Enfilade

Attingham offerings for 2026:

The Study Programme | Sweden: Stockholm and Its Hinterland

Led by David Adshead with Beatrice Goddard, 8–14 June 2026

Applications due by 30 January 2026

The Hall of Mirrors, Gustav III’s Pavilion at Haga Park. The Royal Palaces, Sweden (Photograph: ©Jens Markus Lindhe).

This intensive seven-day course will study the patronage of successive Swedish royal dynasties and that of the nobility and wealthy merchant class, in Stockholm’s palaces and the castles and country houses of its hinterland—Svealand, the nation’s historic core. With earlier outliers, it will focus on the arts and architecture of the mid 17th to early 19th centuries, encompassing the Baroque, Rococo, neo-Classical and ‘Empire’ styles.

For more than a hundred years, from the accession of Gustavus Adolphus in 1611 to its loss of territory at the end of the Great Northern War in 1721, Sweden was a European military superpower and enjoyed an ‘Age of Greatness’, its fortunes reflected in the richness of buildings, interiors, and collections of fine and decorative arts, particularly those of the monarchy. A new political compact with power-sharing between government and parliament—the so-called ‘Age of Liberty’—subsequently encouraged a flowering of the arts and sciences and the further influence of all things French. During the following ‘Gustavian Age’, led by the energetic but latterly autocratic, Gustav III, Sweden’s elegant interpretation of neo-Classicism reached its apogee.

In Stockholm, visits will be made to the Riddarhuset, Riddarholmskyrkan, the Royal Palace, and Gustav III’s Museum of Antiquities. Outside Stockholm, in addition to a number of private houses, visits will include, Tullgarns Palace, Drottningholm Palace, Svartsjö Palace, the English landscape park at Haga, Rosersberg Palace, Svindersvik a summer residence, Gripsholm Castle, the manor house at Grönsöo, and Skokloster Castle. For the last two nights we will be staying in the town of Mariefred on the south-west tip of Lake Mälaren.

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The 73rd Summer School

Led by David Adshead and Tessa Wild, with Sabrina Silva, 27 June — 12 July 2026

Applications due by 30 January 2026

Buscot Park, Faringdon, Oxfordshire, 1780–83.

The 73rd Attingham Summer School, a 16-day residential course will visit country houses in Sussex, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire. From West Dean, our first base, we will study, amongst other houses and gardens: Petworth House, where the patronage of great British artists such as Turner and Flaxman enrich its Baroque interiors; Parham, a fine Elizabethan house in an unrivalled setting; and Standen, an Arts and Crafts reinterpretation of the country house.

In the Midlands, a series of related houses will be examined: Hardwick Hall, unique amongst Elizabethan houses for its survival of late 16th-century decoration and contents; Bolsover Castle, a Jacobean masque setting frozen in stone; and Chatsworth, where the collections and gardens of the Cavendishes and Dukes of Devonshire span more than four centuries. Other highlights include Robert Adam’s crisp neo-Classical interior and Fishing Pavilion at Kedleston Hall.

The final part of the course will focus on the rich estates and collections of Oxfordshire. Our itinerary will include Broughton Castle, a moated and fortified manor house with a chapel first consecrated for Christian worship in 1331, and Buscot Park, with its superb collection with works by Rembrandt, Botticelli, Rubens, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and furniture by Robert Adam and Thomas Hope. While at Buscot we will have the opportunity to explore one of the country’s finest water gardens, designed by Harold Peto in 1904 and extended from 1911–13, and a surviving country house theatre created in 1936 for the 2nd Lord Faringdon. We will also visit the much more modest 17th-century stone-built, Kelmscott Manor, the beloved country home of William Morris and his family, and the place that he described as ‘Heaven on Earth’.

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Royal Collection Studies

Led by Helen Jacobsen, with Beatrice Goddard, 6–15 September 2026

Applications due by 15 February 2026

James Roberts, The Pavilion Breakfast Room at Buckingham Palace (known by 1873 as the Queen’s Luncheon Room), 1850, watercolour and bodycolour with gum arabic, paper: 26 × 38 cm (RCIN 919918).

The Royal Collection is one of the world’s leading collections of fine and decorative art, with over one million works from six continents, many of them masterpieces. Working in partnership with The Royal Collection Trust, this ten-day residential course offers participants the opportunity to study the magnificent holdings of paintings, furniture, metalwork, porcelain, jewellery, sculpture, arms and armour, books, and works on paper and to examine the architecture and interiors of the palaces which house them. Based near Windsor, the course also examines the history of the collection and the key roles played by monarchs and their consorts over the centuries. Combining a mixture of lectures and tutorials, visits to both the occupied and unoccupied palaces in and around London and close-up object study, Royal Collection Studies aims to give experienced professionals in the heritage sector a deeper understanding of this remarkable collection.

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From College Library to Country House

Led by Andrew Moore, with Rita Grudzien, 7–11 September 2026

Applications due by 15 February 2026

This course is conceived from the perspective of the British aristocracy and gentry whose education centred upon preparing them to run their country estate, including the house and collections, and argues for the importance of the library and the book collection in this process. Too often in country house studies the architecture, interior design, and art collections have held sway; this course aims to foreground the College book collections at the disposal of tutors and the subsequent
development of the country house library. Libraries reveal not only the intellectual or recreational interests of past generations, but also how books manifest taste, fashion, and opportunities for display. Book
 historians and tutors well known in their respective fields will conduct the course, attending to a broad variety of subjects including book binding, the development of the idea of rare books and of book
collections, library portraiture, and questions of spatial analysis and mobility—all in the context of the collections housed in some of the oldest and most complete book rooms in Britain.

Library at Holkham Hall.

This intensive residential five-day course is based in the exceptional surroundings of St Catharine’s College, a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Directed by Dr Andrew Moore, the programme plans to visit a series of iconic libraries. These include the historic private library of Houghton Hall, created by Robert Walpole, and Holkham Hall, home to one of the greatest private manuscript and printed book collections in Britain, housed today in three of the country’s most important country house library rooms. The course will also visit the library designed by James Gibbs for Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford at Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire, and the Braybrooke library rooms at Audley End, of considerable interest for being reconstituted from dressing rooms into the 3rd Lord Braybrooke’s library, incorporating the inherited Neville family books. The library at Audley End functioned as an informal family sitting room, with the
adjacent study (the South Library) still displayed as it looked in the early 19th century.

The course includes the Old Libraries of St John’s College and Queens’ College; the Wren Library, Trinity; the Perne Library at Peterhouse; the Parker Library at Corpus Christi; and the Founder’s Library at the 
Fitzwilliam Museum. Additional seminars will take place in the context of the historic book collections in the Cambridge University Library designed by Giles Gilbert Scott (1880–1960). St Catharine’s College will host a seminar on the medical book collection of John Addenbrooke (1680–1719), founder of Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge.