Treasure Houses of Britain is a 1985 documentary television series, narrated by John Julius Norwich and showcasing a number of country houses in Great Britain, produced for American television in concert with an art exhibition touring the United States at the same time.
The series was first shown in three parts on PBS in December 1985. The producer was Michael Gill, also known for Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark and Alistair Cooke's America.
Program 1 – "Building for Eternity"
Introduction
The program opens with John Julius Norwich in St Mary the Virgin's Church, Bottesford. He points to the effigy of his "twenty-times great grandfather" Robert de Ros, who founded the church, as well as Belvoir Castle—which is briefly shown—and whose descendants, the Earls of Rutland—eight of whom lie entombed in the church—gained "fat rewards" by fighting for the king and by the disposition of monastic lands under Henry VIII.
[Norwich's ancestors] were people who believed profoundly in themselves and in God. They believed in the life eternal, and they built here for eternity."
As the exteriors of a ruined castle and some intact country houses are shown, Norwich tells of how a large number of British families have maintained their estates through the ages. In the Middle Ages, they maintained castles for defense; but as England became a safer place, they built manor houses, for comfort and as displays of authority and prestige.
Hardwick Hall
"No one was more passionate about displays of status than Bess of Hardwick."
Hardwick Hall was erected by Bess, beginning in 1590—the year of her fourth, and last, husband's death—using stone quarried from Bess's estate, as well as glass made there ("Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall"). The house is the "most splendid and least altered of great Elizabethan houses".
The most important rooms are the high great chamber, with its plaster frieze and Brussels tapestries; and the long gallery, 166 feet in length, with many framed paintings—including one of Bess herself, by Rowland Lockey, and loaned for the exhibition—hung directly on its tapestries, as a form of display.
Burghley House
"The Elizabethans saw architecture as a reflection of power, and for a great potentate, such as Queen Elizabeth I's Lord High Treasurer, William Cecil, a small house was unthinkable."
Burghley House was built on the site of an old monastery between 1550 and 1580.
The paintings Madonna and Child in a Landscape (1615/1620), by Orazio Gentileschi, and A Rose in a Glass (1730), by Herman van der Mijn, were contributed to the exhibition. Also contributed were three Italian boxwood statuettes of Lucretia, Cicero, and Cleopatra, by anonymous artist(s).
Another carving in the house, not on exhibition, is "A carved limewood relief of a dead bird" (late 18th Century) by Jean Demontreuil.
Wilton House
The earls of Pembroke and Montgomery built Wilton House on lands granted them by Henry VIII, lands that had belonged to Wilton Abbey.
A relation, Philip Sydney, wrote his poem "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia" at the house. Sydney's nephews, the third and fourth earls, were patrons of Shakespeare, whose plays Twelfth Night and As You Like It were likely to have been first acted at Wilton. The First Folio of Shakespeare's plays was dedicated to them. William Kent's statue of Shakespeare, commissioned by the ninth earl for £100.18s.4½d, stands in the front hall of the house.
After a fire in 1625, the original Tudor house was rebuilt—by Inigo Jones, England's first Palladian architect—in the classical style of the Stuart court.
Wilton served as General Eisenhower's operations headquarters for the Normandy invasion in World War II, its Double Cube Room serving as the operations room for the Battle of Normandy.
That Double Cube Room contains the biggest painting by Anthony van Dyck, of the family of the fourth earl, who was Lord Steward to Charles I, but switched to the parliamentary side during the English Civil War. Charles I is said to have loved Wilton and stayed at the house every summer.
Other old-master paintings include Leda and the Swan, by Cesare da Sesto; The Virgin and Child With St. John and Catherine, by Parmigianino; A Man Amusing Children with a Rommel Pot, by Frans Hals; a nativity by Hugo van der Goes; and Christ, St. John, and Two Angels, by Peter Paul Rubens.
The 17th earl added contemporary works, including an early painting by David Hockney, The Pyramid of Giza.
Chatsworth House
"No house has a lovelier setting than Chatsworth House." The first house was built by Bess of Hardwick and William Cavendish at the end of the 16th century. When the first Duke of Devonshire greatly expanded the house, he laid out the gardens in the complex, 17th-century French style. In the 18th century, came an "educated nature", the way the English thought nature should look, the fourth duke bringing in Capability Brown, the greatest of all landscape gardeners. One hundred years later, Joseph Paxton, designer of The Crystal Palace, laid out walks and waterfalls.
The present gardens are the creation of Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, who designed a serpentine beech hedge leading up to the statue of the sixth, bachelor duke, and who is "violently anti-Capability Brown" with regard to gardens, although in parks she thinks him "supreme". A formal garden she has built reflects the architectural plan of Chiswick House, which was designed by Lord Burlington and William Kent.
J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art, which hosted the "Treasure Houses of Britain" exhibition in Washington, D.C., pronounced Chatsworth a "work of art" in the way it "sits in its landscape", and that indoors it has "elegance" but "a coziness, too". John Singer Sargent's painting Portrait of the Acheson sisters (1902)—of the granddaughters of Louisa Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, by her first marriage—is a favorite. Sargent was born an American but, like Henry James, tried to "out-English the English".
The first duke was a supporter of William III and the house has a collection of Delftware tulip vases. The fourth duke married the daughter of the wealthy connoisseur the Earl of Burlington, thereby doubling the family's possessions and estates. The sixth duke doubled the sized of the house, the great rooms of which were meant to proclaim the family's wealth and sophistication. George V and Queen Mary were the first monarchs to actually stay at the house.
The State Drawing Room contains tapestries designed by Raphael and a painting, by Edward Irvine Halliday, of the house being used as a girls' school during World War II, to avoid the grounds' being used to billet troops. The malachite table and urns were presents from Czar Nicholas I to the sixth duke. The Emperor's Fountain on the grounds being name in honor of the czar, who visited the house. Stamped leather wall coverings are also due to the sixth duke and include his portrait in the design.
Program 2 – "Palaces of Reason and Delight"
Blenheim Palace Blenheim Palace, designed by John Vanbrugh for John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, became a symbol of Britain's imperial destiny, its building heralding a century of prosperity and foreign expansion.
Houghton Hall
Houghton Hall, begun in 1721, was built by Marlborough's Secretary of War Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister. Not as large as Blenheim, it was a family house, whose design abandoned the baroque of Vanbrugh for the classicism of Andrea Palladio.
Houghton's small library, contains a day bed and, on the wall, a portrait of George I by Godfrey Kneller. The central stone hall was designed, as was the interior of the entire house, by William Kent, who had the help of the sculptor John Michael Rysbrack and the stuccoist Johann Baptist Atari. Antique dealer John Bly calls Kent the first true interior decorator. Kent was inspired by his meeting with Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, who became Kent's patron. Together they created decor such as the chairs in the saloon, covered in red Utrecht velvet, and those in the hall, covered in even rarer green velvet. The bronze laocoön in the hall is a copy by the French sculptor François Girardon. Kent's mahogany staircase is part of one of the first large-scale uses of that wood in a house.
Many important works of art were sold by Walpole's grandson to Catherine the Great, and many of those are still in the Hermitage Museum, but Kent's furniture was purchased by George Cholmondeley, 3rd Earl of Cholmondeley, the husband of Robert Walpole's daughter Mary, for £10,000. The house has a 1732 painting by William Hogarth of the Cholmondeley family, to whom the house eventually passed. George Cholmondeley, 5th Marquess of Cholmondeley's marriage to Sybil Sassoon, who is portrayed in John Singer Sargent's The Countess of Rocksavage (1922), brought her paintings to the house, including Jean-Baptiste Oudry's 1753 still-life The White Duck (stolen in 1990). Other fine pieces include a Louis XVI cabinet topped by a vase of flowers in Vincennes porcelain. The house contains two early (1754 and 1758–59) self-portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, plus his 1754–55 painting Mr. and Mrs. Browne of Tunstall, of two of the painter's Suffolk neighbors. Norwich's favorite painting in the house is Holbein's Portrait of a Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling (completed 1526–1528, purchased by the National Gallery in 1992).
In 1973, Sybil Cholmondeley restored the outside flights of step, which had been demolished by the 3rd earl, as a memorial to her late husband, with a Latin inscription by John Sparrow. Their son has a large collection of model soldiers, a collection, begun in 1928, that has come to number 20,000. Display cases include representations of the Prussian Gardes du Corps on parade; the Battle of Waterloo, where wool from Scotch sheep imitates the smoke of cannon fire; a skirmish in the Franco-Prussian War; and the Battle of Culloden.
Newark Castle
The ruined Newark Castle, a hunting lodge of the Stuart kings of Scotland and fortress in the hills of the Scottish lowlands during a turbulent time, is near the cleuch (gorge, or ravine) where an ancestor of the dukes of Buccleuch and Queensbury saved King James I of Scotland from a charging male deer and thus gained the family title ('buck' + 'cleuch'). The building became known from being a setting for Walter Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel.
Bowhill House
Newark Castle is near to, and on the estate of, Bowhill House, which was built during the reign of George IV and is one of three great houses used by the Buccleuch family throughout the year. As the Buccleuchs were patrons of Walter Scott, who advised on the building's 19th century additions, this house contains many of his "relics", as well as an 1808 painting of Scott by Henry Raeburn and a sketch of him by Edwin Landseer. Scott's literary influence helped inspire the king to visit Scotland. The king, in return for Buccleuch hospitality, made a gift of his portrait by David Wilkie.
Drumlanrig Castle
Drumlanrig Castle is an ancestral home of the Douglases and came to the Buccleuchs through the marriage of the second duke to Jane Scott, Countess of Dalkeith. This house is a castle disguised as a palace. It is surrounded by gardens and parkland. The gardens are known as "Virginia" and "Barbados", and a 1692 sundial shows the directions of cities and ports in the New World, which transformed nearby Glasgow into an important British sugar and tobacco port, as well as enriching the surrounding countryside.