IN 2001–02 THE Bard Graduate Center in New York mounted a major exhibition on William Beckford, later shown at the Dulwich Picture Gallery; in 2008 it followed this with another, devoted to Thomas Hope, later shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, mounted by the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (closed 3rd January), and now at the Victoria and Albert Museum (to 4th July; the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, is a third partner),1 completes a remarkable triad. There were many differences between Horace Walpole (1717–97; Fig.31), William Beckford (1760–1844) and Thomas Hope (1769–1831) but, apart from the circumstance that all three published successful novels, initially anonymous, viz. The Castle of Otranto (1764), Vathek (1786) and Anastasius (1819), it is surely noteworthy that all three opened their houses, each a personal and idiosyncratic creation, to visitors, with printed tickets. Those for Strawberry Hill were printed in 1774, and rules for obtaining them in 1784; Hope’s Duchess Street house had ticketed admission from 1804; and Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey was open in 1822 and 1823 – for sales, admittedly, but occasions for characteristically cynical glee on Beckford’s part, and for the production of a fine Gothic and heraldic ticket, designed by Thomas Stedman Whitwell. Another common factor was the criticism they received for exposing – or vaunting – their taste in collecting and decoration far beyond the paintings and sculpture recognised as legitimate markers of virtù. Thus William Hazlitt on Fonthill: ‘a glittering waste of laborious idleness, a cathedral turned into a toyshop’; thus the literary and antiquarian physician John Ferriar on Hope in 1809, after the publication of his Household Furniture (1807): ‘HOPE, whom Upholst’rers eye with mute despair,/The doughty pedant of an elbow-chair’; and thus in 1828 Sir Walter Scott on Walpole: ‘Horace Walpole, with all his talents, makes a silly figure when he gives an upholsterer’s catalogue of all his goods and chattels at Strawberry Hill’.2

That ‘upholsterer’s catalogue’ has been recently reproduced in a splendid facsimile, presented to the Roxburghe Club by Lord Waldegrave, of an extra-illustrated copy of the 1784 edition of Walpole’s Description of the Villa at Strawberry Hill, inscribed by Walpole for posthumous presentation to Charles Bedford, who had in 1774 succeeded as Walpole’s Deputy as Usher to the Exchequer.3 The Bedford copy, its title-page ornamented in watercolour with strawberries and honeysuckle, is amplified by thirteen portraits of Walpole, culminating in the 1797 engraving after Lawrence, which served as the frontispiece to Mary Berry’s edition of his Works (1798), by five of Mrs Damer, the sculptor to whom Walpole left the life-tenancy of Strawberry Hill, and by two of Thomas Kirgate, Walpole’s printer, who helped Bedford assemble his extra-illustrations, including eighteen topographical prints and a drawing of an angel, made by Walpole at the age of fifteen, painstaking but showing little artistic promise. Also bound in are lists, after Walpole, of the apartments, of the collections he drew on, and of the recipients destined to receive a copy of the 1784 Description after his death.4

The Roxburghe facsimile, edited by Nicolas Barker, is supported by two valuable appendices, the first an index, with summary biographical notes, of the roughly 250 collectors and/or recipients of the Description, and the second, on a grander scale – nearly sixty pages – listing the inserted contents of all the known extra-illustrated copies (that made for James Bindley, represented in the exhibition by one version of John Carter’s delightful triple caricature of Walpole, surfaced in time to be noted in a ‘Postscript’). Barker’s substantial introduction, enlivened by a judicious choice of quotations, including that from Ferriar cited above, ranges widely, from the collecting of portrait heads to the purchase of this copy for the much-married Frances, Lady Waldegrave, at the Bedford sale of 1861.

The Description is one of the three principal historic pillars of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill: by a neat device, the exhibition labels, laudably legible, include relevant quotations from it in red.5 The precedent for the Description was Walpole’s own Aedes Walpolianae (1747), his account of Houghton Hall and its collection, albeit that Houghton, which Walpole always loved, but where he had suffered from the society of the cronies of his father, Sir Robert Walpole, ‘men who are mountains of roast beef, and only seem just roughly hewn into the outlines of human form, like the giant rock at Pratolino’, is in total contrast to Strawberry Hill, arguably its calculated antithesis. But the Description is a much richer, more personal and innovative document than Aedes. The second pillar of the exhibition is Strawberry Hill itself. Beckford’s verdict, a ‘miserable child’s box – a species of gothic mouse-trap – a reflection of Walpole’s littleness’, would be more effective had it not been anticipated by Walpole’s own self-deprecatory description, a ‘paper fabric and assemblage of curious trifles, made by an insignificant man’. In any case, whereas Fonthill Abbey is now a fragment, Strawberry Hill has survived and, thanks to prodigious efforts by the Strawberry Hill Trust, supported by, among many others, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the World Monuments Fund, is at an advanced stage of restoration, with the promise of opening to the public in September 2010. The third pillar is, ironically, the celebrated sale conducted by the egregious George Robins in 1842, at which the contents of Strawberry Hill were dispersed on the orders of George, Earl Waldegrave, habitually drunk and in fresh disgrace from a prison sentence for assaulting a policeman at Kingston Fair.

In 1980 an intense and comprehensive exhibition, Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill, supported by an informative, modest and stylish catalogue, was held at Orleans House in Twickenham.6 It is no coincidence that one of its principal organisers was Michael Snodin who, thirty years later, is Guest Curator of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, editor of the catalogue or, rather, ‘exhibition book’ and, again not incidentally, Chairman of the Strawberry Hill Trust. Although a much more lavish effort, the present exhibition carries many echoes of 1980, the biggest difference being that the former has been able to draw on the unparalleled riches of the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington; indeed Wilmarth Sheldon ‘Lefty’ Lewis (1895–1979) might have merited separate treatment in the catalogue as collector, scholar and patron of scholarship, above all of the monumental Yale edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (he does not escape unscathed in Lord Waldegrave’s preface to his Roxburghe volume). The organisation of the objects is exemplary in its clarity and logic, leading the visitor on a route through Strawberry Hill, which is an abbreviated version of that taken by his eighteenth-century predecessors, enlivened by thematic groupings on Walpole’s family and friends, on royal portraits and objects with royal or other distinguished associations, on Walpole as the author of the Anecdotes of Painting in England and as collector of portraits, on his ceramics and glass, on his superlative miniatures and enamels, and on his more modern acquisitions, with a coda on his aftermath and the 1842 sale. An appendix to the catalogue transcribes and annotates Walpole’s own selection of sixty-four ‘principal curiosities’, approaching half of which are, mirabile dictu, in the exhibition. Interestingly, as Snodin observes, his criteria for selecting these among several thousands prove to be predominantly aesthetic, albeit some objects, ‘Wolsey’s hat’, say, or ‘Dr Dee’s black stone’ (cat. nos.129 and 108), are important for their associations, and few lack multiple meanings.

The initial juxtaposition of the National Portrait Gallery’s version of the three-quarter length portrait of Walpole by Reynolds (no.1) and the much smaller, and brighter, Müntz view of Strawberry Hill (no.37; Fig.32) in its late 1750s form deftly sets the scene. Indeed the catalogue tends not to stress sufficiently that this was essentially a Thames-side villa, a maison de plaisance, and that Walpole’s base was in London, first Arlington Street, where he was born, and later Berkeley Square, from which he pendulated, to adopt his word, to Strawberry Hill, and where he died. Nor is enough said of Strawberry as a place for entertainment, including in 1778 a ball given for his nieces when he observed: ‘The circular drawing-room was worthy of the presence of Queen Bess, as many of the old ladies, who remember her, affirmed’. A crucial dimension of Walpole’s identity is writ large in his description of himself on the title-page of the Description, ‘Youngest Son of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford’. Being a youngest, not even a younger, son freed him from the respon­sibility to maintain a great dynastic country house and also meant that, although the sinecures fixed by his father made him a rich man, he was not a magnate on the grand scale. He could not know, when he embarked on the Strawberry Hill venture in 1747, that Houghton would suffer from increasing debt and neglect, that its capital collection of paintings would be sold to Catherine the Great in 1779, that male heirs would fail and he would succeed as Earl of Orford in 1791, or that, thanks to prudence and inheritance, his own fortune should have mounted up substantially by his death in 1797. Dynastic and financial considerations should not be overlooked in assessing his opportunities and motivations, tempting though it may be, nowadays, to concentrate on the ‘psychosexual’ or the ‘homosocial’ (and had he deigned to notice such earnest speculations, Walpole would surely have coined some witty and waspish comments).

Of course Walpole was capable, like many collectors, of wishful thinking and self-deception, and his penchant for amateurs, especially the female and noble, is notorious, yet it is evident that, as well as being an industrious and skilful antiquary (he would have avoided both adjectives), he was a considerable connoisseur.7 He did not collect old masters on any scale – why compete with Houghton? – although he was proud of the few he possessed, and continued throughout his life to pronounce with all the authority of a Grand Tourist on any he came across (in 1791 he wrote to Mary Berry, on tour in Italy: ‘The Bolognese school is my favourite, though I do not like Guercino, whom I call the German Guido, he is so heavy and dark’). But, as is evident in the exhibition, he had a sure and versatile eye for portraits, witness the star Eworth of Lady Dacre and her son (no.21), recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery,8 the Van Dycks of Margaret Lemon and Margaret Smith (nos.151 and 152) and, above all, for miniatures and enamels. The two come together in the Henri Toutin copy of Peter Oliver’s Lady Venetia Digby (no.218) in a superb sculptural cosse-de-pois enamelled frame by Gilles Legaré and in the Peter Oliver diptych of Sir Kenelm Digby and Lady Venetia (no.216), whose reverse is another cosse-de-pois enamelled masterpiece in the manner of François Le Febvre, Claude Rivart or Jean Caillart.9 The ceramics, beginning, inevitably and rightly, with the Chinese porcelain goldfish tub on which ‘Demurest of the tabby kind, The pensive Selina reclin’d’, include great rarities such as the ‘Saint-Porchaire’ ewer from Edinburgh (no.230; Fig.33) or the Victoria and Albert Mus­eum’s ‘Cup of Mr Francis Place’s China’ (no.233), while a range of Sèvres and Wedgwood, including a delightful pair of flower tubs designed by Lady Diana Beauclerk (no.253), emphasise Walpole’s emphatic modernity, also witnessed by a superb lacquer commode by Pierre Langlois (no.4; Fig.34) and a settee by Vile and Cobb, both from his Gallery.10 There are many piquant juxtapositions: the snuff-box with a portrait of Mme de Sévigné (no.110), and a letter from her addressed ‘Des champs Elisées; point de succession de tems point de datte’, (no.111) both sent to Walpole by Mme du Deffand in 1766, are next to the early sixteenth-century Venetian psalter (no.106) Walpole attributed to ‘don Julio Clovio, scholar of Julio Romano’ with its elaborate box incorporating the arms of Anjou, Arundel, Oxford, Portland and Walpole, a characteristic celebration of ‘the genealogy of the objects of virtù – not so noble as those of the peerage, but on a par with those of race horses’. The catalogue entries hold faith with Walpole in particularly full and careful accounts of provenance.11

The combination of Snodin’s substantial guide-essay and Kevin Rogers’s account of the building, supported by excellent colour-keyed plans, gives a very clear picture of Strawberry’s complex evolution, the big change coming in about 1759, when work on the Gallery initiated the development of the State Apartment, which culminated in the addition of the Great North Bedchamber in the early 1770s. Although Richard Bentley’s initial ideas rarely survived to execution, his drawings exhibit a power and poetry denied to John Chute’s, which played a more practical part. The Gothic aspect of Strawberry is clearly important, but its greatest originality emerges in Rogers’s analysis of its conception and planning as radically asymmetric and accretive. Some of the other essays seem less convincing. Is it more than a jeu d’esprit to use Nietzsche to anatomise Walpole or to compare him with Winckelmann? Macaulay’s brilliant 1833 demolition of Walpole, often quoted in the catalogue, may always dominate: Byron, fragmentarily cited, and Austin Dobson, of whom no trace, make an odd couple in defence. A fuller account of the fortuna critica of both Walpole and Strawberry would have been a useful addition. On a different level an analysis of the textile component would have been rewarding, and relevant to one of the two fascinating bonnes bouches which conclude the catalogue. The first is Walpole’s own record of a dream of 1760, which took him to Whitehall Palace, its lost Holbeins and a prefigurement of Otranto; the second, his revelatory account of the effects of light and shade, and of colours, the textiles being a major component, which he had achieved at Strawberry Hill, anticipating Sir John Soane’s ‘poetry of architecture’. Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill indeed does honour to both its protagonists.