Country House Collections

Over the past few years, Terry Dooley and Christopher Ridgway have edited a series of volumes, all published by Four Courts, that deal with aspects of the country house, principally in Britain and Ireland but also further afield. Dooley is the founder of the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates at Maynooth University, and Ridgway is the curator at Castle Howard in Yorkshire. The present volume arises, like its predecessors, from a conference, and contains fourteen papers, twelve on Britain and Ireland, with one each on the USA and Lithuania. It is not possible here to précis all the papers. Suffice it to say that the authors raise a variety of well thought out questions touching on such matters as the assembly and dispersal of collections, the development of policy and method in the presentation of the country house, and the country house as a cynosure for historians of collections. Particular highlights include the contributions by Stephen Hague and Salvijus Kulevicius. Hague’s paper assesses the impact of evolving social and curatorial factors on the furnishing and decor of houses in America, such as Stenton in Philadelphia, while that of Kulevicius’ is all the more intriguing for the unfamiliarity of the material. This sets out the evolving conceptualization and interpretation of the Lithuanian ‘manor’ (a holding formerly belonging to the nobility), from the founding of the modern state in 1918 through the ideological motives of the Soviet era to the current tendency to present the manor in terms of heritage and way of life, free from stereotypes but acknowledging the ambiguous position of the culturally ‘Polonized’ former manorial landowners. It would be intriguing to see this topic studied comparatively with Ireland where the ‘big house’ was often in a similarly equivocal position.

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