Plates 3.33-3.37: Six Views of Cowdray House
One of Grimm’s images (Plate 3.37) was copied from a drawing by a Mr. Russel—perhaps John Russell Sr.—and corrected by Francis Grose, according to the caption; the others, presumably, were drawn from Grimm’s own studies at the site. Grimm worked in Sussex on a regular basis from 1780 to 1791. He made drawings of the interior of Cowdray House in 1782 (Farrant 2001, 49) but none are included in Vetusta Monumenta. After Grimm’s death, Richard Gough, Director of the SAL, purchased a number of Grimm’s drawings and a sketchbook at auction. Gough later bequeathed 236 Grimm drawings to the Bodleian Library (Farrant 2001, 48).
Objects: Known as one of the great Tudor manor houses, Cowdray was begun in the 1520s on the site of a previous manor house built between 1273 and 1284. That thirteenth-century house was known as Coudreye (the Norman word for the nearby hazel woods). Sir David Owen, uncle to Henry VII, began construction of the new house in the 1520s. In 1529 he sold the estate to Sir William Fitzwilliam (c. 1490-1542). Cowdray House was destroyed by fire in 1793 along with many of its famous paintings. Its impressive ruins stand just outside the small market town of Midhurst, located in Easebourne parish in West Sussex. The ruins of Cowdray House are owned by the 4th Viscount Cowdray and have been open to the public since a major preservation and conservation project in 2006. A fountain basin from the courtyard, stripped of bronze bows and statuary of uncertain provenance, is preserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (Henderson 2005, 235, 189, Fig. 217).
Transcription:
Plate 3.3
South View of Cowdray, from the Cottage. S.H. Grimm del 1785. Basire sc.
North View of Cowdray House.
S.H. Grimm del 1786.
Basire sc.
Sumptibus. Soc. Antiquar. Londini.
Publish’d according to Act of Parliament 23d. April 1796.
Plate 3.4
Cowdray house in Sussex, the Seat of Ld. Viscount Montague, N:E:View.
S.H. Grimm del 1781.
Basire sc.
Sumptibus. Soc. Antiquar. Londini.
Publish’d according to Act of Parliament 23d. April 1796.
Plate 3.35
W:View of Cowdray-house, the Seat of Viscount Montague.
S.H. Grimm del 1782.
Basire sc.
Sumptibus. Soc. Antiquar. Londini.
Publish’d according to Act of Parliament 23d. April 1796.
Plate 3.36
Inner front of Cowdray-house, taken from the Gateway.
S.H. Grimm del 1782.
Basire sc.
Sumptibus. Soc. Antiquar. Londini.
Publish’d according to Act of Parliament 23d. April 1796.
Plate 3.37
Cowdray-court from the Lodging house, copied from a drawing done by Mr. Russel & corrected by F:Grose Esqr:
S.H. Grimm del 1783.
Basire sc.
Sumptibus. Soc. Antiquar. Londini.
Publish’d according to Act of Parliament 23d. April 1796.
Translation:
Original Explanatory Account: Click here to read the original explanatory account for Plates 3.33-3.37.
Commentary by Elizabeth J. Hornbeck: The sixteenth-century Cowdray House was largely destroyed by fire on 24 September 1793. This was a catastrophic loss for the nation of England and for the antiquarian community, since the house had been an important example of Tudor noble architecture and the repository for a large number important paintings, particularly the five history paintings that adorned the walls of the great dining parlor. SAL member Sir Joseph Ayloffe (1708-1781) had written at length about the history paintings in 1773, and urged the SAL to produce prints of these five works. In addition to Ayloffe, numerous antiquaries and artists were quite familiar with Cowdray House and its contents, having spent much time in the area as part of their efforts to study and preserve historical paintings and architecture. They must have been devastated by the news.
The fire broke out in the late hours of 24 September. Richard Gough explains the unusual circumstance by which “the family portraits, and all the historical paintings by Holbein, or his contemporaries, which ornamented the four drawing rooms and his lordship’s dressing room” had been collected together, “during the repair of those several apartments previous to his Lordship’s return from the continent, into the North gallery” (Gough 1796, 1). The carpenters and glaziers had been permitted to work at the west end of this gallery. The fire began in the carpenter’s workshop around midnight, when the few inhabitants of the house were asleep. The fire consumed the entirety of the North wing with all its contents. It then spread to the East wing, which included the great hall, chapel, and dining parlor, but residents of nearby Midhurst had run to the house to help save furnishings and art from the flames.
Gough visited the site one month later, on 22 October 1793, in order, as he puts it, “to ascertain how much of the valuable collection of paintings had been saved” (Gough 1796, 1). He delivered his findings to the SAL in the form of a letter dated 7 November 1793, which was printed in Vetusta Monumenta as the explanatory text for Plates 3.33 to 3.37. Gough’s account deals almost entirely with an inventory of paintings, most of them lost, and talks very little about the building itself. For the architecture of Cowdray House we must rely on James Basire Sr.’s (1730-1802) engravings of Samuel Hieronymus Grimm’s (1733-1794) watercolor drawings.
Cowdray’s status as an important courtier house signaled the wealth and power of its owner. In the sixteenth century Cowdray House hosted five royal visits from Tudor monarchs on their summer progress. Henry VIII visited three times. For his first two visits–in August 1538 and July 1539–Sir William Fitzwilliam, a close friend of Henry’s, was owner of the property. Sir William had been created Earl of Southampton in 1537. For Henry’s third visit, August 1545, Cowdray was owned by Fitzwilliam’s younger half-brother and heir, Sir Anthony Browne (c. 1500-1548). Cowdray House was also visited by Edward VI in July 1552 and by Elizabeth I in August 1591; Browne’s son, Anthony Browne, 1st Viscount Montagu (1528-1592), was in possession of the house during the latter two royal visits.
Cowdray’s collection of paintings was assembled largely by Sir Anthony Browne. The large-scale history paintings at Cowdray commemorate historical events in which Browne himself played a key role in assisting Henry VIII. One showing the progress of Edward VI would have to have been commissioned by Sir Anthony’s son.
The SAL had recognized the significance of the paintings due to the efforts of Ayloffe, one of its fellows, who addressed them in March and April 1773, his “Memoir” being subsequently published in Archaelogia in 1775 (Description 1788, 1). Ayloffe credited Philip Yorke, 2nd Earl of Hardwicke, with the idea of “engraving historical paintings that commemorated remarkable events in Britain’s national history” in order to bolster a sense of patriotism and national identity (Nurse 2007, 144). Ayloffe had criticized the SAL’s previous prints, which he saw as being “of little consequence and less amusement” (qtd. in Nurse 2007, 144). Ayloffe’s proposal gained strong support in the Society, both for patriotic reasons and because “it complemented the vogue for history painting within the Royal Academy” (Nurse 2007, 144). The Society concentrated on a new series of historical prints between 1770 and 1780, when no engravings were published in Vetusta Monumenta. Instead, the Society issued engravings of a number of important history paintings, including five wall paintings from Cowdray showing scenes of war with France from 1544 to 1545 and the coronation procession of Edward VI of 1547. Thus, the SAL is responsible for the preservation of two of the best-known images from the mid-sixteenth century: the City of London at the time of Edward’s coronation, and Portsmouth at the time of the sinking of the Mary Rose. Despite the great cost, which the Society never recovered, the publication of historical prints (including those from Cowdray and two more from the Royal Collection at Windsor) was crucial in raising the Society’s profile at a time when it was campaigning to obtain apartments in the new Somerset House with the Royal Society and the Royal Academy. A new large size of paper called ‘Antiquarian’ was devised to print such large pictures, but, according to Bernard Nurse, “the effort and expense of producing detailed and reliable reproductions of such large-scale originals was so great that the last three paintings from Cowdray were copied and engraved in outline only” (2007, 144).
Historic architecture in Sussex received a great deal of attention from British antiquaries in the eighteenth century. In 1743 the antiquarian Jeremiah Milles (1714-1784), who would later serve as President of the SAL (1768-1784), toured Sussex extensively, including Cowdray House; his notes are preserved in the British Library. Milles wrote extensive notes about Cowdray, the majority of which concern the paintings, then attributed to Holbein among others, that decorated the house. (While Holbein was perhaps the most highly regarded artist during the Tudor period, there is no evidence he ever worked at Cowdray, and Susan Foister does not mention Cowdray in her monograph Holbein and England.)
Milles also wrote about the building itself and its site. Cowdray, which he called “a noble old Gothick seat belonging to the Lord Montacute,” was “of hewn stone built round a square court with a square tower at each corner of the house.” Of the interior he wrote, “The apartments in this house are spacious and well furnished. There is a handsome old hall, which like all other old halls in England is said to be roofed with Irish oak.” Later he mentions “a very handsome bronze fountain” in the court of this house. But he found the site “by no means agreeable” because “it stands very low, in a watery meadow, by the side of a rivulet which must make it exceedingly damp” (qtd. in Farrant 2001, 99-100, BL MS.15776, ff. 221-48). However, he did find the park behind Cowdray House very beautiful. The “rivulet” to which he refers, which is visible in some of the plates, must be the River Rother, which runs to the west and south of Cowdray House.
The renowned Sussex antiquary William Burrell (1732-1796) also took an interest in his own county. He hired the Swiss landscape artist Samuel Hieronymus Grimm (1733-1794) to tour Sussex for a fortnight or so each year from 1780 until 1791, “except 1786, though he [Grimm] happened to be at Cowdray that year, copying the Coronation Procession of Edward VI for the Society of Antiquaries. For at least part of each tour in 1780-4 and 1787 Grimm was accompanying Burrell” (Farrant 2001, 48). Grimm’s work in Sussex for Burrell resulted in nearly 900 finished watercolors, which today reside at the British Library; several of Grimm's paintings of Cowdray are reproduced in color in Woodburn and Guy (2005-06).
Grimm worked as a traveling artist based in London from 1768 until his death. The most important component of his artistic practice was commissioned watercolors of antiquities, historic buildings and landscapes, often done for wealthy clients to document their estates. In addition, Grimm produced pictures of some 200 country houses or large village houses that greatly expanded the scope of his oeuvre. While he lived in London, he traveled extensively throughout England and Wales for this kind of work (Farrant 2001, 46-49). The SAL retained Grimm on four occasions between 1779 and 1791 to copy Tudor paintings. As noted above, Grimm was paid the reasonably generous fee of ten guineas for the six Cowdray drawings (SAL Council Minutes III.190); sadly, he did not live to collect the twelve impressions of this plate set also promised to him in April 1794 when this plate set was first proposed.
Grimm seems to have been the go-to artist for antiquaries interested in Sussex. Francis Grose (1731-1791), who had “corrected” the drawing by “Mr. Russel” on which Plate 3.37 was based, was a noted antiquary, artist, and writer. “Mr. Russel” may refer to the English painter John Russell RA (1745-1806) who worked in London starting in 1767; however, he is best known for his portraits. His father, John Russell Sr., was a book and print seller who drew and published two views of Guildford; he too could have been the original artist for the view of Cowdray House in Plate 3.37.
Grose purchased eighteen of Grimm’s Sussex views to include in Volume V of his Antiquities of England and Wales, which was originally issued in just over one hundred parts between 1772 and 1787. However, no images of Cowdray House were among the eighteen that Grose published. Instead Grose favored medieval castles and ecclesiastical architecture to represent the most famous antiquities of Sussex.
The Plates:
Cowdray House consisted of four wings arranged around a central courtyard. Unlike many buildings depicted in Vetusta Monumenta, the plates devoted to Cowdray House do not include any plan, section, interior, or birds-eye views, despite the availability of interior views like Grimm’s watercolor of the remarkable Great Hall, also known as Buck Hall due to the eleven life-size wooden bucks that decorated the room. Its steeply pitched hammerbeam roof may have been the work of James Nedeham (d. 1544), who designed the Great Halls at Hampton Court and Christ Church, Oxford (Woodburn and Guy 2005-06, 36-37). Instead we have the elevations showing all four exterior facades and two views of the inner courtyard. It is interesting to compare the six different views of Cowdray House contained on these five plates, in which we can see both a general similarity among them as well as specific differences. Both views in Plate 3.33 show the general landscape around Cowdray, with the house occupying a relatively small part of each composition. Grimm’s obvious delight in rendering trees and the wild foliage along the river bank emphasize the countryside and the vast lands held by this manor, but at the cost of architectural details. The next two views, Plates 3.34 and 3.35, show the exterior of the house at a large enough scale for features like the quoining and the variety of towers and roofs to be rendered in detail, but still set in nature. The last two views, Plates 3.36 and 3.37, show the private space of the interior courtyard. These two views allow for an even greater level of detail to be shown, such as the elaborate tower in Plate 3.36, which may be unique in English architecture.
Top of Plate 3.33, “South View of Cowdray, from the Cottage”:
In this view, Cowdray House sits in an idyllic landscape with the River Rother in the foreground; it is nestled in a pastoral setting and is dominated by an open sky that occupies the top half of the roughly square composition. The house is shown at a small scale relative to the landscape. The exterior elevation of the south wing shows an irregular range of structures including, at the right, a long one-story gable-roofed structure facing east. To the left of it we see a two-story chimney which presumably is attached to the narrow gabled end of the two-story building at left, though if this is the case, the perspective view of the chimney is confusing and may be rendered incorrectly. At the left corner stands a two-story windowless wall and a reinforced hexagonal corner tower. Beyond this south wing we can see numerous square towers and chimneys rising from the other wings of the house. One of the most intriguing features of the house is a unique multistory tower structure, the louvre of the Great Hall, intended to ventilate smoke from the open hearth. The six-sided structure had windows on each side and buttresses at the corners, with a number of flags surrounding it. It is visible in most of the plates, but in Plate 3.33 (top) it is rendered only faintly indicating distance; the best view of it is in Plate 3.36. Oddly, though, the images of it are inconsistent in terms of the number of sides and the number of flags around it.
Still looking at Plate 3.33 (top), we see a long low stone wall, or possibly a pair of walls on either side of a path running parallel to and along the south wing of the house. At the west end of the path there is some kind of rustic structure that is obscured by the shadows. On the near side of the stone wall are scattered groups of cows and, at right, a group of three standing men. Both men and animals are rendered in a fairly schematic form. There are clusters of trees and shrubs in the landscape and closer to the house. In the foreground of the image is the River Rother, which must be the “rivulet” that Milles describes in his letter. The exuberant vegetation growing along its irregular bank is rendered in detail and provides much visual interest. The expressiveness with which these plants are rendered is remarkable; they seem to be foregrounded metaphorically as well as literally, perhaps showing off Grimm’s interests and skills as a landscape artist.
In both images on Plate 3.33, the artist seems more interested in the surrounding landscape than the details of the house itself. Both images lack the detailed representation of quoining (larger blocks used on exterior corners) that is visible in Plates 3.34, 3.35 and 3.37.
Bottom of Plate 3.33, “North View of Cowdray House”:
While the south view at the top of the plate is roughly square, the north view at the bottom is about twice as wide as it is high. Thus the house is shown at an even smaller scale, with low hills visible in the distance to the south of the house and the river. A line of trees extends to both edges of the composition, behind (south of) the house; these indicate the line of the so-called rivulet (the River Rother) seen in the foreground at the top of Plate 3.33. Three roads are visible; at the right we can see in the middle distance a road with two figures walking away from Cowdray House and towards what might be a farm house at the right edge of the scene. In the foreground and close to the right edge we can see a man and a woman on a road nearer to the foreground; the woman is carrying something on her head. They are walking away from the house and, more immediately, away from a wooden platform of some sort that might be a dock on the River Rother. The third road leads from that platform to the left, crossing in front of the Cowdray House and a fair distance from it; on it we see two men driving two cattle. They are shown at a much smaller scale than the couple at the right foreground. Also visible in the north view is a small but substantial two-story octagonal structure that stands to the west of Cowdray House and is clearly part of the estate. It is referred to in the literature as the Conduit House or the Round House, from which water for the main house was supplied. It served as the home of the resident custodian, and all the rooms are triangular, as the walls radiate from a central pillar (Woodburn and Guy 2005-06, 34). It also appears in Plate 3.34.
Plate 3.34, “Cowdray house in Sussex, the Seat of Ld. Viscount, Montague, N:E:View”:
This plate shows Cowdray House and the smaller Conduit House. Like Plate 3.33 (bottom), the image in Plate 3.34 is about twice as wide as it is high. The contrast between the left and right sides is striking: the left half is dominated by Cowdray House, while the right half shows mostly trees, with the exception of the Conduit House at the far right and a low fence running from the north wing to the structure. Between the house and the outbuilding, an interesting void or negative space becomes the central focus of the composition, in contrast to most of the images in which the house is in the center.
As for Cowdray House, we see the illuminated east façade stretching to the left and the north façade stretching to the right, and in shadows. Gough, who visited Cowdray a month after it was destroyed by fire, describes the east wing as containing the great hall, chapel, and dining parlor. The fire on 24 September 1793 began in the north wing, where many important paintings were being stored; from there it spread to the east wing.
This plate includes no people or animals, making it more austere, like a strict architectural study rather than a landscape scene. There are more architectural details here than in the two views on Plate 3.33. In Plate 3.34 Grimm shows the prominent quoining used for exterior corners, i.e., where two walls meet.
Also visible in Plate 3.34 is the multistory tower structure, which is most vividly seen in Plate 3.37. These two plates show opposite sides of the east wing; the tower structure stands on the roof of the “Lodging house,” which is adjacent to the inner court. Notice the perspectival error in Plate 3.34 by which the central roof beams on either side of the tower structure are not aligned.
The Conduit House at right, which in Plate 3.33 (bottom) looked like a compact octagonal central plan building, here seems more irregular. In addition to the two-story central structure, there seem to be two small rooms, like apses or entryways, extending to the left and right.
Plate 3.35, “W:View of Cowdray-house, the Seat of Viscount Montague”:
This is the grandest view of Cowdray House, showing the western façade which is the formal entry to the house with its impressive use of symmetry. Adding to the sense of approach, a wide road is shown in the foreground leading up to a low fence and gate, with a pair of horses grazing at the left. Beyond this low fence is a park, which must be the one which Jeremiah Milles described as beautiful on his 1743 visit to Cowdray. Our point of view is that of a traveler with the road stretching in front of us as we draw near to the house.
The western façade has at its center the massive three-storied gatehouse, flanked by three-storied octagonal battled turrets punctuated by small windows. Note the quoining on the exterior corners where the walls meet at oblique angles. In addition we can see two pointed dome-lets; these sit atop the two octagonal turrets on the opposite side of this gatehouse (pictured in Plate 3.37). The gatehouse has a double door of oak framed by a shallow arch, two massive windows, and a clock at the top of the wall. The arched second-story window is the larger of the two, and is framed by elaborate carved stone panels above and below. The third-story window is square, with a decorative string course along the top, above which is the clock. On either side of the gatehouse are two-storied chambers and, at the two corners of the west wing, three-storied blocks with bay windows flanked by windowless turrets. The entire western façade has battled walls. The elaborate multi-storied tower can also be seen in Plate 3.35 rising in the distance behind the gatehouse. Unlike the other three wings of the house, the west wing is perfectly symmetrical. The artist has countered the symmetry of the house with a landscape that is asymmetrical, with tall expressive trees and a darkening sky on the right, while the left has fewer trees and a clear, wide open sky. That small octagonal Conduit House is also visible at left, partially obscured by trees.
Plate 3.36, “Inner front of Cowdray-house, taken from the Gateway”:
This is the first of two views of the interior courtyard, a private space within the home, showing the western face of the east wing, which is the view one would have across the court upon stepping through the gatehouse. The east wing contained the “Lodging house,” great hall, chapel, and dining parlor. Plate 3.36 also shows the pavement and fountain of the court itself. The paving stones are laid in such a way as to lead the eye diagonally to the right and left, framing the fountain between them. The path on the right leads to a one-story entry structure with steps leading down; this is the entrance to the great hall. The path on the left leads not to a door but to a blank wall, its only purpose being to create symmetry. The central structure has three very large windows framed by pointed arches; it looks quite medieval and ecclesiastical in style.
Atop the “Lodging house” is the elaborate multi-storied tower structure atop the gabled roof. It appears to be aligned on an axis with the gatehouse and the fountain that sits in the center of the court. It has three windowed stories, and in the center a fourth windowed tower rises even higher. The central tower has an elaborate mitre-shaped roof (like a cardinal’s hat). There are a total of nine flags, one in the center surrounded by eight at a lower level, each flagpole supported by a statue of a rampant heraldic animal. Similar statues and flagpoles stand at either end of the gabled roof. This is the most detailed rendering we have of that tower structure; we can see ornate brick work on the surfaces, as well as a profuse number of Gothic-style bosses that decorate the mitre-shaped roof of the central tower.
This view across the courtyard allows us to perceive another notable feature of the design of Cowdray House, which is that the entrance to the great hall is not aligned with the gatehouse but is instead off-center, which the diagonal pavement emphasizes. Maurice Howard points out that Cowdray House follows the advice of the English doctor Andrew Boorde (c. 1490-1549), who wrote about the practical and healthy house in his Compendyous Regyment or Dyetary of Health (1542, though the three chapters on architecture had been printed separately and possibly before 1542). Boorde advised that these two doors should not be aligned, thereby trapping winds within the court so they did not pass directly from the gate to the main door (Boorde, cited in Howard 1987, 19, 78).
Grimm’s watercolor of this scene is reproduced in Woodburn and Guy, figure 14 (2005-06, 39). Grimm includes more of the courtyard, so that part of the paved walkway is shown in the foreground running parallel to the picture plane from edge to edge. While excluding those foreground areas of the pavement, Basire nonetheless includes more of the architecture at the right, a taller segment of the south wing at the edge of the scene. While Grimm includes a small human figure, apparently a laborer, Basire does not include any human figures in the print.
Plate 3.37, “Cowdray-court from the Lodging house”:
The last plate in this series shows the grand symmetrical gatehouse from the interior court; this is the reverse side of the west wing shown in Plate 3.35. The two battlemented turrets are covered with pointed dome-lets, while we can see that the turrets behind them on the opposite side do not have dome-lets. The diagonal paths of the pavement originate at the gatehouse, leading the eye even more forcefully to the gatehouse (which is slightly to the right of center) where two very small schematic figures, apparently women, stand in the doorway. The diagonal paths create a forced perspective from a low viewpoint that makes this court seem enormous; in Plate 3.36 it appeared to be a much smaller space. The fountain is also prominent. While Plates 3.33-36 were drawn by Grimm from life, Plate 3.37 is specified as one that Grimm “copied from a drawing done by Mr. Russel & corrected by F:Grose Esqr.”.
Grimm’s watercolor of this scene is reproduced in Woodburn and Guy, figure 15 (2005-06, 39). Grimm includes the figure of a woman in the foreground, perhaps a maid. She is wearing a red dress and a white cap, standing near the fountain and holding a basket in one hand, Basire eliminates this figure. Both Grimm and Basire include two very small human figures standing in the distance under the Tudor arch of the gatehouse, as if they have just arrived.
Both Plates 3.36 and 3.37 show the fountain at the center of the court; it is the earliest example in England of the candelabrum type of fountain, i.e., fountains with “a central pillar or shaft supporting bowls superimposed and decreasing in size towards the top.” (Henderson 2005, 188). According to Henderson, its placement and the polygonal form of the basin are all appropriate for an early sixteenth-century date. It has a band of Tudor roses encircling the shaft. At the top is a bronze figure of Neptune, but this is not rendered in enough detail to discern its features.
Fortunately, that bronze figure, together with the fountain, survives and is now preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The provenance of the bronze figure of Neptune is debated, making this “the most problematic fountain of the period.” This figure, of exceptional quality, could have been commissioned by Sir William Fitzwilliam from Benedetto da Rovezzano (1474-c.1552), a Florentine sculptor who went to England in 1524 and worked on bronze sculptures for Cardinal Wolsey’s tomb. Alternately the figure has been attributed to the Florentine sculptor Giovanni Francesco Rustici (1475-1554), who never came to England but who worked at the French court alongside Leonardo da Vinci. In this case it could have been acquired by Viscount Montague in the early eighteenth century while traveling abroad to collect art for Cowdray House, and then combined with the earlier fountain base. The fountain was moved after 1793 to Woolbeding House in Sussex, and in 1958 to the V&A Museum (where it is now on indefinite loan from the National Trust) (Henderson 2005, 188-190).
Conclusions:
Based on the evidence of eighteenth-century writings as well as much modern art historical scholarship, Cowdray House is best remembered for its extensive collection of art, which had been well documented before much of it was lost (along with the house) in 1793. Indeed, Gough’s visit to the property so soon after the fire was motivated by his concern for the paintings rather than for the building.
However, these five plates, with six different views of Cowdray, tell a different story. It was unusual for Vetusta Monumenta to include so many views of a single building, especially since, as noted above, they do not include any plan, section, interior, or bird’s eye views. Nonetheless Cowdray House and its environs are very thoroughly documented as an example of a prestigious Tudor estate, which may make up for the paucity of images of some of the Tudor palaces. For example, the SAL believed they had no views of Nonsuch Palace suitable for engraving (though in fact Plate 2.24 depicts Nonsuch, but is mistakenly identified as Richmond Palace). There is one view of the Palace of Placentia (Plate 2.25), one view of Hampton Court Palace (Plate 2.27), two of the Palace of Beaulieu (Plate 2.41 and 2.42), and three plates for two of the Whitehall Palace gates including plans (Plates 1.17, 1.18, and 1.19). There is one view of Richmond Palace (Plate 2.23), although the SAL erroneously believed it had two. So why should an aristocratic manor house merit six views on five plates? For one thing, the fire that destroyed it in 1793 was still a current event, a shocking calamity that had claimed not only the building but dozens of nationally important art works. In contrast, many of the Tudor palaces documented in Vetusta Monumenta had been lost for more than a century. For another thing, many eighteenth-century antiquaries and their associates were intimately familiar with Cowdray House, having visited it numerous times in the project of documenting the antiquities of Sussex, possibly making its loss feel all the more personal and acute. These included Milles, Burrell, Grose, and Grimm, all previously discussed. In addition, Ayloffe describes his visit in 1772 “in company with Messrs. Brander, Chown, Astle, and Blyke,” members of the SAL, who “had an opportunity of viewing and examining at leisure a considerable number of very curious and ancient paintings,” and to enjoy the hospitality of Montague, “who permitted us a freedom of access to those valuable treasures, with an ease and politeness that fully characterized the nobleman and the scholar” (Ayloffe 1773, 239). This account suggests that Cowdray held an important place in antiquarian circles for those devoted to English history and nobility.
For all the importance given to the lost paintings in written narratives by Ayloffe, Gough, and others, these five plates show instead the importance of the manor, both its architecture and its vast grounds. The monumental gatehouse shown in Plate 3.35 (approaching Cowdray House) and Plate 3.37 (from inside the central court) rivals the Tudor gatehouse at Hampton Court Palace (built between 1529 and 1547; see Plate 2.27), which however is not shown in Vetusta Monumenta. The symmetrical façade in Plate 3.35, the formal entrance to Cowdray House, is fit for a monarch, and may reflect the prestige claimed by its builder, Sir David Owen (uncle to Henry VII), or by its subsequent owner, Sir William Fitzwilliam, a close associate of Henry VIII. The elaborate multi-storied tower structure atop the “Lodging House” in the east wing was perhaps the only one of its kind in England. Cowdray House is an archetypal example of the inventive architectural style associated with the Tudor period, and its inclusion in Vetusta Monumenta shows it to be no less of a national treasure than the paintings it housed.
Works Cited:
Ayloffe, Joseph. 1775. “An Account of some ancient English Historical Paintings at Cowdray, in Sussex.” Archeologia vol. 3: 239-271.
Farrant, John H. 2001. Sussex Depicted: Views and Descriptions 1600-1800. The Sussex Record Society’s Centenary Volume. Sussex Record Society 85.
Foister, Susan. 2004. Holbein and England. New Haven and London: Yale U.P.
Fontana, Dominic. 2013. “Charting the Development of Portsmouth Harbour, Dockyard and Town in the Tudor Period.” Journal of Maritime Archaeology 8 no. 2, Special Issue: The Social Archaeology of Ports and Harbours (December): 263-282.
Gough, Richard. 1796. “VOL. III. PLATES XXXIII. XXXIV. XXXV. XXXVI. XXXVII.” In Vetusta Monumenta, Vol. 3.
Henderson, Paula. 2005. The Tudor House and Garden: Architecture and Landscape in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries. New Haven and London: Yale U.P.
Howard, Maurice. 1987. The Early Tudor Country House: Architecture and Politics 1490-1550. London: George Philip.
Milles, Jeremiah. 1743. Notes on Cowdray House. BL MS. 15776, ff. 221-48. Printed in Farrant 2001.
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