the poetics of manorial space. Hundreds Hall, the Warwickshire seat of the Ayreses, encapsulates many roles as the epicentre of the story and as a powerful symbol of the gradual decay of English aristocracy in the post-World War II Britain. The article will try to incorporate Gaston Bachelard’s spatial criticism elaborated in his The Poetics of Space (1958) and the concept of heterotopia by Foucault for the interpretation/ (s) of the narrative. The study seeks to locate Bachelard’s bourgeoisie points of view, which the author subverts by portraying the rise of the proletariat. The focus of the article is to highlight the ingenuity of Waters’s creative process, which resorts to the genre of English Country House fiction to capture the condition of British aristocrats in a time of crises.
Charles Le Brun à Montmorency Lafage, Gaëlle
Bulletin du Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles,
2017, Volume:
14
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Aujourd’hui disparue, la demeure de campagne que Charles Le Brun se fit bâtir à Montmorency reste mal connue. Richement ornée et agrémentée d’un jardin avec ses fontaines, ses grottes et ses ...parterres, cette maison de peintre était d’une grande somptuosité. Grâce aux dessins, aux estampes, aux archives et aux témoignages qui ont pu être réunis, cet article rend compte de l’histoire du lieu, de l’aspect général de l’habitation et de ses jardins et enfin de la vie du peintre dans cette maison de plaisance qu’il habita les dernières années de sa vie. Apparaissent ainsi en filigrane ses goûts et ses ambitions dans cette création toute personnelle.
Now entirely disappeared, the country house that Charles Le Brun built in Montmorency remains little known. Richly decorated and embellished with a garden, fountains, grottos and flowerbeds, this painter’s house was sumptuous. Thanks to the drawings, prints, archives and testimonies that have been gathered, this article gives an account of the site’s history, the overall appearance of the house and its gardens, and finally of the painter’s life in the country house he inhabited during the final years of his life. Thus Le Brun’s tastes and ambitions are implicitly revealed in this very personal creation.
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