Strawberry Hill House
These added Gothic features such as towers and battlements outside and elaborate decoration inside to create "gloomth" to suit Walpole's collection of antiquarian objects, contrasting with the more cheerful or "riant"[2] garden.
[4][5] In stages, Walpole rebuilt the house to his own specifications, giving it a Gothic style and expanding the property to 46 acres (190,000 m2) over the years.
They looked at many examples of architecture in England and in other countries, adapting such works as the chapel at Westminster Abbey built by Henry VII for inspiration for the fan vaulting of the gallery, without any pretence at scholarship.
Indeed, Michael Snodin argues, "the most striking external feature of Strawberry Hill was its irregular plan and broken picturesque silhouette".
In an essay titled "On Modern Gardening", Walpole expresses his own ideas as reflected in his Strawberry Hill grounds.
Walpole's taste in landscape and gardening moved away from the traditional, formal layout of "parterre, terraces, marble urns, statued fountains and ‘canals measured by the line'".
The Doric portico, the Palladian bridge, the Gothic ruin, the Chinese pagoda, that surprise the stranger, soon lose their charms to their surfeited master.
Walpole responded; "Gothic is merely architecture, and as one has a satisfaction in imprinting the gloomth of abbeys and cathedrals on one's house, so one's garden, on the contrary, is to be nothing but riant, and the gaiety of nature".
[12] Walpole saw the modern English garden as a point of perfection: "we have given the true model of gardening to the world; let other countries mimic or corrupt our taste; but let it reign here on its verdant throne, original by its elegant simplicity, and proud of no other art than that of softening nature's harshness and copying her graceful touch".
It was a seat in the form of a huge bivalve of a species not easily recognized, which generally elicited a vast amount of wonder and admiration from his visitors".
According to Elliot Warburton, "Strawberry Hill in its new form soon became the marvel of the neighbourhood – a little later became the town talk – in a short time a theme of frequent comment even in distant parts of the country".
[9] In a letter to George Montagu in 1763, Walpole complained: "I have but a minute's time in answering your letter, my house is full of people, and has been so from the instant I breakfasted, and more are coming – in short, I keep an inn; the sign, the Gothic Castle ... my whole time is passed in giving tickets for seeing it, and hiding myself when it is seen – take my advice, never build a charming house for yourself between London and Hampton-court, everybody will live in it but you.
In the first half of the 19th century, two successive owners, brothers John and George Waldegrave, spent most of their family fortune, followed by a "Great Sale" lasting twenty-four days held in the grounds in 1842 which left the house stripped of virtually all its contents.
[24] The collection at Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill was featured at the Victoria & Albert Museum from March to July 2010 to prepare for the opening of the house to the public that October.
Curator of the exhibition Michael Snodin saw Walpole as an influential figure in both collection and architecture: "He created a form of thematised historical display which prefigured modern museums.
[1][26] In 2013, Strawberry Hill House won the European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage in the Europa Nostra Awards.
[29][30] The curators suggest that some of the portraits, such as Peter Lely's "sensual"[29] A Boy as a Shepherd, as well as those of Walpole's male friends, imply that he was homosexual.
But in Jones's opinion, the "most gothic" painting exhibited was by Walpole's contemporary, William Hogarth: his 1733 portrait of the triple murderer Sarah Malcolm in prison.
