Castle Howard

On Saturday I went on a trip to Castle Howard, with James, who is a good companion for a day out as he both drives and takes photos (two things I am not very good at). I’d been wanting to go to Castle Howard for a while, because it’s mentioned several times in Bill Bryson’s Home, which I read a couple of months ago and really enjoyed. Bryson talked about the landscaped gardens, the follies in the grounds and of course the architecture of the house itself and the famous dome.  And although I had a nice day out, it didn’t quite live up to expectations.

The building is stunning, and the grounds were lovely for a autumnal walk (whilst sneakily eating an apple from the kitchen garden). There was an interesting exhibition about the re-building of a large proportion of the house, including the dome, after a massive fire in 1940. I particularly loved the description of Scarborough schoolgirls, evacuated to Castle Howard during the war, handing books, carpets and paintings out through the windows to save them from the flames. Some of the rooms were never fully restored, at least until first Granada TV and then later BBC films came calling, to film their respective versions of Brideshead Revisited.  The film companies paid to have these interiors fully kitted out in with every period detail – that is every detail that would be visible on camera. The ceilings are exposed, and distinctly modern, while the murals on the walls were painted to suit the tastes of the Catholic (and fictional) Marchmain family, not the Howards.

In contrast to this, the dome, which floats majestically above the main hall of the house, was recreated as to be all but indistinguishable from the original, to the untrained eye. A Canadian artist was commissioned to create an exact copy of Pellegrini’s The Fall of Phaeton which had adorned the underside of the dome – in any other context he would be a forger, but here he is seen as a conservator. The Hall is stunning, but once you become away that it is not ‘real’, not the original eighteenth century building and artworks, it starts to feel a bit strange. Throughout history these huge country houses have been adapted and updated by succeeding generations, but by the 1960s when the dome was rebuilt, this house was not updated in a modern style, but reproduced exactly as it was in its golden age. The stately home was no longer, despite the smattering of framed family snapshots that are around today, a home in the real sense of the world. It was not financially viable, in the post war period, for one family to live here, funding a grand lifestyle off of their land and their name. The home had become a historical monument, and it would have been considered sacrilege to add a 1960s extension instead of restoring the dome.

Today, the house is basically a museum, but one that constantly gives the impression of trying very hard not to be a museum. There is no information on the rooms, their functions, or the people who lived there. The hundreds of artworks are unlabelled, which is frustrating and makes them quite boring, actually, when you don’t know who painted them, who sat for them, which generation Howards collected them and why. Perhaps if I hadn’t been too cheap to buy a guidebook my visit would have been more informative and interesting, but for £13 for an adult ticket I don’t think a few labels on the paintings is too much to ask!