Every Mans proper Mansion House and Home, being the Theater of his Hospitality … may well deserve … according to the degree of the Master, to be decently and delightfully adorned. For which ende, there are two Arts attending on Architecture, like two of her principal Gentlewomen, to dresse and trimme their Mistresse: PICTURE & SCULPTURE

In this passage from The Elements of Architecture (1624) Sir Henry Wotton (1568–1639) suggests that Painting and Sculpture are handmaidens to Architecture, responsible for her adornment.¹ This essay considers the converse: how architectural design has been put into the service of collections of painting and sculpture in British country houses. How have galleries evolved in terms of their location, orientation, modelling, decoration and lighting to serve the display requirements of works of art? To what degree did picture and sculpture galleries develop from spaces used for other purposes, and did one differ from the other? How were British examples influenced by earlier continental models and ideas, and how did they relate to the typologically similar galleries of palaces and great town houses? What follows is an attempt to draw together from the too often parallel literature of architectural and art history various disparate strands that touch on these questions.

Appearing first in medieval Latin as guleria, the word ‘gallery’ has been used to describe both a room within a building and a collection, thus a ‘gallery of paintings’. Its usage evolved to encompass sequences of rooms of display and finally, in the nineteenth century, it stretched to describe entire institutions dedicated to the display of works of art.² In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Britain the label ‘gallery’ was used freely to describe architectural spaces of very varied location and function, whether ‘external, cloister-like structures’, or internal private or public amenities.³

If first a means of communication, galleries evolved as places of recreation and display, though these functions were not necessarily mutually exclusive; with the loss of evidence it is difficult to make categorical judgements about sequence and chronology.⁴ The two-storied galleries that Thomas Bourchier (c.1411–1486), Archbishop of Canterbury, introduced between 1456 and 1486 around three sides of Stone Court at Knole, Kent, were, for example, probably primarily for communication, while the similar structure that Henry VII built in 1506 at Richmond Palace, commanding views of the Privy Garden and Thames, and the near contemporary wooden gallery at Thornbury Castle, South Gloucestershire, built over a stone cloister by Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham (1478–1521), had in part a recreative function.⁵ The galleries of Henry VII’s palaces and those of his courtiers were used ‘for exercise in wet weather, for dancing, and no doubt for a good deal of social and political intercourse’, even, on occasion, for target practice.⁶ Those built at Hampton Court and Whitehall Palace in the 1530s, and elsewhere, were first and foremost private spaces for royal use, for they connected directly to the king’s and queen’s privy lodgings and gardens, and they were shared only at royal discretion. They were ‘havens of beauty with views within and without’, places ‘where curiosities and conversation could be combined’, and ‘garden[s] for wintertime’ where confidential political business could be conducted.⁷ The country house gallery reflected these social and recreative functions; it was analogous to the French promenoir and, together with the rooftop leads, provided a secure place for exercise, particularly for women and children.

Origins

Acknowledged as a French innovation, the gallery of display gained architectural and decorative sophistication in Italy before being adopted more widely.⁸ At Fontainebleau, between 1528 and 1539, Sebastiano Serlio, Giovanni Battista Jacopo and Franceso Scibec da Carpi produced a synthesis of architecture, painting, stucco work and wood carving in the Gallery of François I, which linked the king’s apartments to the Chapel of The Trinity. It served as a model for subsequent galleries in which such elements were subordinate to the whole – a pattern that only changed in the late eighteenth century as notions of display shifted in favour of the aesthetic value of individual works of art.

Royal and courtly galleries

The Tudor court provides a number of examples of galleries in which works of art were displayed: at Hampton Court Cardinal Wolsey’s Gallery was glazed in 1514 and three years later hung with Flemish tapestries, while the King’s Gallery in the Cloister Court ‘contained musical instruments, a Mappa Mundi and numerous paintings’.⁹ Royal models were inevitably emulated by members of the court and more widely by the aristocracy. Coeval with the galleries at Hampton Court and Whitehall was the range built on the west side of The Vyne, Hampshire, by William Sandys, 1st Baron Sandys (1470–1540), Henry VIII’s Lord Chamberlain. Probably constructed in anticipation of the king’s visit of 1531, it contained a Stone Gallery on the ground floor and an Oak Gallery above it whose display of carved heraldic panels, though much reordered, may have furnished the room since the 1520s (fig. 1).¹⁰ Cowdray, Sussex (1520–42), a courtyard house begun by Sir David Owen (1459–1535) and completed by the courtier Sir William Fitzwilliam (c.1490–1542), had a first-floor gallery in both the north and south ranges. Projecting from the centre of each were deep, canted bays that provided privacy and allowed views of the inner courtyard and the park. At Acton Court, Gloucestershire, the walls of the 120ft-long upper gallery added by Nicholas Poyntz (d. 1557) in the 1550s, also in advance of a royal visit, were decorated with Latin texts.

The influence of ecclesiastical architecture

While the galleries of royal and episcopal palaces provided country house builders with exemplars, the Dissolution also enabled the cloisters and corridors of monastic buildings to be pressed into service when secular houses rose from their remains. Despite demolishing the monastic church at Lacock, Wiltshire, Sir William Sharington (c.1495–1553) retained much of the abbey’s fabric in his remodelling and built a Stone Gallery above the south range of the medieval cloister. The claustral plan of the London Charterhouse similarly influenced the creation of two new galleries following the priory’s violent suppression. The second of these, built in c.1571 by Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk (1536–1572), was a garden gallery, in part of two storeys, on the eastern side of the former cloister garth; it comprised a 263ft-long brick-vaulted ground-floor corridor and a 50ft-long timber gallery above it that gave way to an open ‘Terras’ for the remainder of its length.¹¹ With its views over the gardens on either side and its connection to a tennis court and bathing house, it was clearly a place of pleasure.

Some newly built houses such as Burghley House (1558–87), the Lincolnshire seat of Sir William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (1520–1598), included open loggias – subsequently enclosed and adapted for display – that echoed the courts and cloisters of monastic foundations. The pragmatic enclosure of loggias to provide appropriate spaces in which antiquities could be displayed had a precedent in Italian villas.¹²

Long galleries

The fashion for long galleries in British country houses was a phenomenon that began in the second half of the sixteenth century and continued beyond the Jacobean period.¹³ The one built by Sir Nicholas Bacon (1510–1579) at Gorhambury, Hertfordshire, in advance of Queen Elizabeth’s visit of 1572, may have started a fashion for galleries of a grandeur that had previously been the preserve of palaces (fig. 2).¹⁴ Bacon’s gallery is likely to have housed portraits from the outset, but it served him in other ways too: George Puttenham, the author of The Arte of English Poesie (1589), records finding the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal ‘sitting in his gallery alone with the works of Quintilian before him’; on its walls hung some sixty sententiae, or moral phrases, derived from Seneca and Cicero and written on vellum in Roman inscriptional capitals – ‘a memory-theatre of a verbal sort’ whose wisdom Bacon drew upon for his own oratorical performances.¹⁵

The five long galleries at Theobalds, Sir William Cecil’s Hertfordshire house, also provided a spur for competitively minded courtiers, as is witnessed by those built at Knole, Kent (1604–8), Audley End, Essex (1604–14), and Hatfield House, Hertfordshire (1607–12), which Cecil’s son Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury (1563–1612) remodelled.¹⁶ A late-flowering gallery of open form, and precociously correct classical dress, is found in the extraordinary design of c.1605–10 for a free-standing, two-storey colonnaded ‘Porticus’, attributed to John Osborne and intended for the garden of Salisbury House, Robert Cecil’s Strand Palace.¹⁷

Portrait Sets

The grandest of early modern British galleries often contained portrait sets of kings and queens (British and continental), Roman emperors, famous men (homini famosi or illustri) and family members and friends. They were educative and projected important messages – of authority and lineage – just as the heraldic panelling at The Vyne had done.¹⁸ In 1600 Baron Waldstein saw a group of English royal portraits in what may have been the Great Gallery at Theobalds, displayed together with ‘coloured portraits of the Roman Emperors’, ‘busts of the 12 Caesars sculpted in some special material’, ‘portraits of Don John of Austria, the Duke of Parma, Count d’Egmont, the Admiral of France, the Prince of Condé, and the Duke of Saxony’, and, in the frieze, painted views ‘of a number of important cities’.¹⁹ Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk (1473–1554), is recorded as having had twenty-eight portraits of ‘divers noble persons’ in the gallery at his house at Kenninghall (dem. 1603), Norfolk, while his grandson Thomas Howard, 3rd Viscount Howard of Bindon (d. 1611), wrote in 1559 of Bindon Abbey, Dorset: ‘The Gallery I lately made for the pictures of sundry of my honored friends, whose presentation thereby to behold will greatly delight me to walk often in that place where I may see so comfortable a sight.’²⁰ Such assemblages were bearers of information and meaning, giving form to sometimes remote figures from history and reminding the viewer of the owner’s loyalties and political and familial alliances, in short their legitimacy. They figured too in the literary imagination: in An Heptameron of Ciuill Discourses (1582), a collection of prose romances by George Whetstone, the protagonist leads the narrator ‘into a very beautifull Gallerie’ in which there were ‘Mappes of the worlde … artificially set foorth in Painting’, ‘Pictures of all Christian Princes … Pictures of certaine Heathen Rulers: and … Pictures of so many learned men and grave Magistrates, as he could through freenship or reward obtaine’.²¹

The thirty-eight portraits, on panel, presently hanging in the Brown Gallery at Knole, were in 1608 fixed into the upper register of what has been variously described as the Matted, Rich or Great Gallery (now Cartoon Gallery) during the room’s remodelling by Thomas Sackville (1535/36–1608), 1st Earl of Dorset (fig. 3). The series of depictions of noblemen, military leaders, churchmen and philosophers formed part of a complex decorative scheme that integrated carved and polychrome woodwork, painted grotesques, heraldic stained glass and wall hangings; significantly, a portrait of Sackville hung directly opposite the door to the King’s Bedroom. The portraits were relocated in 1701 with the arrival from Copt Hall, Essex, of a set of six copies by Franz Cleyn of Raphael’s celebrated Sistine Chapel tapestry cartoons, while sixteen of the thirty-five surviving carved term figures that articulated the wall surfaces were reused in the Venetian Ambassador’s Dressing Room.²²

At Apethorpe, Northamptonshire, a new east range, built by Sir Francis Fane (1580–1629) in advance of James I’s visit of 1624, comprised a first-floor Long Gallery above back-to-back loggias, an upper gallery on the second floor and a roof walk above. Divided into bays by fluted Corinthian pilasters, the floor-to-ceiling oak panelling of the main gallery includes sixteen apertures, 7 feet 6½ inches high, designed to accommodate a series of portraits – an apparently unprecedented arrangement.²³ On the ground floor the spine wall that separates the addorsed loggias contains apsidal niches that may have contained small-scale sculpture.²⁴

Because elements may now be missing, it is all too easy to overlook the fact that late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century spaces such as the galleries at Knole and Apethorpe were of an integrated design in which architecture, decoration, painting and sculpture merged. At Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, the decorative components of the west wall of the 140ft-long gallery – fictive dado panelling and a painted frieze below the plaster ceiling cornice – are proportioned so as to accommodate perfectly the thirteen-piece set of Oudenaarde tapestries illustrating the story of Gideon that Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury (c.1527–1608), managed to acquire on the London market during the course of her building work.²⁵ The inventory of 1601 shows that portraits of English and continental monarchs, ecclesiastical and political figures and family members also hung in the room, complementing the allegorical figurative sculpture in the overmantels.²⁶

Other works of art

Purpose-built galleries for the display of more cosmopolitan collections inevitably appeared first in London. The superposed spaces created at Arundel House by Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel (1585–1646), and Inigo Jones, projecting southwards to the Thames, are shown in the celebrated portraits of the earl and his wife, Aletheia (née Talbot), Countess of Arundel and Surrey (c.1590–1654), painted by Daniel Mytens in c.1618.²⁷ The lower gallery, with what must be an idealised view of a garden beyond, is shown lit from both sides and hung with paintings, while the barrel-vaulted upper gallery is shown lit solely from the east, with statuary arranged to either side.²⁸ In 1616 a visitor saw ‘all the pictures in the gallery and the statues in the lower rooms’ – in other words the inverse of the arrangement shown in Mytens’s paintings, and a more logical one.²⁹ The galleries anticipated the similarly configured Galerie Mazarine in Paris that François Mansart designed for Cardinal Mazarin, 1st Duke of Rethel, Mayenne and Nevers (1602–1661), in 1645, who placed his antiquities in the lower gallery and his paintings and furniture above.³⁰

Knowledge of both sculpture and painting was for Henry Peacham an accomplishment that a gentleman needed to master. His primer, The Compleat Gentleman (1622), advises that the pleasure of antiquities ‘is best known to such as have seene them abroad in France, Spaine, and Italy, where the Gardens and Galleries of great men are beautified and set forth to admiration with these kinds of ornaments’.³¹ To Arundel, who had transplanted ‘old Greece into England’, Britain owed ‘the first sight of Greeke and Romane Statues, with whose admired presence he began to honour the Gardens and Galleries of Arundel-House’.³² At York House Peacham noted that the Duke of Buckingham’s ‘Galleries and Roomes are ennobled with the possession of those Romane Heads, and statues, which lately belonged to Sir Peter Paul Rubens’, and that at St James’s Palace and Somerset House ‘a whole army of old forraine Emperours, Captaines, and Senators’ paid homage to Charles I.³³ In 1629–30 a sculpture gallery – a colonnade of fifteen oak columns built against the garden wall – was constructed at St James’s Palace to house the statuary acquired from the Dukes of Mantua and was described by Jean-Puget de la Serre in 1637.³⁴ But it was the king’s collection of Italian and Dutch paintings in the Long Gallery there that is likely to have had a greater influence. Here hung eleven heads of Roman emperors by Titian combined with equestrian portraits by Giulio Romano. Completing the hang and its iconography, Van Dyck’s great equestrian portrait of Charles I (1600–1649) with M. de St Antoine (1633) hung in prime position at one end of the gallery in place of the twelfth ‘emperor’.

Giles Waterfield has argued that Sir Christopher Wren’s creation in 1697 of the Cartoon Gallery in the state apartment at Hampton Court for the display of Charles I’s set of Raphael’s cartoons was ‘perhaps the earliest example in Britain of a purpose-built picture room’, as the design of the room was determined by the proportions of the cartoons.³⁵

Despite the display of these exceptional collections in galleries that were indebted to continental ideas, Roger North, writing in c.1695–6, acknowledged that even in the late seventeenth century many country house galleries remained essentially recreative spaces. The number of great collections that merited purpose-built spaces remained limited. He writes: ‘I shall discourse somewhat of that noble accomplishment to an house, a gallery. This is a room, for no other use but pastime and health, so farr as the gentle moving usuall within the walls of an house may concern it.’³⁶ It was perhaps a memory of this aspect of the country house gallery that encouraged two grand tourists to behave as they did in 1764 in ‘the great gallery at Florence’: ‘They submitted quietly to be shewn a few of the pictures. But seeing the gallery so immensely long, their impatience burst forth, and they tried for a bett who should hop first to the end of it.’³⁷ And while they are unashamedly romanticised products of a nineteenth-century yearning for Old England and its ‘anecdote and atmosphere’, the theatrical scenes illustrated in such works as Joseph Nash’s Mansions of England in the Olden Time (1839–49), enlivened with figures dressed in period costume, also emphasise the enduring recreative function of British country house galleries.³⁸

Distribution

Paintings and sculpture have always been distributed throughout country houses, their location reflecting fashion, the taste of an individual owner and the wealth of material that was available; living among collections brought both pleasure and prestige.³⁹ Informal conventions about which categories of pictures were suitable for which rooms gradually evolved. In Ben Jonson’s 1602 play Poetaster, a husband tells his wife not to hang their pictures in the hall or the dining chamber ‘but in the gallery only for ‘tis not courtly else’.⁴⁰ Twenty years later Sir Henry Wotton advised

first, that no Roome be furnished with too many, which in truth were a Surfet of Ornament, unless they bee Galleries, or some peculiar Repository for Rarities of Art [and on placing] chearefull Paintings in Feasting and Banquetting Roomes; Graver Stories in Galleries, Land-skips, and Boscage, and such wilde workes in open Tarraces, or in Summer houses (as we call them) and the like.⁴¹

William Salmon echoes Wotton’s language: ‘Histories, grave stories and the best works become galleries; where one may walk and exercise their senses in viewing, delighting, judging and censuring.’⁴² The prime purpose of the gallery had finally been reversed: rather than encountering the odd picture during a walk through a space primarily intended for recreation, it was the very presence of paintings that now provided the motivation for a diversionary walk.⁴³ From the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century the importation of very large numbers of paintings, and to a lesser extent sculpture, drove the need to create purpose-built galleries that would complement existing rooms where works of art were displayed.

The influence of continental galleries on collectors and architects

Thomas Palmer (1540–1626), 1st Baronet, warned that the ‘speciall gallerie of monuments and olde aged memorials of histories, records of persons and things’ that travellers could see in Italy was ‘a fantasticall attracter, and a glutton-feeder of the appetite, rather than of necessarie knowledge’.⁴⁴ The galleries of display found in the noble and ecclesiastical palaces in Rome (not least in those of the nipote, or nephews of the pope), in Florence and Venice, and indeed in rural villas, were nonetheless emulated throughout Britain; Christina Strunck has estimated that ‘there existed no less than 173 galleries in Rome and its immediate surroundings during the early modern period (1500–1800).’⁴⁵ The antiquary Richard Symonds described the visits that he made in the mid-seventeenth century to collections in and around Rome, including those of the Barberini, Borghese, Farnese and Giustiniani families, the palazzi Mattei, Mazzerino, Sacchetti, Sora and Spada, and the Villa Medici and Academia di San Luca.⁴⁶ Such galleries were to become essential viewing in the eighteenth-century heyday of the Grand Tour and sources for potential purchases.⁴⁷

In Venice travellers could admire the striking arrangement of antique statuary left to the republic by the Grimani family in the Statuario Pubblico, an annexe to the Biblioteca Marciana, and in Florence, the collections displayed by Grand Duke Francesco I in the Tribuna of the Uffizi or those in the galleries of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi. The Pantheon (c.126 AD) and Antiquario in Rome inspired the construction of free-standing galleries in the gardens of British country houses.⁴⁸ The practice of placing excavated fragments in gardens and courtyards gradually shifted in favour of display in galleries on the piano nobile of palazzi – statuary restored, polished and set on new pedestals as part of an ensemble.⁴⁹ The display of the Farnese Hercules (until its removal to Naples in 1787) in a newly created context enriched with frescoes painted by Annibale Carracci and his studio provided the locus classicus for this approach.

Grand Tourists, artists and architects could see casts of the most significant ancient statuary at the Palazzo Mancini, Rome, a collection set up in 1725 by Nicolas Vleughels, the Director of the French Academy, encouraging perhaps the idea that casts were acceptable alternatives to marble originals, which, thanks to the limitation of supply and the legal restrictions on their export, were beyond the reach of most would-be collectors.⁵⁰ A visit to the collections of the Capitoline, immeasurably enriched in 1733 by Pope Clement XII’s gift of the remainder of Cardinal Albani’s antiquities, was also de rigueur.⁵¹

British tourists described what they saw. In June 1739 Francis Greville Brooke, 8th Baron (1719–1773), reported that the palazzi ‘are built to be peopled only with statues and pictures; whilst the families retire into a corner of an upper story, and eat almost as little as the breathless inhabitants that fill their galleries’.⁵² The rules of rank obliged owners to receive visitors but, in order to preserve their privacy, some created spaces that served no purpose other than to be shown to foreigners.⁵³ Fifteen years later John Boyle, 5th Earl of Cork and Orrery (1707–1762), reported on the Grand Duke’s gallery in Florence where ‘strangers are admitted to walk in the gallery all the morning, and to converse with marble gods and petrified emperors as freely as they please. The rooms within the gallery are kept under lock and key; no person is permitted to remain alone in any one of them.’⁵⁴ John Bacon Sawrey Morritt (1771–1843), of Rokeby Park, Yorkshire, enthused in his correspondence: ‘There are at least eighteen or twenty houses, of which each has a rich picture gallery, and many fine collections of statues.’⁵⁵

The tripartite form of the 230ft-long gallery in the Palazzo Colonna at Rome, and the arrangement of its collections with sculpture in the centre and paintings in the salone at either end, served as the inspiration for a number of galleries in British country houses and museums.⁵⁶ It inspired great imaginary interiors too, for example in the canvases of Giovanni Paolo Panini (fig. 4). Charles, Lord Somerset (1689–1710), described the Colonna as ‘the gallery to wch in that nature there is nothing to be compard’.⁵⁷ When visiting it in 1793, Sir William Forbes, 6th Baronet of Monymusk and Pitsligo (1739–1806), lamented the death of the architect John Henderson, who had borrowed, for a design for the Assembly Rooms at Edinburgh, the idea of a gallery with ‘a recess at each end … separated by a screen of columns’.⁵⁸ Thomas Pitt (1737–1793), later 1st Baron Camelford, commissioned George Dance the Younger to survey the gallery, having obtained a licence to measure it. Dance later competed in the competition run by the Accademia di Belle Arti, Parma, winning the Gold Medal in May 1763 for designing a gallery of H-plan form – perhaps an evocation of ‘Piranesi’s description of a fantasy scheme for a sculpture gallery in his Prima parte di architettura e prospettive (1743)’ – that was to prove highly influential (fig. 5).⁵⁹ It provided ‘the origin of the theme of the top-lit one-storeyed buildings’ that appear both in Dance’s subsequent work and in that of Robert Adam, for example at Newby Hall, Yorkshire (1766–85; fig. 6).⁶⁰ Dance was later chosen by the engraver and publisher John Boydell to design a commercial gallery at 52 Pall Mall, London – a two-storey building comprising a ground-floor exhibition hall with three interconnecting galleries on the first floor.⁶¹

Another British architect who turned his hand to the design of galleries when travelling in Italy was Charles Heathcote Tatham. In March 1795 in thanks for his election as Accademico d’Onore he sent to the Accademia Clementina in Bologna a design drawing labelled ‘Progetto d’un edificio destinato alla scoltura’ (Project for a building intended for sculpture).⁶² Tatham later designed a sculpture gallery at Castle Howard (1802) for Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle (1748–1825), and a picture gallery for Charles Anderson-Pelham, 1st Baron Yarborough (1749–1823), at Brocklesby (1807), Lincolnshire, publishing engravings of both schemes in 1811 (figs 7 & 8).⁶³

As country houses took on some of the character of the palazzi that their owners had seen on the continent, parallels were inevitably drawn. Robert Harvey, later Mayor of Norwich, wrote in July 1773: ‘I cannot help thinking that Holkham & Houghton rival these places in beauties.’⁶⁴ In 1800 when visiting Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire, Richard Colt Hoare (1758–1838) of Stourhead, Wiltshire, remarked: ‘I thought myself transported to some of the palaces in Italy, where a variety of pictures are collected in a long extent of rooms, unarranged, with all their antique rust and gold upon them.’⁶⁵

The case of Wilton House, Wiltshire, reveals how notions of display evolved during the eighteenth century.⁶⁶ A 1730s manuscript, ‘A Copy of ye Booke of Antiquities at Wilton’, suggests that the Earl of Pembroke’s grouping of sculpture, broadly by type, in a series of interconnecting rooms was at the time thought preferable to display in a large single gallery, which was deemed inappropriate for a country house:

The Rooms lye in Visto as a great Gallery; and in them … the Marbles are set. Thus there is this Advantage of what there would be in a Gallery, that the different classes … are separated in a different place to each … Were this Collection to be set with Harmony together … it would require the length of a 1000 feet. Such a Gallery is only fit for a Royal Building.⁶⁷

The sculpture collection of Thomas Herbert, 8th Earl of Pembroke and 5th Earl of Montgomery (1656/7–1733) – ancient, Renaissance and modern works that included marbles from Arundel House, the Mazarin collection and the Giustiniani family – was combined and integrated with the display of paintings, satisfying the Italian concept of paragone, in which juxtaposition encouraged comparison.⁶⁸ The double-storey Great Hall contained the larger statues, busts and reliefs, while a series of first-floor rooms were described by a visitor in 1772 as being so ‘crowded with Greek and Roman Busto’s, that I fancied my self at the Villa Borghese’ (fig. 9).⁶⁹ The influence of models such as the galleries in the Vatican, the Giustiniani and the bust room in the Capitoline museum is also evident.

Visiting Wilton some years later, William Gilpin felt that the sculpture might have been ‘arranged in a more judicious manner’, arguing that the ornaments of a room should not ‘obtrude foremost upon the eye’ and that the scale of the collection demanded a different solution: ‘The hall … the staircase, the saloon and other apartments, might be adorned with a few busts and statues; but to receive the whole collection, perhaps a long gallery should have been professedly built.’ Nor need a single medium gallery be over-ornamented: ‘Here the statues would be the objects, not the room. To them therefore the whole should be subordinate.’⁷⁰ In this we can read the influence of new aesthetic ideas promoted in the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann.

Pictures and sculpture, then, might be arranged and juxtaposed in a variety of ways: for pleasing aesthetic effect, for the purpose of comparison by type or school and for the enjoyment of more than one viewer at a time: ‘Galleries were built wide, so that those nearest the wall could examine the smallest most detailed works [pictures] on the lowest register, while those behind were admiring major works placed six or seven feet from the floor, and those yet further away were scanning the highest pictures.’⁷¹ Such arrangements in country house galleries reflected a pattern established in temporary exhibitions, for example at the Royal Academy of Arts, where pictures hung on or below ‘the line’ or were ‘skied’ above it.⁷² This practice was in turn inspired by the galleries of the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace. Gilpin advocated a not dissimilar approach to the layering of sculpture in a gallery.⁷³

Terminology was used inconsistently, and the function of rooms often blurred one with another. In his account of saloons, great rooms and galleries and their overlapping function in country and town house interiors of the 1720s and 1730s John Cornforth explains how the then fashionable saloon, intended for the reception of great visitors, was often double height and hung with pictures. A letter describing a former gallery in wistful terms expounds on the advantages of clerestory lighting in a new room that combined the functions of reception and display:

I am oftener missing a pretty gallery in the old house I pulled down than pleased with a Salon which I built in its stead, tho’ a thousand times better in all manner of respects … In the midst of its roof a round picture of Gentileschi …The rest of the room is adorned with paintings relating to Arts and Sciences, and underneath divers original pictures hang, all in good lights, by the help of an upper-row of windows which drown the glaring.⁷⁴

In Italy, if anything, the trend had been in the opposite direction: ‘In the course of the seventeenth century, galleries had tended to become the most important reception room of the Baroque palace and assumed functions traditionally assigned to the sala grande.’⁷⁵ Pragmatically, ‘the largest and highest-ceilinged room in the house, the Great Hall or the Saloon, almost automatically became the home of the bigger and more prestigious pictures, whatever their subject.’⁷⁶

The traditionalist Hon. John Byng, later 5th Viscount Torrington (1743–1813), lamented the passing of the Long Gallery – ‘the glory of every old house, which we now never make part of a new building’ – and scorned the importation of Grand Tour collections. A visit to Belvoir Castle in June 1789 prompted him to write: ‘Now all these young (Romish) collectors lavish away a fortune in Italy, without enquiring after their professional Riches, or knowing that their Old Stair-cases and Gallery contain noble Portraits, and original Paintings, which are suffer’d to rot, unregarded.’⁷⁷

Augustus Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry (1730–1803), included galleries of a civic scale in each of the three country houses that he built: Downhill and Ballyscullion, both in Co. Londonderry, and Ickworth, Suffolk. His overarching aim of educating through a comparison of schools of production determined the display of his ever-growing collection of paintings and sculpture. Downhill, begun in c.1772 contained a double-height gallery at the western end of the house, but a fire in 1851 destroyed the library and much of the sculpture collection. Ballyscullion, begun in 1786 and eclectic in its architectural influences, comprised a central rotunda of elliptical plan, quadrant wing walls and outlying pavilions in which galleries, each 82 by 25 feet, were to house Italian and Flemish works; Hervey wrote: ‘Young geniuses who cannot afford to travel into Italy may come into my house and there copy the best masters.’⁷⁸ Ickworth, for which the Italian architect Mario Asprucci provided an early design, was conceived along the same lines. In July 1796 the earl bishop wrote to John Symonds, a Cambridge professor to explain: ‘My galleries are to exhibit an historical progress of the art of painting both in Germany and Italy, and that divided into its characteristic schools – Venice, Bologna, Florence, etc’; his daughter Lady Elizabeth Foster was told that the paintings would be ‘divided by pillasters into their respective schools’. The seizure by Napoleon’s forces of the earl bishop’s collections in 1798 and their subsequent sale and dispersal in Rome, prevented the realisation of these galleries. Another exception to the rule is Stourhead, Wiltshire, where Sir Richard Colt-Hoare, 2nd Baronet (1758–1838), largely separated portraits, landscapes, old masters and British pictures, arranging them by genre.

If lighting was of secondary importance in the gallery of communication but a significant consideration in the gallery of recreation, the placement, orientation, number and size of windows were critical factors in the gallery of display. The Elizabethan and Jacobean vogue for expansive glazing, expressed, for example, at Hardwick Hall, Holdenby House, Northamptonshire and Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, was to prove inimical to the display of paintings.⁷⁹ Advising against hanging paintings in rooms that were overly lit from competing sources, Sir Henry Wotton urged that

the best Pieces be placed not where there is the least, but where there are the fewest lights; therefore not only Roomes windowed on both ends, which we call through-lighted; but with two or moe Windowes on the same side, are enemies to this Art; and sure it is, that no Painting can be seen in full Perfection but (as all Nature is illuminated) by a single Light.⁸⁰

Antiquities, he felt, should be placed on ‘Pedistals, and ranked decently, either sub die, where they shew best, or in a stately Gallery’.⁸¹

The tradition of lighting galleries from the side, which continued into the eighteenth century, proved less than ideal. Uneven light or light from the wrong quarter could cause distracting reflections from varnished or, in later years, glazed surfaces. Some pictures would receive too much light, while those on the piers between windows, seen contre-jour, or those that hung in a dark corner might be difficult to read. Windows limited the number of pictures that could be hung in a gallery and compromised their arrangement.

In the eighteenth century the benefits of top lighting were recognised. Churches, artists’ studios (famously Rembrandt’s) and continental galleries all provided prototypes that could be emulated. The top-lit Galerie à la Lanterne in the Palais-Royal in Paris, where the collections of the Duc d’Orléans were displayed, was much admired by Grand Tourists.⁸² The Tribuna of the Uffizi palace in Florence, a hexagonal domed room with clerestory lighting, designed by Bernardo Buontalenti in 1585–9, served as another important model. Here sculpture, paintings and works of decorative art from the Medici collection were displayed together, as a wunderkammer, against richly coloured walls. Johan Zoffany’s idealised depiction of its interior (1771–8) was perhaps as influential in shaping ideas about the form and treatment of gallery spaces in Britain as was the place itself. It was accepted, however, that its clerestory lighting was more favourable for the viewing of sculpture than for pictures. Gilpin, among others, advocated an arrangement in which clerestory lights ran along only one wall of a gallery, lighting sculpture ranged on the opposite side.⁸³

An alternative to clerestory lighting was the roof-top lantern or ‘monitor’ light, which provided a higher, indirect light source. Preferable for the display of pictures, it was adopted by Sir William Chambers for the Royal Academy’s influential Great Room in Somerset House in 1780.⁸⁴ Houghton Hall in Norfolk, however, provides us with one of the earliest top-lit picture galleries in a British country house; it was destroyed by fire in 1789 (fig. 10). A letter of 1731 suggests that Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745) had intended to create a side-lit picture gallery in one of Houghton’s wings – ‘a large room which looks on the parterre, designed for a gallery’ – but by 1742 Thomas Ripley had designed in its place a windowless room lit by three roof lanterns, whose coffered ceiling compartments reflected those in William Kent’s Saloon.⁸⁵ By the following year the gallery contained fifty-one of Walpole’s best and largest paintings. The gallery, 73 feet by 22 feet, was entered via the north colonnade and heralded by a vestibule containing six marble urns in niches. Walpole’s son Horace felt it ‘would not yield even to the Palazzo Colonna’.⁸⁶

The skylight offered a third type of top lighting. One of the earliest examples can be found in John Soane’s 1787 proposals to create a picture gallery from a windowless corridor on the second floor of Fonthill Splendens, Wiltshire, the neo-Palladian house (dem. 1807) that William Beckford (1760–1844) inherited from his father, Alderman Beckford. The constraints of this unpromising space prompted Soane to make his first use of the canopy dome, whose secrets he had learnt from his master George Dance the Younger (fig. 11). This scheme, with its rhythm of three oval canopy domes, capped with conical skylights interposed with unlit barrel vaults supported on paired pilasters, would have provided a dramatic space for the display of pictures and was to have had as its terminal focus a cast of the Apollo Belvedere.⁸⁷ In 1811 at Dulwich, Soane designed London’s first purpose-built, top-lit, public art gallery to house a permanent collection, and in 1829 a small top-lit ante-room to the sculpture gallery of his friend Sir Francis Chantrey (1771–1841) at his house at 30 Belgrave Place, London.⁸⁸

The early to mid-nineteenth century was a period of experimentation as new architectural materials began to be used in country houses. Between 1805 and 1807 at Attingham Park, for example, John Nash created a continuous apron of glazing set within a curving iron frame that ran around all four sides of the gallery he designed to house the picture collection of Thomas Noel Hill, 2nd Lord Berwick (1770–1832).

Ian Gow has suggested that Paxton House, Berwickshire, is ‘the first Scottish country house to contain a room where the architectural brief put the pictures first’.⁸⁹ Having inherited it as a septuagenarian, the Edinburgh lawyer George Home (1735–1820) added a purpose-built gallery and library wing to designs by Robert Reid in 1812–13 (fig. 12). Home’s task was to accommodate the Grand Tour collection made by his uncle Patrick in the 1770s, then housed at Wedderburn Castle. Reid discussed the practicalities, and difficulties, of providing top lighting ‘to show pictures to the very best advantage at all times’, with the artist Sir Henry Raeburn, recommending ‘something like a large umbrella be suspended from the centre of the light, to be taken up or let down occasionally’, allowing diffused light to fall on the pictures.⁹⁰ The result was a gallery of experimental form: a rectangular hall, with a domed circular roof light and apsidal exedra at each end, also lit from above and separated from the central space by columnar screens.

In 1850 Welbore Ellis Agar (1778–1868), 2nd Earl of Normanton, added a gallery, apparently to his own design, to his neoclassical house at Somerley, Hampshire. It is distinguished by having top lighting arranged in two parallel strips, each serving one of the long walls of the room (fig. 13). This unconventional arrangement was admired by Dr Waagen in 1854: ‘The lighting from above is so happily calculated that every picture receives a clear and gentle light.’⁹¹

The concern to find the best means of lighting pictures and sculpture, stimulated by the advent of various types and colours of artificially generated light, was gradually to evolve into a science. Ever an innovator, in 1880 the industrialist Sir William Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong (1810–1900), installed arc lights in his gallery at Cragside, following their trial by the South Kensington Museum, but a few months later changed them for his friend Joseph Swan’s incandescent filament lights after their successful use at the Savoy Hotel, London. Curtains, blinds, louvres and baffles, and materials such as mirrors, gauze and ground glass were deployed to mediate the effect of light – to redirect, diffuse or reflect it. Of considerable influence in the furnishing of country house galleries had been the use of mirrors and crystal chandeliers seen, for example, in the Galleria Colonna and Galleria Pamphilj al Corso in Rome.⁹² Robert Adam’s 1765 revision of his design for a gallery at Harewood House for Edwin Lascelles, 1st Baron Harewood (1713–1795), for example, provided for four large pier mirrors, placed between the room’s five windows (fig. 14). Such pier glasses became ‘night time windows’ in a conceptual sense, an idea made literal in the picture galleries at Apsley House (1828) and at Somerley, where the windows were covered over at night by panels of mirror glass.

A fashion of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was to view sculpture by torchlight: a strong, flickering light carried by the viewer as he or she moved through and around a gallery generated a chiaroscuro effect that emphasised the plastic form and latent power of statuary.⁹³ William Patoun had recommended this practice as early as c.1766: ‘Go to the Belvedere at Night and see the Apollo and Laocoon by torch Light … You may by this means throw what masses of Light and shadow you please and see a thousand delicacies that are unobservable in the Open Air in broad daylight.’⁹⁴ But other than for such theatrical experiences, the view prevailed that the best lighting for a gallery should simulate the studio conditions in which works of art had been made. On the basis of this principle both Benjamin West (1738–1820) and J. B. Papworth (1775–1847) built galleries to show their own paintings. Before the advent of controllable artificial light sources, the experience of viewing works of art at different times of day must have been striking; visiting the Chelsea house of Lord Privy Seal, John Robartes, 1st Earl of Radnor and Viscount Bodmin (1606–1685), on 30 September 1661, Samuel Pepys had, for example, noted: ‘Here I saw by day-light two very fine pictures in the gallery, that a little while ago I saw by night.’⁹⁵

The treatment of the walls and floors of galleries was another design consideration: dark walls provided a better foil for the display of pictures and were thought to reduce the effect of glare. Gilpin suggested that the walls of a sculpture gallery might be ‘stained with a darkish olive-tint’ to show the statuary to best advantage and a ‘lighter tinge might probably give them more softness’; Thomas Hope (1769–1831) chose yellow for his Duchess Street gallery.⁹⁶ Sir Charles Lock Eastlake (1793–1865), both a painter and gallery director, was later to advise: ‘A picture will be seen to advantage upon a ground brighter than its darks, and darker than its lights, and of so subdued a tint as may contrast well with its brighter colours.’⁹⁷

It has been suggested that ‘the English had a particular genius for galleries of varied design which, in response to practical architectural considerations, they incorporated into their house-plans with an originality and ingenuity seldom matched abroad’.⁹⁸ Certainly there are examples of galleries placed on the long axis of a house, in a cross wing, in one or more ranges of a courtyard plan, orthogonally to the main body of a building or projecting from it, and at ground, first- or second-floor level, even superposed in some houses. The rationale is generally discernible from an analysis of the function and status of both the internal and external spaces with which they were intended to communicate, but the plethora of galleries in early modern houses such as Theobalds and Hatfield House shows that more than one of these solutions could be adopted simultaneously in a single building.⁹⁹ Nor is there consistency in terms of orientation, although Sir Henry Wotton had recommended that galleries, whether intended for exercise or display, should be placed on the north side in order to protect them from the sun: ‘Pinacothecia’ designed for ‘workes of rarity in Picture or other Arts … would loose much of their grace’ if troubled by moving shadows.¹⁰⁰ Roger North had argued that a gallery should ‘be easy of access, and for that reason … upon the first floor’, acknowledging that if it was ‘intended to entertein and divert the best company’, its ‘finishing’ should accordingly be ‘either carv’d, painted, or sett with pictures’.¹⁰¹

We have seen how galleries were created and adapted successively to serve changing purposes, circumstances and fashions. The Long Gallery at Blickling Hall, Norfolk, perhaps provides as good an example as any of this process. The 123ft-long gallery on the first floor of the Jacobean double courtyard house, overlooking the gardens to the east, was built by Sir Henry Hobart, 1st Baronet (d. 1625), between 1619 and 1621. Ascending the original Jacobean staircase in the east wing (which by the end of the century contained fifty pictures ‘great and small’), visitors would have turned either left to enter the Great Chamber, and the series of increasingly private rooms that lay beyond, or right to the Long Gallery. In addition to a display of the family’s heraldic achievements, the plasterwork of the gallery ceiling contains symbols of the Five Senses and of Learning, together with twenty enigmatic emblems selected from Henry Peacham’s Minerva Brittana (1612).¹⁰² In its first incarnation the gallery was a place of promenade and prospect in which pleasure could be had from puzzling over and decoding the emblems and their accompanying riddling labels and anagrams (concettismo). In the gallery’s next incarnation John Hobart (1693–1756), 1st Earl of Buckinghamshire, displayed a series of ten full-length portraits of his friends, neighbours and Whig allies painted by William Aikman in 1729, placing at one end, as the culmination of his statement of allegiance to the Whig hierarchy, a large equestrian portrait of George II by John Wootton and Charles Jervas. The earl’s inheritance in c.1745 of some 10,000 books from Sir Richard Ellys (1688?–1742) of Nocton, Lincolnshire, called for pragmatism: the Aikman full lengths were necessarily displaced by bookcases; a new chimneypiece, copying a model at Coleshill House then believed to be by Inigo Jones, and a series of classical grisaille overdoors painted by Francis Hayman were introduced, together with twenty-eight busts, twenty vases and three statues by John Cheere. Between 1858 and 1863 William Schomberg Robert Kerr, 8th Marquess of Lothian, orchestrated a fourth change: Benjamin Woodward designed new, elaborately carved book presses and John Hungerford Pollen provided a painted decorative frieze of complex iconography and a vast hooded chimneypiece of French inspiration.

The tradition of building and adapting galleries in country houses for the display of works of art has not ended, indeed a number have been built in recent years, serving both long-standing needs and new circumstances. The demolition of the great nineteenth-century London town houses and their galleries in the early and mid-twentieth century saw significant works of art transferred to country houses, necessitating a degree of rearrangement, though this was a process of retrenchment. More recently the requirement to display conditionally exempt works of art has provided a new impetus for gallery spaces. At Weston Park, Staffordshire, an ancillary building has been adapted for just this purpose, serving the privately owned houses in the area. At Welbeck Abbey, Nottinghamshire, the Harley Foundation has recently commissioned Hugh Broughton Architects to create a gallery within the walls of the Tan Gallop that John Bentinck, the reclusive 5th Duke of Portland (1800–1879), had built for the exercise of his horses (fig. 15). There are two parallel spaces within the new gallery, one a cycloid-vaulted, top-lit room for the display of paintings and the other, with varying ceiling heights and limited natural light, for the showing of decorative arts and fragile works of art. Architectural inspiration for the design is credited to Louis Khan’s Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, and Rafael Moneo’s extension for the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, Spain, but ultimately its barrel-vaulted forms derive from Roman architecture. And so we have come full circle to the loggia of Renaissance Italy and its ancient precursors.

Sir Henry Wotton, citing the Roman authority Pliny, suggested that Sculpture and Painting ‘censure one another’, explaining: ‘For Picture is best when it standeth off, as if it were carved; and Sculpture is best when it appeareth so tender as if it were painted.’ He seems by this to mean that the way in which both painting and sculpture are displayed, and perhaps lit in a carefully controlled architectural space, influences the way that the spectator experiences them and that, if carefully mediated, each art form may advantageously take on characteristics of the other.¹⁰³

I am grateful to Andrew Moore and Lisa White for reading and commenting on a draft of this essay and to Aistė Bimbirytė-Mackevičienė for alerting me to literature on galleries that I was previously unaware of.