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John Fowler

The Invention of the Country-House Style

Review of John Fowler: The Invention of the Country-House Style as submitted by Ian Gow for ICON News (Institute of Conservation)

Conference papers, so often published from a sense of duty, like Festschrifts, tend to the worthy but dull so these sparkling papers come as an agreeable surprise and must be amongst the most amusing post-conference papers ever published. One simply longs to have been at the two conferences of which these are the distillation for the fun of observing the delegates as they realised that their hero, whom they had come to celebrate, in paper after paper, was shown, at least in the paint department, to have been rather less authoritatively in touch with the world of Marie Antoinette than he thought and there is a sense that by the end of the conferences the discarded body of poor John Fowler was left with almost as many stab wounds as David Rizzio, the favourite of another Romantic Queen.

The unravelling began at the outset at the first Kelmarsh conference when Marion Suhr recounted the recent history of her attempt to restore Nancy Tree's iconic pink Entrance Hall at Kelmarsh. Through the accidents of inheritance, the rented Kelmarsh, - the dummy run for the Trees' more mature masterpiece after they purchased Ditchley - had become a Trust and the spaling pink walls had to be freshened up. Marion Suhr's gives a blow by blow account of her dawning realization that this iconic twentieth-century interior, far from being authentic Nancy, was not just a quick wash and brush up by Fowler in 1950 but a repainting job that reveals a careless lack of supervision by the master to an extent where the true taste of the revered Kick, Nancy's house-painting genius, may have not a lot in common with what replaced it:

'As a consequence of our meeting Ken, there has been some considerable dispute about the significance of the present scheme. The optimists, and Fowler fans, suggest it is a wonderful example of a great patron, Nancy Lancaster, working in conjunction with a great designer, John Fowler, in a house that led the way for cutting-edge interior design. Others may argue that it was an economical cheering up after the Second World War, applied by a local decorator, colour mixed by a chap called Horace, vaguely under the direction of John Fowler at a time when he and Nancy were not even speaking. The latter scenario places the real significance firmly with the earlier pre-1933 scheme.'

This disparity between myth and reality at Kelmarsh set the tone for much of what followed.

Peter Inskip's paper 'Working with John Fowler' is important in setting down the crucial oral history on which future scholarship will depend and we must all be grateful to Robert Becker for publishing neat so much of Nancy Lancaster's wit in his Nancy Lancaster Her Life, Her World, Her Art, 1996. Peter Inskip also has the best joke when he recalls that Sir Hardy Amies, on seeing John Fowler's famous garden at the Hunting Lodge, swore, that when he himself had a country cottage, it should have neither lawn nor hedges so that he would not have to exhaust his weekend on its maintenance. All these papers cannot but show up the paucity of the current sources on which this important chapter in taste must depend and the necessity for more memoirs of the surviving cast to be committed to paper.

Christine Sitwell, Painting Conservation Advisor to the National Trust in her paper cannot but sow the same modern doubts as Marion Suhr as she revisits John Fowler's work for the Trust and reassesses it with the hindsight of recent thinking and much more research data. In the Green Drawing Room at Clandon, for instance, 'Recent paint analysis has suggested that the scheme Fowler applied to the ceiling is purely decorative and has no historical basis'. And it gets worse in the Saloon where Fowler's scraping back was revealing not so much Leoni, as he fondly thought, but 1879 High Victoriana and it is difficult to remember how recently we have begun to get a grip on nineteenth-century paint specifications. Even Lees-Milne, who claimed the credit for introducing Fowler to the Trust was aghast: 'looking round, I thought it the most hideous decoration I had seen: flesh pink (which John Fowler calls biscuit) and purple'.

None of these writers seem to me to be relishing their debunking and this cannot but make Patrick Baty's line by line analysis of John Fowler and John Cornforth's outline of the Fowler method of painting rooms in their English Decoration in the 18^th Century, 1974 which they confusingly juxtapose with references to William Butcher's 1821 account of painting a room, extremely funny as Butcher's workmanlike account of how to achieve a substantial effect, in spite of the vagaries of the then available materials, appears to be wilfully used as a justification for adulterating much better and reliable modern paints in pursuit of faulty effects on dubious aesthetic grounds and his title 'Inspired by the Past?' says it all.

Ian Bristow's first of two papers set out his thorough and more exacting research into the nature of eighteenth-century paint and that period's approach to colour as well as a useful summary of the history of modern authentic decor in Britain; according an important place to the restorations of the Brighton Pavilion, while his chapter on the paint analysis of the Kelmarsh cannot but show up the more primitive approach of John Fowler and Nancy Lancaster.

Rather less certain is Louise Ward's expose of the 'myth' of authentic country-house decor which she suggests is not only a twentieth-century construct but something of an imposture or even fraud in that while we may wish to think of it as a touchstone of Britishness it was the invention of an American, Nancy Lancaster. This too is very amusing until we are told that the Blue Drawing Room at Chatsworth is authentic Fowler, and thus one's guard is necessarily raised as this is a simplification rather too far.

But the fun of these papers depends, like a Feydeau farce, on a general acceptance of Fowler's standing as the authority and conduit of eighteenth-century authenticity and, if a third conference could be contemplated, the growth of this idea seems worth teaselling out. In 1976 I joined the Department of the Environment and found myself as a Research Assistant engaged in trying to help the decision making about such important historic interiors as Audley End and Osborne. John Fowler and John Cornforth's English Decoration in the 18^th Century, had only just been published but in 1974 but I think I was puzzled by the Trust's interior decorating and very much more comfortable with the 'Authenticity Before Taste' camp in the Department of Furniture and Woodwork of the Victoria and Albert Museum. In his review of Cornforth and Fowler in the Times Literary Supplement, 17^th January 1975, Peter Thornton, Keeper of that Department thundered:

'If, in spending so much money as we do as a nation on the preservation of our great houses, we are sincerely trying to preserve part of our cultural heritage and not merely providing subjects for Christmas calendars, we must present these houses coherently to the public so that it can learn to appreciate and understand what their true place was in our history.'

And he went on to oppose the genuine article of 'authenticity before taste' to Cornforth and Fowler's 'loosely artistic rendering' which is exactly what this pair of conferences some 30 years later is now exposing.

It seems to me that some of this authority was given retrospectively, and in my view quite innocently, by John Cornforth who was merely acting as Boswell to the ailing Fowler's Johnson as Peter Inskip recalls of a typical weekend at the Hunting Lodge. John Cornforth's hundreds of Country Life articles are concerned to show 'the thinking behind' whatever was under review and he spent his life as a journalist asking this kind of question and weighing up the evidence as the files of his papers, now in the V&A demonstrate. The two Johns' book was meant to be helpful, indeed the book began as an internal training manual for the Historic Buildings Reps of the NT; 'the boys and girls of the National Trust' whose education was to remain John Cornforth's life-long personal mission. Because John Cornforth later became a leading authority on decoration in his own right, it gave a seriousness to a book that John himself had no wish to revise as he saw all too clearly that the modern research of the next generation in Ian Bristow and so many others made it now outmoded. Instead of wasting time on a revision he started, but not without a struggle, to give shape to his posthumous masterpiece on early Georgian interiors.

The emerge of Colefax and Fowler as an international brand after John Fowler's death must also have imparted a posthumous authority as presumably the firm now had a very real commercial stake in a view that saw John and Nancy as touchstones of eighteenth-century authenticity and the business history of their firm needs to be teaselled out too. It clearly evolved into something very different from the antique shop - or more accurately antiques shop - of John and Nancy's early days with presumably an element of subcontracting in other areas. Looking back it is easy to see now that John Fowler cannot have had our modern historiographic sense of his importance in the history of taste or he surely could not have offered up anything quite so flaky as an example in his controversial 'A matter of balance' Chapter 11, as Mrs Lancaster's Wyattville London Drawing Room: but one's confusion here is surely a quite modern historiographic one in that he must have chosen it fairly as an example of 'fashionable decoration' whereas we, infused with the Colefax and Fowler myth, where Louise Ward is on rather surer ground, are now so confused that we read it as no less a 'restoration', now Avery Row too is seen as iconic, than the Clandon and Sudbury examples that follow.

But it seems to me that some blame must be reserved to the National Trust and the best paper in this collection is undoubtedly Tim Knox's on John Fowler and the National Trust where he bravely extends the Trust's knuckles for the rap as he describes the storm of protest that greeted the white paint that John Fowler applied to the stair at Sudbury and the dawning that this brouhaha, ably fanned by the donor family, was to teach the Trust an 'important lesson' in that they as guardians of their 'historic-house museums' should not have 'permitted a decorator to impose his taste upon them in a way that a private proprietor might do'.

The focus of the row therefore was not about interior decorators as such but more about control. There is nothing wrong with a Curator employing interior decorators much as Nancy in her own houses was to find Boudin invaluable as a source of materials and expertise but she herself never relinquished any overall control and remained accountable for the final result. Tim Knox deftly withdraws the Trust's knuckles, just as he had invited the ruler to descend, by acknowledging this Boudin-factor with his question 'what else could they do' given the state in which their houses had largely come in the aftermath of the War and requisitioning.

But it seems to me there is a better historiographic defence if one accepts how radical the very idea of presenting works of art in situ that was inherent in the Trust's innovatory Country House scheme actually was. Curatorial expertise was confined to art galleries and museums which tended to be custom built around a specification for the display and best storage of objects that was quite different from the average country house. Indeed an art gallery approach, as pursued by Blunt at Petworth, might produce very beautiful results but was as likely to be rather damaging to our current notions of an historical integrity. Few people possessed any expertise in this new area expertise although it is interesting to reflect that Nancy Lancaster might have made quite a good HBR when rather few people had her wealth of informed knowledge derived from her progress as an inveterate uninvited sightseer of so many country houses in England following on from her interest in Virginia houses.

The Fowler and Lancaster grasp of historic paint, as is so entertainingly revealed here was clearly their Achilles' heel and Patrick Baty reveals how Fowler literally painted himself into a corner but it was surely a lesser aspect of Nancy's interest in houses where a couture foreground had a middle distance of antique shop finds - although it is worth remembering that they bought much of the contents with Ditchley - often with good provenances, and the paint was just the background.

What seems much more interesting is her fixation with patina and shabbiness because we see this an endearing British foible rather than an American thing. And yet it is possible to find other wealthy American ladies who were important pioneers. On Fenway in Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner cobbled a museum together that brilliantly incorporates the patina that she must have been attracted to in Europe and she was not above mixing paint herself to guide her workmen. Electra Webb having been brought up by her mother Louisine Havemeyer, consort of the Sugar King, to curate her part of the family art collection comprising Manet, El Greco, Degas and Mary Cassat left her mother deeply baffled when she began collecting 'Kitchen furniture' as her mother dismissed Electra's pioneering Americana collections. It was Electra Webb who set Mr du Pont on his true Americana path and she has her shrine at the start of the Winterthur tour. Although immensely wealthy, she adored nothing so much as cheap and cheerful disposable wallpapered bandboxes.

Although it is easy and amusing to say that the country-house look was invented by an American, the Trees seem to me to be not so easily pinned down by narrow definitions of nationality and Anglo-American seems more just. Ronald Tree was too English to succeed in American politics, which is why they came back to Britain, but they came to hunt and readily assimilated a very British way of life. It seems to me that Nancy's houses were genuine not phoney and, as Martin Wood shows in his recent Nancy Lancaster: English Country House Style, 2005, Nancy herself was amused that everything at Haseley had come from other houses she could name yet she could not so easily point up her own contribution. It seems to me that she was genuinely celebrating the quirky idiosyncrasies she had seen and relished in the houses she swooped down upon in her often uninvited progresses and some things like the line-up of leather chairs in the Dining Room is a look that takes one straight back to Robert Kerr's The Gentleman's House, 1864 'a substantial and hospitable aspect in this apartment is the unbroken line of chairs at the wall'. As John Cornforth might have said, Nancy was a 'country house buff'.

One is reminded of another similar and very amusing work of debunking with a focus on interior decorators, though veiled in the politesse of Washington diplomacy, in James A Abbott's Designing Camelot: The Kennedy White House restoration, 1998. Although Mrs Kennedy was not exactly in the end doing quite what she started out to do, she had made an outstanding contribution to the thinking about how official residences might be managed. Her popular book must be one of the first attempts to publish historic photographs in sequence of the same room to show changing taste and perhaps she and Boudin were responsible for one of the first serious attempts to recreate a Victorian interior.

Similarly although paint may not have been the strongest card in their pack, it is impossible not to admire and be rather in awe of the outstanding contribution that John Fowler and Nancy Lancaster made to our understanding of the British country house. They had the curiosity to take up their three-penny pieces, they quite often, as in the White Drawing Room at Ditchley chose to leave well alone, and all the time they drew people into the cause. That we have the rather petty luxury of debating what colour the walls of many country houses should be is in part a product of the pioneering efforts of Ronald and Nancy, the two Johns and Jim who inspired a desire to save them at a time when so many more might have been demolished.