Because Beaulieu was the gift that keeps on giving (really, see the last three posts), I now have a bit of a backlog. In the time it has taken me to write all that up I have visited four, yes four other stately homes. So there’s quite a lot of pent-up irritation and aristocratic entitlement to get out of my system and I had better get started.
I’m beginning with Chatsworth in part because it is the ur-stately home in so many ways - as big and expensive as Buckingham Palace and rescued from post-war irrelevance by garden centres, farm shops and all the other accoutrements that we now come to expect from an aristocratic estate that wants to milk us of our middle-class cash. But it’s also very dull. It’s not so much that there is nothing to see here, but that none of it is explained at all well, until I began to wonder what I was traipsing round for.
Anyway, let us begin. Seen from the drive in, the place is immense and square and classical and for goodness sake they have even gilded the window frames on the front, which I didn't ever imagine anyone would want do, so it’s hitting peak ostentation before we’ve reached the front door. And it’s so excessively large that I can’t take a proper picture of it once I’ve arrived, so here’s one from Wikimedia Commons.
I’m visiting on the first day of the summer season, so everyone is very chipper and welcoming. At the side entrance, before we even go in, there is art. It turns out that is going to be the theme of the visit, even if I don’t know it yet.
I also have no idea what this piece of art is or why it is there. This too, it turns out, will be another recurring theme. There are paintings and sculptures everywhere, old ones and new ones. But very few of them are labelled.
Quite soon, this starts making me ratty. I want to know things and no one is telling me. We’ve not got very far before this becomes an issue. As it happens, I can identify these pieces of pottery which are by Edmund de Waal and so have been able to find out that they were created specifically for the house.
They’re placed in a long gallery with also contains quite a lot of classical and ancient art. None of which is labelled either. What on earth is this?
I have a chat with one of the room stewards who tells me that it is Greek and that the other, left, foot is in a national museum in Germany. So it is important. But I am just expected to file past it and somehow absorb its significance from the atmosphere. Or merely be impressed. And what’s this cat goddess doing?
It’s like the British Museum only pointless.
The lack of labelling carries on throughout the whole tour. There are old tapestries and new paintings, good porcelain and bad murals but I can only tell you anything through a deep dive on the internet.
For example I am only able to say this is a Julian Opie thanks to Flickr. So that might not even be true.
The one exception to this is their exhibition for 2024, which is about children. And this means that some pictures on display - which feature children, generally called Cavendish - have labels. Hurrah!
So I can tell you that I have seen sculptures by Jacob Epstein and this rather wonderful Lucien Freud.
The general experience, however, is more like being forced to participate in the Children’s Trail as a grown adult.
They are also failing to ask any of the questions I would, like who are these effete fops with their spoilt dogs? Who put them in charge? And why so many boys, not girls?
There is one picture however, which does have some difficult questions asked of it. Because it is now the law that stately homes do have to acknowledge that there have been some, er, difficulties around slavery.
But I can’t help feeling the this is being done under some degree of duress, or at least awkwardness. Slavery is clearly terrible and has to be addressed, so it is, but so many other problems are still being avoided. Even in these rooms, the languid boys and the expensive modern artists are telling us stories of patriarchy, elitism and privilege. What about all the other hundreds, even thousands of servants who have thronged these corridors over the centuries. Should we not know more about them too? Are they not as important as the boy with the hound and the hawk?
And so we shuffle on, past tapestries and modern art, here merely to pay reverence, not to understand. What’s this doing? No idea.
So far, so stately home. As ever, I find myself in an over-decorated room and asking, what are we meant to be looking at here? But because Chatsworth doesn’t even try to pretend that we are being improved by the art, I think it has actually brought me closer to the answer. And it’s not a comfortable one. We are here, I think, to worship.
Bear with me, this is going to require a detour into theory, but a short one. My last book but one, The Life of Stuff, had a section about the Victoria & Albert Museum, so I ended up reading a paper called The Universal Survey Museum. It’s looking at these great eclectic national museums - the British Museum and the Met in New York are other examples. What it argues is that we don’t go to a museum to learn. Instead we shuffle past exhibits in silence, observing them, in great marble buildings which look like temples. What we are doing, the authors suggest, is not art appreciation but a sanctioned cultural ritual, and one by which we become better citizens in our secular society.
I’m starting to wonder if the stately home visit is fulfilling a similarly peculiar function. Because this lack of interest in the art or the furnishings isn’t just happening in Chatsworth, it’s repeated in almost every house I find myself. We’re behaving as though we are in a great museum. The shuffling is just the same, the range of art works are often identical, as is the lack of specific interest in any one piece. But why is this happening in a stately home? What does this ritual mean?
One of the clues is that we can’t explain why we are in these places, but we do it for the same reason we take our children to museums. This is what is expected of us if we are to be good, English, middle class people1. So stately homes, too, are ritual places in which we become improved members of society. But what are we worshipping here?
This to me is the really interesting question. I’m not sure that I have all the answers yet, but I suspect that the gods and virtues here may not be entirely in our own interest. They might be things like could be continuity and stability and the past. All of these could be read as quintessentially English values, but at the same time I can’t help noticing that they all benefit the aristocracy, not us.
What else we might be paying reverence to at Chatsworth will have to wait for the next post.
My favourite example of this is on the discussion board Mumsnet, where a long running chat for people with dysfunctional families is called ‘But we took you to Stately Homes’. This is what a proper childhood looks like. So stop telling me I’m abusive.