Julius Bryant

This is a little gem of a catalogue from a 1988 exhibition about the endlessly fascinating Henrietta Howard and her Marble Hill House and is itself part of the story of the rescue and restoration of the house. The main outlines of her life are illustrated by paintings, plans, manuscripts, furniture and books (contemporary and detailing her afterlife). It begins with a small section about the likenesses of Mrs Howard and for a royal mistress these are rather quiet and unostentatious, almost pedestrian in contrast to Barbara Villers. Alexander Pope commissioned Charles Jervas to paint her and, as Julius Bryant reveals, this was to be a companion to the portrait he owned of the intellectual Lady Mary Wortley Montagu whose place in his life Mrs Howard filled too. ‘The pose and setting echoes a rather different seventeenth-century convention, that of the solitary man of letters brooding on a rocky hillside at sunset, a pose in which Pope himself had been painted by Richardson around 1718.’ When she commissioned her own paintings it was somehow typical of Mrs Howard that she had a fondness for Charles Philips's stiff pictures. He painted the delightful but rather awkward conversation piece ‘A Tea Party at Lord Harrington’s House, 1730’ and portraits of her second husband (paired with one of herself), her dear friend Lady Betty Germain and the unusual one of her ex lover King George II – two snappy dogs at his feet and the cushion of his throne still bearing the impression of where he had sat. Bryant quotes Horace Walpole ‘She was elegant; her Lover the reverse and most unentertaining.’

Catalogues are always interesting especially in giving the provenance of items (even if, as here, they are only displayed as photographs) and so it is intriguing to learn that several of the Giovanni Paolo Panini overdoors from the Great Room once belonged to Margaret, Duchess of Argyll. What a contrast these two women make and the ages that created and beheld them and wrote up their lives. In 1988 some of these paintings were still in private collections but so many years later they are now reunited and hang in their first home in Twickenham.… (mere)

Built between 1724 and 1729, Marble Hill was built for Mrs Henrietta Howard (later Countess of Suffolk). This exquisite Palladian house was her secret project, her consolation and the home where she was eventually happiest. She planned it with her friends while still threatened by her brutal husband. She longed to occupy it while mistress of King George II, bored by him and the dullness of court life. How she must have wandered through the lovely rooms, planning her improvements and placing her pictures and china in her imagination while playing cards with the King. This excellent guidebook, written by Julius Bryant, gives a glimpse of what Henrietta Howard’s house must once have been like. How delightful it would have been to listen to her gossiping with Horace Walpole in the Great Room! Or to witness John Gay and Alexander Pope sitting down to celebrate with a birthday dinner in the hall in 1727: ‘We have some thoughts of dining there tomorrow to celebrate the day after the birthday, and on Friday to celebrate the date after that, when we intend to entertain Dean Swift because we think your hall the most delightful room in the world except that where you are.’… (mere)