Enfilade

From Bloomsbury:

Kate Retford and Susanna Avery-Quash, eds., The Georgian London Town House: Building, Collecting, and Display (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 364 pages, ISBN: 978-1501337291, £90.

For every great country house of the Georgian period, there was usually also a town house. Chatsworth, for example, the home of the Devonshires, has officially been recognised as one of the country’s favourite national treasures—but most of its visitors know little of Devonshire House, which the family once owned in the capital. In part, this is because town houses were often leased, rather than being passed down through generations as country estates were. But, most crucially, many London town houses, including Devonshire House, no longer exist, having been demolished in the early twentieth century.

This book seeks to place centre-stage the hugely important yet hitherto overlooked town houses of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, exploring the prime position they once occupied in the lives of families and the nation as a whole. It explores the owners, how they furnished and used these properties, and how their houses were judged by the various types of visitor who gained access.

C O N T E N T S

Susanna Avery-Quash and Kate Retford, Introduction

Contexts
1  Joseph Friedman, Town and Country: Patterns of Aristocratic Collecting in Georgian England
2  Matthew Jenkins and Charlotte Newman, London in Pieces: Building Biographies in Georgian Mayfair

Creating the London Town House
3  Neil Bingham, The Regency Transformation of Burlington House, Piccadilly, Documented through the Architectural Drawings of Samuel Ware
4  Adriano Aymonino and Manolo Guerci, Building and Refurbishing the London Town House during the Mid-Eighteenth Century: Francophilia in Interior Decoration
5  Susanna Avery-Quash, John Julius Angerstein’s Collection of Old Masters at Pall Mall: An Eighteenth-Century London Financier and His Circle of Art Advisers

Display in the London Town House
6  Susannah Brooke, The Display and Reception of Private Picture Collections in London Town Houses, 1780–1830
7  Desmond Shawe Taylor, Picture Displays at Carlton House
8  Anne Nellis Richter, Glitter and Fashion in the ‘Louvre of London’: Animating Cleveland House
9  Jeremy Howard, New Light on Norfolk House: The Decoration and Furnishing of Norfolk House for the 9th Duke and Duchess of Norfolk
10 Donato Esposito, Artist in Residence: Joshua Reynolds at 47 Leicester Fields
11  Helen McCormack, Animating Anatomy: 16 Great Windmill Street, Westminster

Bibliography