Treasures of the Continent

In 2015, the National Trust’s Furniture Research and Cataloguing Project received a Curatorial Research Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre. Dr. Wolf Burchard, Furniture Research Curator at the National Trust, describes the richness of European furniture found in the Trust’s collection and the research undertaken by this project.

The year 2018 saw the world of furniture entirely captivated by the tercentenary of Thomas Chippendale’s birth. To mark the occasion, the National Trust launched its first ever online exhibition, Chippendale Revealed. Complete with new high-quality photography, it focuses on the collection at Nostell Priory in West Yorkshire, where one of the best documented and most comprehensive Chippendale commissions survives. British furniture is indeed one of the greatest strengths of the National Trust’s art collection and has generally received more scholarly attention than continental pieces. The key exceptions to this trend tend to be outstanding examples of European craftsmanship, such as the celebrated French furniture at Waddesdon Manor and Pope Sixtus’s extraordinary pietre dure cabinet at Stourhead.

The international nature of its collections adds to the unique character of the British country house. Exceptional treasures imported from Europe tell the story of the houses’ former owners’ relationships with the continent. Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland, for example, looks after a remarkable suite of early nineteenth-century furniture associated with the Congress of Vienna, in which the inhabitants of Mount Stewart, the brothers Viscount Castlereagh and Lord Stewart, were both key players. The so-called Congress of Vienna Table with its rich gilt bronze balustrade—produced at a time when French ormolu was banned from import—on which the treaty is said to have been signed (at least by some delegates), is a supreme example of Austrian craftsmanship. Who made the desk remains unknown, although it must have been a workshop of the scale and importance of that run by Johann Danhauser, who rarely stamped his work. The twenty Congress of Vienna Chairs, in turn, are very likely to have been made by Gregor Nutzinger or Michael Remele, both of whom provided seat furniture to the Habsburg Imperial palace and court circles. Their petit-point canvas work covers, bearing the arms of the congress’s delegates, were supplied by Monsieur Legros from Nantes in the early 1930s and the work was probably subcontracted to local nunneries.

Another set of early nineteenth-century chairs, recovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, can be found at Attingham Park, Shropshire. Contrary to family tradition, the furniture—comprising a daybed, various sofas and numerous armchairs, chairs and stools—did not belong to Napoleon’s sister Caroline Murat, but rather Queen Marie Antoinette’s niece, Maria Theresa of Sardinia. As recently established, the majority of the furniture was designed by the architect Carlo Randoni for the Palazzo Tursi in Genoa, where Maria Theresa lived after her husband’s abdication. William 3rd Lord Berwick, who was British envoy to Cagliari, then Turin and finally Naples, kept a house in Genoa and probably acquired Maria Theresa’s furniture shortly after her death and before permanently returning to Shropshire in 1833.

Anglesey Abbey houses yet another National Trust collection filled with rare European furniture and decorative works of art, including two of George II’s silver chandeliers, designed by William Kent and made by the German silversmith Balthasar Friedrich Behrens for the royal palaces in Hanover in 1736–7. A Russian marquetry roll-top desk, previously wrongly attributed to David Roentgen, exhibits a combination of Italian and Russian cityscapes. It was probably sold to Lord Fairhaven in 1929 as having belonged to Tsar Paul I, but so far there is no documentary evidence to substantiate this claim. We know that similar pieces of furniture were supplied by ébénistes such as Matvei Yakovlevitch Veretennikov to Peterhof, Tsarskoie Selo and Gatchina, but further research will be required in order to establish the desk’s maker.

The Library at Nostell Priory, West Yorkshire

The few objects mentioned here are but a fraction of the exceptional wealth of the Trust’s collection of continental European furniture. The study of these pieces reveals some truly exciting stories. It provides snapshots of the personalities and travels of the former owners of National Trust houses and can tangibly illustrate political and diplomatic life, grand tours and mainstream fashions, as well as very personal forms of taste. A selection of the Trust’s European furniture has recently received new attention, but a great deal more research will be required in the coming years. A major cataloguing project, made possible thanks to the support of the Paul Mellon Centre and the Royal Oak Foundation, endeavours to revisit all 55,000 furniture catalogue entries on our freely accessible collections website www. nationaltrustcollections.org.uk. Around 16,000 records have been updated in the last three years and the research of the most significant pieces will culminate in a large book, Furniture in National Trust Houses, authored by the Trust’s Curator of Furniture, Christopher Rowell, to be published by Yale University Press.