Horace Walpole’s coach rolled north, wheels and horses clattering over the cobblestone streets toward King’s Lynn. After a two and a half day journey from London, he finally crossed through the park gates of his family’s estate. White fallow deer ran ahead of his carriage through clusters of oak, beech, and chestnut trees.
Houghton Hall was never his favorite place. As the youngest child, he’d stay with his beloved mother in London while his father installed his mistress at the grand Palladian country estate. After his mother’s death in 1737, his father married 36-year-old Maria Skerrett. Just three months later, while giving birth to their second child, the new Lady Walpole died of a miscarriage.
That was five years ago. Back from a two-year Grand Tour of Europe, Horace found his ailing father alone in Houghton’s library, lying on his daybed in a gray silk nightgown. Over the purple marble fireplace hung Sir Godfrey Kneller’s full-length portrait of George I, a gift from the king. Hundreds of gilt leather-bound volumes lined the handsome carved mahogany shelves, a collection that included architecture books in English, French, and Italian as well as classical history and literature. Blue damask chairs crowded the relatively small study, a holdover from the days when his father conducted state business here.
Retirement had been forced on Robert Walpole. Suffering from gout and kidney stones, he’d gradually begun losing control of Parliament. A week after his resignation in February 1742, George II raised him to the peerage with a newly created title, Earl of Orford. It was Walpole who pulled off a reconciliation between the feuding George I, England’s first Hanover king, and his son. After George I died unexpectedly in 1727, his savvy daughter-in-law Caroline convinced her husband to keep Walpole as prime minister.
Under Walpole’s watch, political power shifted from the throne to the Whig Party. Britain became a superpower; its parliamentary democracy lauded by the likes of Voltaire. Nicknamed “the fat old squire of Norfolk,” burly, red-faced Walpole dodged corruption charges, an insider trading scandal, and a dysfunctional royal family to hold onto power longer than Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair combined.
As Robert Walpole’s star rose, he developed a thirst for fine wine and Old Master paintings. In 1718, he bought his first pictures at a London auction—Seaport and Landscape with Ruins by Dutch Golden Age painter Jan Griffier I. Walpole assembled his storied collection quickly as a statement of social standing, power, and influence. Like Pierre Crozat in Paris, he sought works by specific artists and delighted in paintings with prestigious provenances. Even political opponents were impressed by his highly personal gallery. “We took then another view of the pictures, and indeed they are very exquisite; the more one sees the more one admires and desires to see,” wrote Lord Oxford.1
Too busy to travel abroad, Walpole recruited a network of agents to search for Old Masters. In 1724, his spy and sometime art dealer, Scotsman John Macky, obtained four monumental market scenes by Frans Snyders in Brussels. Some picture deals crossed the line between art and politics. Scottish painter and art dealer Andrew Hay avoided prosecution for Jacobite sympathies by securing a bust-length oil sketch Portrait of Pope Innocent X for the prime minister by Diego Velázquez. The following year, Walpole attended Hay’s art sale in London, buying Hercules and Omphale by Giovanni Franceso Romanelli, a follower of 17th-century Roman painter Carlo Maratta.
Coining the phrase “Every man has his price,” the shrewd prime minister kept his Tory rivals at bay by showering supporters with rewards.2 Title seekers now presented Walpole with art. Sir Joseph Danvers gave him Anthony van Dyck’s portrait of his great uncle, Henry Danvers, 1st Earl of Danby, a Knight of the Order of the Garter, England’s highest order of chivalry. Walpole, who became the first commoner to be elevated to the order in 1726, finagled a baronetcy for Henry Danvers in 1746. James, 1st Earl Waldegrave, ambassador at the French court, secured two paintings by Nicolas Poussin and gave Walpole The Entombment from Jacopo Bassano’s workshop around the time he also received the Order of the Garter. Not long after Tory MP and collector James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos, presented Walpole with Sarah Leading Hagar to Abraham by Adriaen van der Werff, the duke’s son was appointed first lord of the bedchamber to the Prince of Wales.3
In his quest for masterworks, Walpole skillfully exploited his colleagues’ misfortunes. The collapse of the South Sea Bubble triggered one of the 18th century’s largest picture sales. Among the casualties was connoisseur Henry Bentinck, 1st Duke of Portland, who sold Walpole Jacob Jordaens’s Self-Portrait with Parents, Brothers and Sisters. Opportunity knocked again in 1725 when Walpole nabbed nineteen portraits by Anthony van Dyck for £1,500 from the dissolute grandson of Philip, 4th Lord Wharton. Lord Wharton’s van Dyck collection, which included portraits of his family, the royals, Inigo Jones, and Sir William Challoner, was second in quality and quantity to that of Charles I. Walpole was well acquainted with van Dyck from a tapestry series in his dressing room. In 1672, Surrey-based Mortlake Manufactory used several of the artist’s Stuart portraits for Kings and Queens, tapestries featuring Charles I, Henrietta Maria, and their sons Charles and James (the future Charles II and James II).
As his art collection grew, Walpole needed a fittingly grand “temple of the arts” to show it off. To his ancestral property in the Norfolk village of Houghton, he added thousands of acres from nearby landowners. To make room for his new estate, Walpole demolished his grandfather’s brick Tudor mansion where he’d been born, along with the surrounding estate village because it spoiled his view (like Louis XIV at Versailles, Walpole rebuilt the village down the road). Walpole spared no expense for the 106-room manor, which Scottish architects James Gibbs and Colen Campbell covered in creamy gold Yorkshire stone.
For Houghton’s interiors, the fifty-year-old collector engaged fashionable royal painter-decorator William Kent. Fresh from refurbishing 10 Downing Street, a gift to Walpole from George II, “Kentino” was already familiar with his patron’s artworks. With his painterly approach to decorating, Kent drew on multiple sources and styles—from antiquity to the late Baroque and Palladio. Throughout the staterooms of the first floor, Kent chose colors and themes to complement Walpole’s paintings which he double and triple hung, often in frames of his own design.
Kent’s stunning three-flight mahogany Great Staircase led to the vast gray and white Stone Hall where Walpole’s bust presided over a portrait gallery of sixteen Roman emperors. Overhead, dancing putti spread garlands around roundels of Walpole, his first wife, eldest son, and daughter-in-law. The Walpole family crest, the Saracen, adorned the center of the ceiling; each of the four corners sported a garter star, after Walpole’s Order of the Garter for which he was dubbed “Sir Blue String.”
From the Stone Hall, double doors opened into the crimson and gilded Saloon, where the mahogany and gilt armchairs, settees, and stools matched the crimson wool and silk velvet walls. From Kent’s coffered octagonal ceiling painting of Apollo’s sun chariot to Venus’s scallop shells on the carved mirrors, tables, and seats, the Saloon was brimming with rich imagery. Walpole’s anti-Jacobite mindset didn’t stop him from collecting religious paintings and many of the largest hung here, including Murillo’s Adoration of the Shepherds and Albano’s Baptism of Christ.
Francis, Duke of Lorraine (later Holy Roman Emperor Charles VII), slept in the sumptuous Embroidered Bedchamber where Walpole’s coat of arms and Order of the Garter were embroidered in gold, white, red, and blue thread at the head of the bed and on each corner of the canopy. Overhead in matching blue, gold, and white, Kent depicted the eternally young shepherd Endymion and his lover Selene, goddess of the moon. Above the fireplace in a spectacular Kent-designed frame hung the costliest of Walpole’s eight Poussins—The Holy Family with SS Elizabeth and John the Baptist (1655) which Horace Walpole called “one of the most Capital Pictures in this collection.”
Horace dubbed the nearby Green Velvet Bedroom a “pompous room of state.” VIP guests slept on a fifteen-foot-tall canopy bed made of luxurious green silk velvet and gold fringe with a scallop-shaped headboard and carved acanthus leaf cresting. The gold trim on the velvet hangings set Walpole back over 1,200 pounds (equivalent to about 150,000 pounds or $230,700 today).4 Tapestries woven in Brussels depicted Venus and her lovers Adonis and Vulcan in lavish landscapes, while cupids aimed their arrows at a human heart hanging from a tree trunk.
Houghton’s charismatic owner entertained lavishly. For the Duke of Lorraine’s visit “relays of horses were provided on the road to bring rarities” and guests “dined in a hall lit by 130 wax candles from the remotest parts of the Kingdom with all possible speed,” while “eight carriages were constantly passing night and day between London and Houghton,” noted Charles Latham.5 Bacchus, Roman god of feasting, wine, and excess, reigned in the Marble Parlor, where candlelight from chandeliers and silver candelabra reflected off the mirrors and silver. Kent matched the green velvet dining chairs and green vines in his Ode to Bacchus ceiling painting to the greens in a pair of van Dyck portraits, Henry Danvers, Earl of Danby and Sir Thomas Wharton.
Behind John Michael Rysbrack’s fireplace relief, Sacrifice to Bacchus, Kent tucked a hidden corridor for servants. Forks were placed face down on the mahogany table so the men wouldn’t catch their frilly cuffs. Food arrived in Paul de Laramie’s elegant silver vessels and soup was served in Kent-designed tureens. In addition to claret bought by the cask, Walpole enjoyed champagne and white Lisbon, sometimes ordering one thousand bottles at a time. In 1733, the bon vivant returned more than 6,200 empty bottles of French wine to his wine merchant. In a letter to the Prince of Wales, Lord Hervey noted that he and thirty guests found themselves “up to the chin in beef, venison, geese, turkeys, etc; and generally over the chin in claret, strong beer and punch.”6 After dinner, guests retired to the Cabinet Room to smoke cigars and drink. Walpole hung some fifty small pictures on the green velvet walls, including Annibale Carracci’s sensual Venus. For Rubens’s Portrait of Helene Fourment, featuring the artist’s beautiful young second wife, Kent designed a striking picture frame featuring a triangular front, pearl motif, and scallop-shell-and-garland frontispiece.
Walpole’s private rooms, including his mahogany-lined bedroom, were located on Houghton’s south side. Family members dined in the Common Parlor surrounded by portraits. These included van Dyck’s Inigo Jones, Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Elderly Lady, Jordans’s Self-portrait with His Family, Hals’s Portrait of a Young Man, and Rubens’s Head of a Franciscan Monk. Kneller’s Portrait of Grinling Gibbons hung over the marble fireplace inside carved pear-wood swags attributed to the virtuoso carver. Walpole would buy two works from Gibbons’s posthumous sale—Snyders’s Concert of Birds and Giordano’s Vulcan’s Forge.
In contrast to Kent’s “floor of taste, expense, state and parade,” the plain basement suited Walpole and his legendary hunting parties. An avid hunter, Walpole reportedly opened his gamekeeper’s reports before his government papers. “The base, or rustic story, is what is chiefly inhabited at the Congress,” Lord Hervey wrote the Prince of Wales. “There is a room for breakfast, another for supper, another for dinner, another for afternooning and the great arcade with four chimneys for walking and quid-nuncing [gossiping]. The rest of this floor is merely for use, by which your Royal Highness must perceive that the whole is dedicated to fox-hunters, hospitality, noise, dirt and business.”7
After Horace Walpole returned from his Grand Tour, his father persuaded him to “sacrifice the Joys of the Beau-monde to ye amusements of dull rural life.”8 While spending the summers of 1742 and 1743 at Houghton, Horace helped curate his father’s art collection and wrote Aedes Walpolianae, a tribute and catalogue (published in 1747, Aedes was the first book by an English author on a private English picture collection). While a shared love of art brought them closer, the cultivated Horace could barely tolerate his father’s guests. “Only imagine that I here every day see men, who are mountains of roast beef, and only seem just roughly hewn out into the outlines of human form, like the giant rock at Pratolino!” wrote Horace. “I shudder when I see them brandish their knives in act to carve, and look on them as savages that devour one another.”9
In his retirement, Robert Walpole turned Houghton’s north wing greenhouse into a rectangular picture gallery. Here, against wall coverings of Norwich (wool) damask, he hung some four dozen paintings including Snyders’s large-scale market scenes and a Rubens workshop cartoon of the Hunt of Meleager and Atalanta. In 1745, the 68-year-old’s health took a turn for the worse, aggravated by a new lixivium treatment for kidney stones. Robert Walpole intended Houghton Hall to be a lasting monument to his heirs, one that would rival England’s greatest aristocratic homes. But with his lavish lifestyle and princely art collection, he’d amassed huge debts, a situation he hid from his family by burning the bills.
Only after Walpole’s death in March 1745 did Horace and his other children learn of the £50,000 debt (equivalent to over $8 million today). Though the prime minister’s eldest son and namesake, Robert Walpole, 2nd Earl of Orford, sold off his father’s London paintings and Houghton silver, it didn’t make much of a dent. He died just six years after his famous father, leaving Houghton Hall, his title, and the family debt to his unstable 21-year-old son, George. “The most ruined young man in England,” according to his uncle Horace, George Walpole added to the family’s financial woes.
An ardent falconer, George Walpole spent some one hundred pounds a year on each of his birds of prey, sending them to the continent during molting season. In addition to gambling, he indulged his mistress, Mrs. Patty Turk, a former Houghton maid. To pay his growing debts, George Walpole sold Houghton’s two exterior stone staircases. By 1773, Horace found Houghton “half a ruin, though the pictures, the glorious pictures, and furniture are in general admirably well preserved. All the rest is destruction and devastation. The two steps exposed to all weathers, every room in the wings rotting with wet; the ceiling of the gallery in danger . . .”10 But the worst was yet to come, what Horace described as the “shipwreck of my family.”
In Fall 1778, George Walpole hired James Christie, founder of the eponymous auction house, to value his grandfather’s paintings in the “most profound secrecy.” Being knowledgeable about gems, not pictures, young Christie consulted with painters Benjamin West, Giovanni Cipriani, and Philip Tassaert in preparation for an auction. Alexey Musin-Pushkin, Russia’s ambassador to the Court of St. James, quickly informed Catherine of the impending auction: “Your Majesty has perhaps heard of the collection of paintings of the celebrated Robert Walpole . . . His grandson Lord Orford is taking the liberty of placing everything, or part of it, at Your Imperial Majesty’s feet. It is worthy, in the opinion of all connoisseurs, of belonging to one of the greatest sovereigns.”11 Wasting no time, Catherine instructed the diplomat to make an en bloc offer of £40,550 (equivalent to around $10 million today) for 204 of Walpole’s best paintings. Catherine’s talent for clandestine negotiation paid off. By July 1779, the empress and George Walpole had struck a deal.
News of the sale unleashed a firestorm of protest, similar to the reaction in Paris seven years earlier to Catherine’s Crozat acquisition. Not since the auction of Charles I’s paintings had such treasures been sold in England. The closest thing to a national art collection, Walpole’s masterworks included eight Titians, nineteen Rubenses, twenty van Dycks, five Murillos, three each by Veronese, Holbein, and Rembrandt, and two each by Velazquez and Raphael. Adding to the outcry was a sense that the English people had helped pay for the paintings; that Walpole’s fortune had come from decades of his control of the state coffers. It didn’t help that in April, Parliament had rejected radical MP John Wilkes’s proposal to buy Houghton’s paintings for the newly founded British Museum. Writer Samuel Johnson now petitioned Parliament to block the pictures’ export.
Ever since Catherine’s coup d’état, Horace Walpole had harbored a visceral dislike for the Russian empress, labeling her the Crocodile, the Grand Usurperess, the Northern Fury, and Ursa Major of the North Pole.12 Now that dislike turned personal. “. . . [A] miserable bargain for a mighty Empress!” he wrote in August 1779. “. . . Well! adieu to Houghton!—about its mad master I shall never trouble myself more. . . . The happiness my father entailed on this country . . . has been thrown away.”13 Desperate to save his father’s paintings, Horace appealed to art-loving George III to buy the trove for the Royal Collection. Two years after succeeding his grandfather, the king had acquired a celebrated collection of Italian paintings and had helped found the Royal Academy and Royal Society of Arts. But by 1779, George III was preoccupied with the American War of Independence which had snowballed into a war with France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Neither the British government nor the royal family stepped up to save the Walpole collection.
When Grimm wrote Catherine informing her that the Houghton collection was no longer available, she cheerfully replied: “The Walpole pictures are no longer to be had, for the simple reason that your humble servant has already got her claws on them, and will no more let them go than a cat would a mouse.”14 To transport her precious cargo across some one thousand miles of perilous seas, Catherine dispatched the naval frigate Natalia to King’s Lynn, the closest port to Houghton Hall. By spring 1779, 204 of Robert Walpole’s finest paintings were stripped from Houghton’s opulent staterooms, taken by wagon to King’s Lynn, and loaded onto the Natalia.
Memory of the lost Braankamp pictures must have come rushing back to Catherine in early August when she learned that the Natalia had been damaged off the coast of Holland. Fortunately, the Walpole crates were transferred to another ship and reached the Winter Palace safely that fall. Catherine relished their arrival, personally supervising the unpacking. Most spectacularly, fourteen paintings by Anthony van Dyck joined her eleven Crozat van Dycks. The Antwerp-born artist’s influence on generations of portraitists was so great that the British adopted him as their own.
According to a 17th-century biographer, van Dyck’s father “was a merchant of cloths, which in Flanders surpass all others in fineness and workmanship; his mother occupied herself with embroidery, and she painted with her needle, fashioning landscapes and figures in stitchery.”15 This background helps explain the artist’s talent for painting costumes. At sixteen, after an apprenticeship to cabinet picture painter Hendrik van Balen, van Dyck joined the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens, who described him three years later as “the best of my pupils.”16 In 1632, when Charles I appointed van Dyck “principalle Paynter in Ordinary to their Majesties” and knighted him, he was already one of Europe’s most popular court painters.
Van Dyck adopted a number of new techniques in England. His palette widened to include an array of blues, pinks, yellows, and greens. He placed his subjects outdoors, portraying men as Arcadian shepherds and women in shimmering silks and satins. The fantasy was executed so well, writes Emilie Gordenker, it “came across as effortless, entirely convincing, and perfectly suited to the courtiers.”17 With their sumptuous costumes and luxe backdrops, van Dyck made his royal and aristocratic sitters look down-to-earth and magnificent at the same time. Most notably, he did much to glamorize England’s short, stammering king and his consort, French Bourbon Princess Henrietta Maria. The Queen’s niece, who only knew her aunt from van Dyck’s lovely portraits, was surprised to discover that she was actually “. . . a little woman with long lean arms, crooked shoulders, and teeth protruding from her mouth like guns from a fort.”18
With courtiers clamoring for their own stylish portraits, van Dyck found himself swamped with commissions. Charging fifty to sixty pounds for a full-length, thirty for a half-length, and twenty for a head and shoulders portrait, the ambitious artist turned out some four hundred portraits in seven and a half years, an average of at least one painting a week. Choosing from a repertoire of poses, van Dyck started by sketching his ideas for a portrait. After just a quarter of an hour, he’d hand a finished sketch on a small piece of blue paper to his assistants, who would enlarge it and paint it on canvas. During subsequent sittings, van Dyck painted the sitter’s head and hands, delegating landscape, drapery, and costume to his assistants before adding the finishing touches himself. Paris-based banker and collector Everhard Jabach, who sat for van Dyck three times, observed that he “never worked more than an hour at a time on each portrait, either when sketching it out or when finishing it. . . . After which his servant came to clean his brush and bring him another palette whilst he welcomed the next sitter. . . . In this way he worked on several portraits in the same day with extraordinary speed.”19
Among Catherine’s new van Dycks was one of his most enchanting, Philadelphia and Elizabeth Wharton (1640), the daughters of Philip, 4th Lord Wharton from his first marriage. A spaniel (symbol of fidelity) paws at the cream-colored dress of five-year-old Elizabeth, while four-year-old Philadelphia, in blue, touches her arm. Though their elegant dresses, pearls, and ringlets make the sisters look like miniature ladies-in-waiting, their expressions convey the joy of childhood. Scholars agree that the charming figures of the girls, including their finely painted heads, are by van Dyck. The underlying images, or pentimenti, in the outlines of their dresses indicate the artist’s own revisions. The less refined gray curtain and leaning tree (symbol of the loss of the girls’ mother who died five years earlier) were painted by van Dyck’s assistants.20
Catherine could not have been happier with the Walpole pictures. As a token of thanks, she sent George Walpole her full-length portrait on the same ship that carried his grandfather’s paintings to St. Petersburg. Painted in the style of Sweden’s Alexander Roslin, the portrait of Catherine in an ermine robe still hangs over the gray and white marble fireplace in Houghton’s Saloon. In return, George Walpole penned “a code of the laws of coursing” for Catherine and named his favorite greyhound “Czarina.” After seeing Catherine’s portrait, Mrs. Lybbe Powys observed: “. . . Tis really melancholy to see the hangings disrob’d of those beautiful ornaments, and only one picture now there, a portrait of the Empress herself, which she made my Lord a present of; but though ’tis said to be a striking likeness, and well painted, it rather gives one pain, to see the person who must deprive everyone who now visits Houghton of the entertainment given to them by these pictures, and their going out of the kingdom makes it still worse.”21
The European Magazine summed up popular sentiment when it published a list of the paintings sold to Catherine along with an angry article addressed to the publisher. “The removal of the Houghton Collection of Pictures to Russia is, perhaps, one of the most striking instances that can be produced of the decline of the empire of Great Britain, and the advancement of our powerful ally in the North. . . . But it is too late to lament; the disgrace has been sustained; and the capital of Russia now boasts what formerly drew crowds into the county of Norfolk to see and to admire. . . .”22
No one was more distressed about the loss than Walpole’s son. “To be sure,” wrote Horace, “I should wish they [the paintings] were rather sold to the Crown of England than to that of Russia where they will be burnt in a wooden palace on first insurrection.”23 His concern for the safety of the art would be justified as violence erupted in St. Petersburg during the 20th century. But ironically, the sale may have saved many of his father’s paintings from a fire after all. On December 7, 1789, a decade after the sale, a fire broke out at Houghton, destroying Robert Walpole’s picture gallery in the north wing.
While England mourned, Catherine rejoiced. The glory days of the British Empire, once stretching from India to North America, were fading. Thanks to her cultural and military campaigns, Russia was a rising superpower. By March 1780, the empress wrote Grimm: “The Natalie is washed ashore while she went to get what was already onboard, shipped and delivered; the Walpoles are doing great and are spending winter crowded in my gallery.”24