Tits out for the Lords
It’s chapter two of saying the unsayable about stately homes, with particular reference to Chatsworth. Last time, we needed an eight year old boy to point out that big houses like this are designed to remind you who’s in charge. In this post, it’s my turn to be awkward and what I am here to tell you is that stately homes are full of naked people. And most of them are women.
In at least half of all stately homes, nudity is everywhere. It’s on the ceilings, on the walls, it sits in frames and stands on the sideboards. But heaven forbid that we should ever notice what is in front of our eyes.
In the course of writing the last post about the Painted Hall in Chatsworth I read a lot about its murals. The walls depict the life of Caesar, and then he ascends to live amongst the gods on the ceiling. These sentences talked about Laguerre, about Caesar and his role as an allegory for the Stuart Kings, about the Baroque and Whiggery. What they did not mention at all - apart from in one small aside about flesh and drapery - is that everyone on the ceiling seems to be having a lot of problems with their clothing. This is particularly true of the women, whose drapery seems to be very disobedient indeed. Or perhaps doing what it is meant to do, if you are a certain kind of man. This one mural contains enough naked breasts to stock an entire newsagent’s top shelf in the 1970s. And the women, looking coyly away from the painter or failing to grab their chiton as it falls to the floor, are pulling the same poses as any 70s pin up, trying to look modest while at the same time striking exactly the right angle to show off their assets.
But no one ever calls out this world as soft porn. It’s classical, isn’t it; it’s art; it’s in a stately home. So it must be alright.
There are couple of things which are worth saying at this point. One is that it’s Not All Stately Homes. Indeed it is more specific and therefore peculiar; grand houses seem to either have a lot of nudity in their decor or none at all. See for example Osterley Park where the ceiling and wall decoration includes lots of lovely vignettes of gods and goddesses, all of whom have managed to keep their clothes entirely in place.
Which in some ways makes houses like Chatsworth feel much worse. This much nudity wasn't inevitable, instead it is a choice that someone has made. And I can’t help wondering what it would feel like to be a woman living in a house of this kind. Whether they were a servant or a daughter, at some level there would always be the knowledge that most of the men they met would be imagining what they looked like topless. In short, very much like living in the 1970s.
Thus far, what’s on the walls at Chatsworth is typical of what a visitor might find in many other stately homes, with nude women in the paintings, carved into the furnishings or sculpted in the gardens. But Chatsworth has another room which takes this incidental and pervasive sexism to a whole new level. It’s not open to the public at the moment, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not there.
The Sabine room is a smallish bedroom, once a lobby, which is also painted all over with murals, this time by James Thornhill. It is lauded as one of the great wonders of Baroque English painting by writers who use all sorts of words about it, none of which include nudity or topless.
But there’s an extra soft-porn frisson of force in this room, because here the women are being carried off by force. Which is at least a reason why their clothes are slipping off. What Thornhill has chosen to show on almost every available square metre of wall surface is the Rape of the Sabine Women; the moment when the first Roman men go off to kidnap themselves a whole set of wives in order that the city shall thrive. It’s the founding myth of the Roman Empire. It’s also depicted, in various forms, in so many stately homes that I am starting to think that it says something fundamental about the English aristocracy too, but that’s a thought for another day. For now, the key point is that there is a definite porn vibe going on here, of women being taken away for sex against their will and their clothes falling off when that happens.
However, I defy you to find anyone saying that anywhere when they write about the room. Here are some sentences I could find. “This is one of the grandest of his decorative schemes, painted with much more flair and vigour than I would have expected from him…”. If you read Wikipedia, it has plenty to say about how certain of the figures could be interpreted in terms of English politics of the time. But what the pictures on the walls actually show is once again something that we don’t say out loud.
It’s now well over fifty years since John Berger pointed out the very obvious truth that in art, men look while women are meant to be looked at. But few art historians want to take on what this might mean. How are we looking at these women, for example? Are they individuals or just objects for male titilation?
This isn’t just a question about art appreciation. One of the things that is sometimes said about eighteenth century houses like Chatsworth is that these were places which ensured the everyone who walked through these doors knew their very precise status. But this isn’t just a question of class. As I mentioned above, every woman who lived in these rooms, whether daughters or visitors, wives or servants, was reminded by the decor that they were different to the men, not actors but objects, there to be looked at. And, perhaps, always needing to be a bit afraid of what male desire might do to them.
Pictures mine/Wikimedia Commons