Country house photography
Whenever our aristocratic amateur goes by rail or road to visit his other aristocratic friends, his Calotype chest forms, as a matter of course, a part of his luggage. He reaches Whatdyecallit Castle a full hour before dinner; the Calotype chest is opened, —the camera mounted, —the three spidery legs produced to their full length; and, by the time that the first bell has rung, our amateur has secured a very good Garden-front and North-wing. This gives him favour in the eyes of them that sit at meat. (Cuthbert Bede, Photographic Pleasures, 1855)Country houses played a major part in the medium's early history. Nicéphore Niépce at Saint-Loup de Varennes, Henry Talbot at Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, John Dillwyn Llewelyn at Penllergare, South Wales, Clementina Hawarden at Dundrum, Co. Tipperary, and Julia Margaret Cameron at Freshwater, Isle of Wight, did much or all of their most important work on country estates. As Bede's comments indicate, photography very soon became part of house party culture. Country houses offered practically everything that the early photographer needed: picturesque surroundings, models, darkroom and storage space, and manpower for shifting cameras, plates, and water. The golden age of country house photography coincided with the swansong of country house life, ending finally in 1939.
Only a fraction of the country house photographs made in this period survive. Countless collections have been destroyed or lost or, probably, moulder in attics. Tens of thousands of photographs must have been taken on Russia's rural estates during tsarism's last decades; but revolution, civil war, and emigration did away with them. (Exceptions include photographs of the imperial family at their country retreats; and the work of the Greek expatriate Mary Paraskeva at Baranovka in the Crimea.) Much more survives from peaceful Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and rediscovered collections continue to arrive in salerooms and record offices. One of exceptional quality, auctioned in 2000-1, was created by William, 2nd earl of Craven (d. 1866), at the family home at Ashdown, Berkshire, in the 1850s and early 1860s. Many British photographers were women: in the 1850s and 1860s alone, for example, Lady Lucy Bridgeman of Weston Hall, Shropshire; the sisters Lady Augusta Mostyn and Lady Caroline Nevill; and Lady Fanny Jocelyn, stepdaughter of Lord Palmerston and a frequent photographer of social and political gatherings at his mansion at Broadlands, Hampshire. In Ireland, Francis Edmund Currey, the absentee duke of Devonshire's steward at Lismore Castle, Co. Waterford, took calotypes in the 1840s and wet-plate pictures in the 1850s. Edward and Louisa Tenison made calotypes of their home at Kilronan Castle, Co. Roscommon, and other Irish seats. Over 3, 000 glass negatives survive from the Clonbrock family, whose photographic tradition began with the marriage of an enthusiastic amateur, Lady Augusta Crofton, to Luke Dillon, later 4th Baron Clonbrock, in 1866. Soon afterwards they built a fully equipped ‘Photograph House’ in the grounds of their house near Ballinaske, Co. Galway. Another outstanding figure was Mary, countess of Rosse, of Birr Castle, Co. Offaly, the wife of a leading amateur astronomer. She took up photography in 1853 while expecting her last child, installed a ‘camera room’ in the castle, and mastered both the waxed-paper and wet-plate processes. Her few surviving views and portraits are of striking quality. In France, finally, the rich amateur Henry Bevan is notable for the pictures he took in the 1860s and 1870s of the house of his uncle, the banker Horace Mallet, and other relatives living in considerable splendour at Louveciennes outside Paris.
As already indicated, the country house offered practically every kind of subject favoured by the 19th-century amateur, from everyday objects—Talbot's Breakfast Table of 1840, for instance—to still lifes of armour and antique bric-à-brac, farms and outhouses, servants and estate employees at work, children playing or demurely posed, and guests playing croquet or, as technology improved, more energetic games like tennis and cricket. (Much early sports photography was done at country houses.) Dogs and horses, outsize salmon and trout, and piles of slaughtered game were also recorded. Photographic amusements—distorted mirror images, spooky double exposures, and the like—also became a staple of country house entertainment.
The definition of country house photography can be stretched in several directions. First, by 1900 many suburban business and professional families were enjoying and photographing elements of a country house lifestyle, from amateur theatricals to motoring. Classic examples include the Lartigues at Courbevoie near Paris, the Austens on Staten Island, New York, and the Atkinsons at Huby, Yorkshire, whose rescued photographs were published by Colin Gordon in A Richer Dust: Echoes from an Edwardian Album (1978). Secondly, not all the photography that took place at country houses was done by amateurs. Between 1859 and 1862, for example, the Schneider family of daguerreotypists toured the estates of eastern Germany and Russia photographing houses, parks, groups of servants, dogs, and whatever else their patrons would pay for. In 19th-century Britain, professionals were called in to photograph important occasions like coming-out balls, weddings, and royal visits; also corpses before burial. George Washington Wilson might be summoned to record a royal engagement at Balmoral, or a visit by Gladstone to the earl of Aberdeen at Haddo House. In the 1870s Henry Taunt of Oxford functioned as official photographer at Disraeli's political house parties at Hughenden in Buckinghamshire. Thirdly, and as cameras became handier, country house photography as a record of upper-class life extended beyond the park gates, to grouse moors, regattas, race meetings, and exclusive vacation spots in Switzerland or on the Riviera. The albums compiled between 1904 and 1909 by Prince Otto zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg (1842-1911), for example, one of Europe's most cosmopolitan grandees, chronicle not only picnics at home in Bavaria but travels and social occasions across the Continent. By 1914, however, the activities of the rich and famous at, for example, the events of the ‘English season’ were also the target of professional photojournalists (e.g. Horace Nicholls) working for a picture-hungry mass press.
After the First World War, except in Russia, country house life continued, although often less opulently. Social life became less formal and more mixed, with entertainers like Charlie Chaplin and Noël Coward rubbing shoulders with royalty at events like the house parties hosted by the British millionaire Sir Philip Sassoon. By the 1920s and 1930s practically every potential guest (and doubtless many servants) had at least a Kodak, and amateur cine-cameras were also proliferating. Not to be forgotten, finally, were the activities of England's cultural elite. The painter Vanessa Bell, sister of the novelist Virginia Woolf (and great-niece of Julia Margaret Cameron), photographed life at her Sussex farmhouse, Charleston, as did other members of the Bloomsbury-Charleston circle, including Woolf herself, Vita Sackville-West, and the painter Dora Carrington. At Garsington Manor outside Oxford, Lady Ottoline Morrell used expensive German equipment to record her own, overlapping coterie between 1915 and 1928.
Anon.: Garden party, Morton Hall, Norfolk, June 1887. Albumen print
— Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Heilbrunn, C. G. (ed.), Lady Ottoline's Album (1976).
- Bell, Q., and Garnett, A., Vanessa Bell's Family Album (1981).
- Seiberling, G., Amateurs, Photography and the Mid-Victorian Imagination (1986).
- Sykes, C. S., Country House Camera (1987).
- Davison, D. H., Impressions of a Countess: The Photographs of Mary, Countess of Rosse 1813-1885 (1989)
