The Chinese Room at Claydon House hits the jaw-dropping heights of Georgian Chinoiserie
The Chinese Room at Claydon House in Buckinghamshire cannot be beaten in the British Isles for jaw-dropping, exotic beauty.
Furthermore, it’s surrounded with a quantity of rooms that are decorated in a quite sensationally lavish way.
The Chinese Room was executed by Luke Lightfoot, described as ‘an ignorant knave with no small spice of madness in his composition’. These were the despairing words of Sir Thomas Robinson, written to Claydon’s owner Lord Verney in 1769, when Robinson was trying to convince him of Lightfoot’s dishonesty.
One upsetting change is that the blue and white – ‘so aggressively unChinese’, according to my friend Alan Dodd – was in fact originally painted buff and pink.
But, aside from this, all has remained the same and is absolute perfection.
Claydon was a Tudor house – converted to a chastely classical dwelling, bang in the middle of the Buckinghamshire countryside. It was of considerable charm.
Ralph Verney inherited the house in 1752. With the fashionable taste of an immensely rich Whig landowner and peer who had drawn up plans for the house in the classical style, he employed Luke Lightfoot as the architect, master mason, carver and surveyor of works.
All over the house, plasterwork and carving of unbeatable glory were the happy outcome, with neoclassical, rococo and neo-Gothic motifs swarming over walls, culminating upstairs with the Chinese delights.
The woodwork looks like whipped cream – what scrumptious joy it is, to be sure! One fireplace from Italy, covered with writhing babies, alone cost £1,000.
There were, though, worries to this grand affair. ‘The more you sift into this ignorant villain’s conduct, the more you will be astonished,’ wrote Robinson of Lightfoot, suggesting that the ‘rogue’ be brought to justice.
As a ‘last resort’ to avoid litigation, Robinson was dispatched to see Lightfoot. ‘He received me in his parlour with his hat on his head, an austere look, fierce as an Eastern monarch. His eyes sparkl’d fire, his countenance angry and revengeful – did not ask me to sit down, his manners were indeed remiss.’
In other words, the mission failed. And they went to war. The Chancery case of Verney v Lightfoot was heard on 12th April 1771. The claim was that of the £30,000 paid to Lightfoot for work and materials, only £7,000 could be accounted for.
A compromise was reached, with Lightfoot making over properties to Verney. Lightfoot retired to Dulwich in 1779 to become a victualler. His son, Theophilus Lightfoot, emigrated to Australia, where the family name survives to this day, using Verney as a Christian name in each succeeding generation.
Sir Thomas Robinson, ‘a gentleman architect’, was then commissioned by Lord Verney to embellish Claydon still further in 1769. A palace of colossal proportions was planned to outshine all its neighbours. One of them, as ill luck would have it for his pride and his pocket, was Stowe – huge and endowed with what Horace Walpole called its ‘inexpressible richness’.
According to an anonymous contemporary critic, both men were ‘unfettered by considerations of prudence’. Robinson, said the critic, looked like a pair of scissors – ‘a giant whose legs could barely support him’.
Verney’s exotic tastes extended to his equipage, said the critic, with ‘a brace of tall negroes, with silver French horns behind his coach and six, perpetually making a noise like Sir Henry Sidney’s trompeters in the days of Elizabeth, blowing very joyfully to behold and see’.
Their building was just as ostentatious but it was to be their downfall.
Lord Verney was ruined by all his expenditure and died a bankrupt in 1791. A year later, it was demolished and Lightfoot’s wing was left to stand alone.
The stables had been the first to be built in
The library
1754, right up against the front of the old 16th-century house, which then had been encased in plain red brick to cover the older mansion.
Verney then extended the house full whack further, by creating three major reception rooms on the ground floor as well as a suite of extraordinarily grand apartments, with every one of them, upstairs and down, a peerless peach.
Luke Lightfoot had also turned out to be a woodcarver par excellence. With two men, he did Verney proud in a quite stupendous way, also creating superb work as a cabinetmaker.
In 1768, he designed a great, domed rotunda as the entrance hall, as well as a massive 90-foot-long ballroom.
But, in the end, sadness loomed, in that Lightfoot was dismissed for never finishing the work.
All these rooms deserve mention, particularly the saloon and the library, with their magnificent fireplaces, pediments on fluted columns and Corinthian columns as door surrounds.
The vivacious marble putti and the coffered ceilings are unusually splendid, with their quite fantastical decoration. Lightfoot called it ‘a work such as the world ever saw’.
Claydon’s Chinese Room is the king of this show. I must stand and yell out loud that it may well be the king of all rooms in the whole of the British Isles.
All these rooms deserve mention, particularly the saloon and the library, with their magnificent fireplaces, pediments on fluted columns and Corinthian columns as door surrounds.
The vivacious marble putti and the coffered ceilings are unusually splendid, with their quite fantastical decoration. Lightfoot called it ‘a work such as the world ever saw’.
Claydon’s Chinese Room is the king of this show. I must stand and yell out loud that it may well be the king of all rooms in the whole of the British Isles.
