A slight digression today, as we are not looking at a stately home in the country, but a London townhouse. To be specific, Apsley House on Hyde Park Corner in London, the former home of Lord Wellington and preserved because he is a great hero and, well, because it has always been there.
Despite it being in the wrong place, there is so much to unpack here. To start with, Apsley House is one of the last few remaining London aristocratic houses - so my first question is why were we quite happy to see all these beautiful treasure houses of art and design demolished in London, but as a nation we go insane if a single one in the country is under threat. What is going on with this?
Then there’s the idea that a powerful man cannot be expected to exist without a big house. As a national hero, Wellington was made a Duke and in order to be a duke he needed a house in the country and one in London. So the grateful nation also awarded him Apsley House and Stratfield Saye in Berkshire. I’d like to think that this was the Regency and things are different now, but the problem with that is Chequers. Not enough has changed. Yet.
We also have the small issue of Wellington’s colonial history before Waterloo which is not mentioned anywhere in the house and so is worthy of a whole post all of its own, but for now can I once again recommend the Empire podcast series on the East India Company.
Finally, there’s the idea that a house like this (i.e. big and gilded) is only fully meaningful if the family still live in it. With the result that the Wellesley family still live in half the house and get their repair bills paid by the nation. That’s us. Which I find somewhat irritating.
But none of this is why we are here today. We are here to look at the art. (Despite the best efforts of English Heritage, but more on that later.)
One of the things that Apsley House has is lots of paintings. As you go up from the hall to the first floor, what you notice is that it’s mostly paintings of men. We start with a set of Dukes of Wellington, proof of lineage, and then after that it is individual soldiers and lots of groups of soldiers, some battles, and more groups of men.
In addition, there are several portraits of Napoleon. One of the other things this visit left me with is a desire to psychoanalyse Wellington. So you defeat Napoleon, become a politician, but have a giant fifteen foot high neoclassical statue of your enemy, Putinesque in its absurdity, at the bottom of your stairs. Tell me about your childhood then Mr Wellesley.
The only women visible in all this array are those who married various Bonapartes. (And your relationship with your mother?)
Then, glimpsed through a door in another room, a women, in prime position over the fireplace, is pictured reclining naked. She doesn't seem embarrassed. And in the next room is a half-length portrait of a woman standing, casually revealing one breast.
So, I think, I’ve got the measure of this. The classic aristocratic art collection of forebears and soft porn, with an added serving of soldier.
But then I start looking more closely. And it turns out that the two naked women are actually by Titian. High class soft porn. Culture. So I examine the other pictures. And there’s a Rubens.
There are a lot of Dutch paintings of meals and people skating, which I don’t know enough about to judge. But I discover one Velasquez.
And another.
Then there are more. Now I am really interested in Velasquez, mostly as a result of reading this excellent book. And one thing I do know is that he didn't do many paintings and most of those are in Spain. So we are not in a house but an art gallery
But can I find out a single thing about the paintings on the walls? No, not a sausage. There is no list of paintings, no guide to the art. The only piece of information in the whole room is a laminated page of A4 about how the first Duke of Wellington chose the wall fabric in consultation with a woman who, from the sound of it, was his mistress. Titillating, but possibly not the information we need. Even if the resonances with 10, Downing Street are very amusing.
So, once again in a big posh house in a room with damask walls, I am asking myself, what am I doing here? Surely one of the justifications for coming to see these big houses, whether in or out of London, is to visit the art. But are we just walking past it like credulous pilgrims, culturally improved just by standing next to it? Because I can’t do much more than that for some of the paintings, which are hung so high that it’s impossible to see their labels.
Now in some ways, this attitude to art has always been the case. When Lord Bath opened Longleat in 1949, he freely admitted as much.
We plumped for guides because we thought Women’s Institutes, British Legions etc, like to be told funny anecdotes about the family. Quite frankly, I don’t think that Rembrandts or Van Dyck’s interest them […] I’m not all that interested in pictures myself, although I love possessing them.
Clearly there are bigger issues here for debate around what art means, to the aristocracy and to people - and to the nation. Along with that endlessly recurring question of what we are doing when we visit stately homes.
But Apsley House is different for two reasons. One is that it’s owned by English Heritage, who ought to know better. The other is that this is a massively significant group of paintings, even when you only consider one single artist.
Let’s do the numbers. There are 107 Velasquez paintings still in existence (and a handful more disputed ones). 55 of those are in Spain. Of the 14 on public view in the UK (the Duke of Westminster has one as well), six are in the National Gallery and four are in Apsley House. So this isn’t just decoration on the walls which is not being mentioned to visitors, it’s a chance to see some really great art. If only someone was going to tell you it was there. Never mind all the Titians and the Dutch masters.
Endnote. It’s not just English Heritage who are hiding their artworks in this way. The only Velasquez in England outside London is at Kingston Lacy House in Dorset, hung in a dark room with a load of much less interesting copies of Spanish works, where the guide (who has a torch to help you see the paintings it’s so dingy in there) doesn’t know which one it is and would much rather talk about the leather wall hangings.
Photos: Me, Wikimedia Commons, English Heritage Archive