Gilded Rage

I also thought I’d finished with Chatsworth, but then I was doing some reading and I got so cross that I couldn’t let it lie.

As I mentioned when I first posted about the house, the window frames are all gilded on the outside; a design decision so ostentatious that even Buckingham Palace chooses not to go there. (As far as I can tell, the only other building that does is Versailles, but please do tell me if you know any different)

In reading about modern day Chatsworth I found someone, probably a Duke or Duchess, suggesting that this vulgarity was some kind of economy because it only had to be done every 45 years or so.

Spare me please. If gilding your window frames was an economical decision, the streets of Britain would be lined with gold-edged houses. Bath and Mayfair would glitter in the spring sunlight. This is clearly insanity. The only people for whom this decision makes sense are those who possess vast reservoirs of both money and idleness. Which is, admittedly a pretty good description of large swathes of the aristocracy.

But for goodness sake can we stop pretending that this is about anything other than just plain showing off, perhaps shading into intimidation by vulgarity. The 1st Duke of Devonshire gilded the windows because he was very rich and wanted to create a house that would remind everyone of his status. The only reason for his descendants restoring this (the window frames were painted in white gloss paint like everyone else’s until 2018) is to do exactly the same.

While I’m here, another thing. Two in fact. The first is that the cafe at Chatsworth served me the worst cup of coffee I have tasted in a long time, so bad that this fact needs recording. I couldn’t finish it.

The other is that researching the windows reminded me about one of the Devonshire’s modern art commissions, which inhabits a long upstairs corridor.

By Jacob van der Beugel, this the North Sketch Sequence. As it wasn’t labelled, I walked past it and thought, hmm, a lot of beige tiles. But I am clearly a philistine because apparently it is an “all encompassing ceramic experience”.

What I failed to see, on account of my inability to read DNA sequences, is that this is a new take on a family portrait. The DNA of the Duke and Duchess and their heirs, Lord and Lady Burlington, is what’s represented on the tiles, along with a fifth section, ‘Everyman’ which is the DNA we all share. The mirrors, too, allow us to share in the experience. How kind.

Of course this is a modern take on hanging the family portraits on the walls of a corridor, but I think the choices here are much more revealing than that. There’s a lot of old-school aristocratic posturing going on in this artwork, even once we’ve got past the fact that the rather 1970s beige was chosen because it is the Devonshire racing colours.

The whole continuing existence of the aristocracy hinges on inheritance. They believe that they are better than us, that they have a right to big houses and lots of money and to tell us what to do, because of the family they were born into. They have these rights, because their father did, and their father’s father. And the longer they’ve had these, generation after generation, the more they believe this.

When you start to read the architecture, this is one of the big messages that stately homes have for us, a long story about time and inheritance. It’s why those blackened portraits line the corridors in the first place, and why the heraldry is painted on the walls and fused into the stained glass windows. It’s why the aristocracy preserve old houses, and also want them to look even older, like classical temples, just to convince us that their families have been there since the dawn of time and so we should not question that they are there, and that they are better than us. It’s also one of the reasons why families like the Devonshires have racehorses and racing colours, because horse breeding is a world with the same values of lineage, exclusiveness, superiority and inheritance

So in a modern world, of course it is not surprising at all that all of these foundational aristocratic thoughts should be expressed in terms of DNA. And that we should be expected to walk along a corridor and admire it. Because they really do believe that they are made of superior stuff to the rest of us.