MENTMORE, WADDESDON MANOR and ASCOTT: The Stately Homes of England (5)

The three great houses discussed in this piece are not Stately Homes in the sense of being ancestral historic homes lived in by generations of English aristocrats. Rather they were all built in the 19^th century to the sophisticated taste of some of the most famous new aristocrats, the powerful Jewish banking family of Rothschild. Two of them epitomise what became known as the lavish Goût Rothschild while the third was intended to be a 19^th century version of a more traditional English Tudor country house. 

Mentmore, built in the "Jacobethan" style

Baron Mayer de Rothschild, son of the founder of the English branch of the family business, commissioned Joseph Paxton (architect of the Crystal Palace) to build Mentmore in 1852 and it was completed in two years. It is a majestic building in the eclectic “Jacobethan” style, reminiscent of Hardwick Hall. Mayer sought to have a country pile like his English colleagues, somewhere to assert his own high status and to house his various fine collections. The treasures included many English paintings, French 18^th century furniture and rare Russian and German silver.

When Mayer and his wife died, Mentmore passed to their only daughter Hannah. She married the gilded youth Archibald Primrose, 5^th Earl of Rosebery. Rosebery once stated that he had three ambitions in life – that his horse would win the Derby, that he should marry an heiress and that he would become Prime Minister – all were achieved! Hannah died prematurely in 1890 and Rosebery acquired Mentmore which departed from the Rothschild ambit. Rosebery and his son lived there and ran a stud but when the 6^th Earl died in 1974 the house and contents were offered to the government in lieu of death duties for £2m. The offer was unaccountably refused and the contents were sold in auction for £6m and sadly dispersed.

Now empty, Mentmore was bought in 1976 by the Maharishi Yoga, one-time guru to the Beatles and eccentric, if not crackpot, teacher of Transcendental Meditation. In 1998 Mentmore was sold on to the property developer Simon Halebi with plans to convert it into a first class hotel. The economic crisis has undermined Halebi’s empire and the ultimate fate of this now rather forlorn building is uncertain.

Mentmore, the Dining Room

The second Rothschild house, Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire very close to Mentmore, has had a happier history. It was built by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild between 1874 and 1889 in the French Renaissance style by the French architect Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur.

Waddesdon Manor, a Loire Chateau in Buckinghamshire

Baron Ferdinand wanted his house to incorporate many of the features of Chambord and Maintenon, but frankly Waddesdon looks incongruous in the Buckinghamshire countryside: the genius loci has been ignored. Ferdinand came from the Viennese branch of the Rothschild family but he loved French art and French artefacts. His collection, which he built Waddesdon to house, contains wonderful French 18^th century furniture, wood panelling, carpets and china, but also ravishing English, Dutch and Italian paintings. The collection was added to by his successors and the donation of house and collection to the National Trust by James de Rothschild in 1957 was truly munificent.

While there might be said to be a selfish acquisitive spirit behind the Collection, it is at last accessible to the general public and it seems appropriate that it is housed in the building which was dedicated to it. 

A Waddesdon interior glimpse

The Goût Rothschild (Rothschild taste) was a 19^th century expression often no doubt said with a sneer by the English establishment as the Rothschilds were parvenu Jews. The Goût ran to reproduction French furniture, ormolu, elaborate stucco and gilding and heavy internal décor, now out of fashion. Yet the Rothschilds brought Continental taste to provincial England and a sophisticated connoisseurship, so movingly evoked in Edmund de Waal’s study of the Parisian and Viennese Ephrussi family in his masterly The Hare with Amber Eyes. England was much enriched by this influence and so too was the US where the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, du Ponts and Astors erected mansions in this style.

My final house is Ascott, also in the favoured Buckinghamshire Rothschild enclave. In contrast with the other two, Ascott is a straight-forward, half-timbered Neo-Tudor mansion, built in 1874-8 with many later additions, by the architect George Devey

Neo-Tudor Ascott House

Unlike the other two, Ascott is quintessentially English as Leopold and Anthony Rothschild strove to celebrate English culture. The 18^th century furniture is English and the paintings are dominated by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Romney and Stubbs although there are also examples of the Dutch masters Cuyp and Steen. Ascott has a particularly strong collection of Oriental ceramics from the Han and Qing dynasties and there is a very rich library.

The Rothschilds continue to occupy parts of Waddesdon and Ascott and are jealous of their privacy. At Ascott visitors are tolerated but hardly welcomed (although both are National Trust properties) – the guide book is out-of-print and there is no visitors’ shop! Yet all three are splendid properties.

SMD

1.10.13

Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2013