Houghton Revisited

Houghton Hall walled gardens

 Yesterday we took a day off and went up to Norfolk to visit Houghton Hall.

At present there is a very special reason for doing so.  The house was built by the ‘First Prime Minister’ Robert Walpole who was a great art collector.  Unfortunately his grandson gambled a good deal of his fortune away and so many of the fine works of art collected by Sir Robert had to be sold to Catherine the Great of Russia.  The collection formed part of the core of the newly built Hermitage.   This year a good many of these pictures have been temporarily returned from St Petersburg and can, for a limited period, be seen at Houghton. Many of them are currently hanging in their original eighteenth century spots on the wall.

The exhibition has been extended once, but I understand that it must finish on 24^th November.  Tickets are available on line and I would urge anyone who is a lover of art to make time to go. Information about the show, and a sight of some of the paintings, can be seen here.

 

One might think that it is lucky that the paintings are still in a good condition.  After all Russian has seen both the Revolution of 1917 and the Second World War, which included the Siege of Leningrad.  The Hermitage itself was in fact subject to bomb damage at that time.  However the paintings were carefully looked after, and in fact may well have been more endangered had they stayed in England since a devastating fire in 1789, ten years after the sale, badly damaged the Hall.

We were lucky with the weather and were able to look round the lovely grounds, and in particular to admire the walled gardens which are a real feature of Houghton.  We were intrigued by the piece of sculpture below, Waterflame by the Danish artist Jeppe Hein (b. 1974), which incorporates a flame within a cascade of water.