This article explores the exemplary surviving print room at Woodhall Park in Hertfordshire, created in 1782 for Sir Thomas Rumbold. A professional named “R. Parker” pasted more than 350 prints around the walls of this interior; the results were then carefully recorded in a catalogue and set of elevation diagrams. The first section, “Space”, analyses the print room within the broader context of the house, in order to connect exterior and interior, explore the relative qualities of “public” and “private” space, and consider neoclassical style as worked out in various media. The second, “Display”, unpacks the pasted scheme, looking at the relationship between “background” images and “starring” works, and that between iconography and pattern-making. The final part explores “Making”, analysing the processes by which prints were selected, trimmed, given paper borders, and arranged around the walls. This discussion considers both the degree to which the intermedial object of the reproductive print was translated into a trompe l’œil painting or sculpture in such schemes, and the creative work of collaging at play. The analysis in this article weaves together textual discussion with still and moving images, film, and animation. Combining these techniques, it aims to provide full documentation and analysis of the scheme, and to engage with embodied, mobile, and temporally determined viewing experience in both the house and the print room.

Print rooms are situated in a rich and yet complex position between various sub-disciplines of art history. My focus here is on the fashion for the print room as it emerged in Britain and Ireland in the 1750s.¹ The vogue for trimming reproductive prints, pasting them around the walls of a room, and embellishing them with printed borders reached a fashionable peak in the second half of the eighteenth century. Typically relying on published series interspersed with selected “starring” images, these were trompe l’œil paper galleries, the prints “hung” from bows and rings, interspersed with floral swags and festoons, with sculptural prints sometimes placed on the dado rails below. Some of the earliest evidence for these rooms comes from the correspondence of Mary Delany, when she wrote to her sister in late June 1750, telling her that she had spent a rainy day at the house of her friends and neighbours, the Veseys, just outside Dublin, making “frames for prints”.² The following April, she was in the throes of creating her own print room at Delville, thanking her brother for sending “six dozen borders … where I have not pictures, I must have prints; otherwise, I think prints best in books”.³ Within the following two decades, the trend had become so established that a number of printmakers and publishers had started to cash in on and feed the fashion: old printed material was repackaged as suitable for such schemes; new decorative prints were designed and published for the express purpose of adorning these rooms.⁴ The extent of their engagement is amply evidenced in the 1774 catalogue of the printmaker Robert Sayer, with one section devoted to “fine prints in sets” with which “to ornament Rooms, Staircases, &c. with curious borders representing frames, a fashion much in use”, and another to those borders and other ornaments “necessary for fitting up print rooms”.⁵ Only twelve houses in Britain and Ireland today contain intact print rooms, but collections and archives contain traces of the many which have long since been destroyed or dismantled.

The print room is a phenomenon which needs to be approached broadly from two key perspectives. On the one hand, we have the prints themselves. These are embedded in a number of period-specific contexts: the elaboration of print techniques, processes, subjects, and types in the eighteenth century; increasingly complex and sophisticated modes of production, marketing, and distribution; the expanded print trade in operation across Europe.⁶ Then, there is the business of what was done with prints in this era, whether contained “in books”, used as “pictures”, or refashioned through a wealth of intermedial creative practice, including extra-illustration and japanning.⁷ Studies of extra-illustration intersect with histories of the book, both in terms of the publications from which many prints derived, as well as those which they were used to adorn, as shown in recent work by Lucy Peltz and Luisa Calè.⁸ Japanning, meanwhile, leads the researcher into the realm of the decorative arts and furniture, as prints were used to adorn objects ranging from “the superb cabinet, to the smallest article of the toilet”.⁹ Such diverse practices were linked by the physical processes of cutting and trimming, of pasting and pressing. And they were pan-European. The distinctive form of the British and Irish print room was one manifestation of a much broader vogue for découpage.¹⁰

Thinking about print rooms requires engagement with print culture and these practices, but this also takes us from objects to spaces, and into the terrain of the eighteenth-century country house.¹¹ This connects with the social history of country houses as pioneered by Mark Girouard, inviting questions as to how these displays—striking in effect, heavy with visual information—related to the individual lives and social practices which unfolded in the rooms they adorned.¹² But the print room also needs to be interleaved with the stylistic history of the country house and its interiors. In the swags, festoons, and trophies which proliferated in its heyday, the print room engaged with the vogue for the grotesque, most fully embodied in the contemporaneous fashion for “Etruscan” rooms.¹³ Print room displays also need to be aligned with the history of wallpaper. Not only was their creation reliant on the rise of paper hanging in the eighteenth century, but their history is also intimately intertwined with both that of Chinese paper schemes, and the parallel development of those wallpaper designs which replicated the print room effect in single sheets.¹⁴ However, this needs to be offset by the fact that print rooms were about iconography as well as pattern making; about reproduced paintings and sculpture as well as ornamentation, and, as such, also connect with spaces such as the gallery and the cabinet. They have rightly been understood as “paper museums”;¹⁵ as (predominantly) monochrome galleries which made good use of the dissemination of increasingly physically and financially available reproductive prints in the period, as well as functioning as decorative schemes. This leads us back to print culture, completing the circle.

That print rooms appear in publications about prints, about country houses, and about interior design and wallpaper underscores their intersectionality.¹⁶ Yet, they also have a marginality born of that intersectionality. This article focuses on the case study of Woodhall Park in Hertfordshire in order to unpack these overlapping media and themes. At its core sit three key issues, which I use to structure the discussion: space, display, and making. Entwined digital components, developed through collaboration with the filmmaker Phil Poppy, are key to this exploration, underpinning engagement with embodied and mobile experience, balancing the informative with the perceptual, and enabling interaction with both the original print material from which the display at Woodhall Park was crafted and the processes by which the room was made. While digital technology has most commonly been used in scholarship on interiors and decoration for purposes of reconstruction, the Woodhall Park print room is a remarkably intact and well-documented scheme.¹⁷ Here, technology can be focused instead on both extending analysis of the display and exploring the kinaesthetic encounter. The aim is to facilitate a more extensive engagement with and understanding of the material, but in full acknowledgement of the digital as an avatar. Remediation and manipulation within the digital provide a parallel experience of, rather than direct access to, this space and its materials and processes. As such, it is embedded within the analysis of this article. Indeed, I intend this to be the kind of performative explication of an argument which has long been at the heart of the discipline of art history, from the slide lecture onwards: art history as “engaged performance”.¹⁸

The print room at Woodhall Park, completed in 1782, offers particularly rich material for such analysis. This is an extensive scheme, consisting of well over 350 prints pasted around the walls, adorned with numerous decorative elements, showing full engagement with the height of the fashion (figs. 1 and 2).¹⁹ It is also unusually well documented. Surviving archival material is not only revealing about the processes of creation, but also provides a degree of surety about the (largely original) appearance of the room which is unrivalled. Finally, a meticulous conservation project undertaken by Allyson McDermott in the mid-1990s enables a fuller experience of and engagement with the display than is possible with those in worse states of repair.²⁰ The prints are still notably darkened, and the necessary infills of plain, toned handmade paper create visual interruptions, but—of the surviving examples—Woodhall presents the best opportunity for analysing the creation, use, and experience of the eighteenth-century print room.

Thomas Rumbold purchased the Woodhall estate from the Boteler family in 1774, for the sum of £87,000. Rumbold could easily afford this, having made a vast fortune through the East India Company over the previous two decades. When he had resigned his post with the company in 1769, and returned to Britain, he was reputed to be worth between £200,000 and £300,000.²¹ However, the estate was without a house, as John Boteler’s Tudor manor house had been destroyed by fire a few years earlier. Rumbold called on the architect Thomas Leverton to provide designs, and his 1777 elevation for the new house was exhibited the following year at the Royal Academy (fig. 3).²² However, Rumbold had continued his East India Company career while back in England, becoming a director in 1770, and he returned to take up the position of Governor of Madras a couple of months before Leverton’s design went on view at the Academy’s rooms in Pall Mall. Despite this, work on Woodhall continued apace in his absence, from February 1778 to January 1781. His attorneys were allocated £14,155 for the contract, and they made a series of substantial payments to Leverton while their employer was away. They had the power to accept unanticipated building expenses, and even to make decisions, approving the final elevation design as “much more beautiful than the former one”.²³ As well as the money paid to Leverton (both for his own work, and that which he subcontracted), large sums were also issued to Ince and Mayhew for bespoke furniture for the new house.²⁴ Even more than the ledgers for Rumbold’s account with the bankers, Gosling and Sharpe, the extent of the expenditure at Woodhall is highlighted by the figures included in a document which survives in the parliamentary archives.²⁵ On Rumbold’s return from India, a bill was moved for inflicting pains and penalties, accompanied by another restraining him from leaving the country. A committee was established, chaired by Henry Dundas, to look into both Rumbold’s corrupt dealings with the zamindars and the Nawab of Arcot, and the charge that his undiplomatic dealings in India had provoked the war in the Carnatic. As part of this process, Rumbold was required to produce a full digest of his property. Sums of £12,250 6s. ½d. and £9,250 6s. 1½d. are cited for “sundries for Building the Mansion House and other Buildings on y^e Estate in Herts”.²⁶ One debt to Ince and Mayhew amounts to “about” £3,541 17s. 3d.; another specifies £1,241 17s. 3d. spent on “Household Furniture” provided by the firm in late 1781 and 1782.²⁷

Understanding the Woodhall Park print room requires study of Leverton’s designs and other documentary sources, in addition to the surviving fabric of the house. This facilitates engagement with the original conception, and with the effects of the (relatively minor) changes over time (fig. 4). The building today reveals that the exhibited design of the west front was broadly implemented in full: a central, seven-bay block, three-storey high, with a pitched roof and full-height central portico. On the Palladian model, single-storey wings extend to each side: the print room is contained within the south wing to the right in the elevation, lit by the second and third windows as one’s eye moves across to the side pavilion. But comparison between design and extant building immediately flags one of the most notable subsequent changes to the structure: the addition of another storey to the side wings in the 1790s, in order to provide additional accommodation. The other key change was the subsequent inversion of the house’s orientation, moving the entrance to the east. This effectively shifted the print room to the back of the house, looking out towards the landscape into which the west door now effectively ejects the visitor who has passed through the building.

Turning from Leverton’s elevation to the ground plan creates a sensation of moving up and over the building, gaining a downward view through the structure (fig. 5).²⁸ The bulk of that central block becomes more notable, and the articulation of the façade with windows, niches, balustrades, and sculpted relief panels is tempered by the realisation that these features result in minimal projection and recession. But the plan also provides room identifications, and the standard Palladian structure of the architecture is now aligned with a similarly typical arrangement of living space. That deep, central rectangular block is filled, as one would expect, with the principal rooms of the house: the hall, saloon, drawing room, library, and so on. The service areas are—for hierarchical as well as practical reasons (distancing from servants, odours, and fire hazards)—located in the wings. The north wing initially screened an open court, as well as housing the dairy, brewhouse, washhouse, and laundry; the south wing contained the kitchen, housekeeper’s room, butler’s apartments, and storeroom, as well as the print room. The plan also, crucially, identifies the print room as originally a “billiard room”: a function confirmed in sale catalogues of 1799 and 1801.²⁹

The print room is thus not part of the corps de logis, set among the public rooms. Its position to one side of the main block of the house—connected by a corridor and a lobby, but clearly apart—near the butler’s rooms—indicates this as a relatively more privately oriented and informal space. This accords with its designated function as a site of male sociability and entertainment; with the informality of this as an environment for play and attendant conversation.³⁰ Indeed, several print rooms from the period were located in a similar position. That at Wanstead, for example, was on the basement floor, below the piano nobile, along with the family’s own apartments, servants’ rooms, and service areas.³¹ The print room at Heveningham Hall in Suffolk, meanwhile, was positioned on the opposite side of the central block to the main state rooms, again adjacent to spaces for servants. It functioned as a small dining room where Sir Gerard Vanneck, the owner, would eat when alone.³² And the print room at Calke Abbey used to be more tucked away than it is today. Until the 1930s, stairs would lead visitors straight up to the principal, first-floor rooms. The “Characture [caricature] room”, situated next to Sir Henry Crewe’s study and other family rooms on the ground floor below, along with the servants’ quarters, would thus have originally seemed more sequestered within the house.³³

Thus contextualised, the significations of the position of the print room in the ground plan of Woodhall can be aligned with its social meaning and purpose. However, this is also a notably high and dominant space among its immediate companions in the south wing, and would have had an effectively dramatic impact as the visitor arrived through the corridor, and then the lobby, with a sense of the servants’ quarters lying ahead. The room itself would have felt more enclosed without the door subsequently punched through to the right of the fireplace: a contained space to be entered, offering an activity to be joined, immersed in a dense and striking display of prints around all four walls, without the immediate invitation of onward progress. However, its height, as well as the level of lighting, would have been amplified by the original glazed dome in the centre of the ceiling.³⁴ The billiard table would almost certainly have been placed directly below this skylight, thus illuminated from above as well as by the two west-facing windows, also making the display of prints much more visible in daylight hours. Those images on the walls would logically have complemented the purpose of the billiard room, shifting between providing a backdrop to the play and offering focal points between shots with the cue, available for the players to peruse and likely discuss.³⁵

The glazed dome would also have tightened the relationship between the billiard/print room and the rest of the house, recalling other skylights, especially that which illuminates the staircase hall, previously encountered by any visitor. This relationship underscores another key point about the print room in this context of spatiality. As these are such distinctive spaces, and because of a long-standing tendency within the history of country houses and interiors to compartmentalise, to atomise features, it can be easy to overlook their connectedness with other rooms in a building.³⁶ The synergies between the effects of the print room and the stuccowork, paintwork, and ironwork in this hall are striking: foliate and floral tendrils, classical figures, and urns abound.³⁷ Many of these motifs continue in the “Etruscan saloon” (as designated in the sale particulars), joined here by beribboned swags—the typically limited palette of brown, red, ochre, and cream chiming again with the print room’s monochromaticity.³⁸ Indeed, the white figures in wreathed oval medallions in the spandrels provide an almost exact counterpart to the Richard Dalton sculptural prints in the corners of the print room’s coving.³⁹ The type of print display created at Woodhall Park can thus be situated within a much broader and well-known story of Neoclassicism, looking back to the antique of Pompeii and Herculaneum via Raphael and the Renaissance. This is the style so vividly evoked in the preface to the Adams brothers’ Works in Architecture, billed as “gracefully formed” and “delicately enriched”, its “grace and beauty” achieved through a “mixture of grotesque stucco, and painted ornaments, together with the flowing raniçeau, with its fanciful figures and winding foliage”.⁴⁰

DOI A variety of media intersect here: forms and motifs inflected by but continued across different materials, the specialities of a range of artists and craftsmen working in conjunction. Within the print room itself, egg and dart detailing, fluted friezes adorned with rosettes, and swag and drop motifs connect paper borders and ornaments with the sculpted and moulded architectural features of the fireplace, skylight, and built-in bookcase. But a still fuller assessment of the spaces of Woodhall requires consideration of the furniture provided by Ince and Mayhew, as the relationship between architecture, decoration, and furnishings was particularly intimate in such later eighteenth-century houses. Here, we find a further proliferation of antique classical iconography, urns, festoons, and ribbons.⁴¹ A 1925 Country Life photograph shows an oval-backed settee and three matching armchairs, adorned with more swags, here of carved drapery, suspended from bows (fig. 6).⁴² A chest of drawers translates these motifs into painted form, with panels of ribbons and foliage, and another swag and drop frieze interspersed with more rosettes.⁴³

The print display at Woodhall Park is particularly dense, but also immaculately organised, symmetrical around both the key architectural features of the room (the door, the two windows, the fireplace, and the built-in cupboard) and the large print pilasters used to break up the areas of wall still further (figs. 7 and 8). A large number of paper decorative elements have been added to make the scheme both more unified and, somewhat conversely, more ornate. The reproductive prints are framed with a wide variety of borders; they are suspended from rings, bows, and other devices, and are surrounded by floral swags and trophies. Paper candelabra and urns “sit” on the dado rail and the mantelpiece.⁴⁴ The elaborate display is offset by its restriction to the upper three-quarters of the walls, above the dado and panelling, necessary in order to take knocks and scrapes from furniture, but also providing a respite to the eye. The prints continue up into the wide coving, but this is a more steadily paced display of large prints of heads from a series engraved by Giovanni Cattini after Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, published in Venice in 1744.⁴⁵ They are interspersed with exceptionally large floral swags, compiled from up to forty appliqued sections each, linked to provide an unbroken sequence running between those four statue prints in the corners.⁴⁶ The space shows full engagement with the trompe l’œil tradition, evident throughout print rooms, with the conceit of the framed images “hung” on the walls, and the two-dimensional images of sculpture and decorative objects “placed” on three-dimensional architectural features. The prints are also effectively projected forward into space by the receding effect of the cool, pale blue walls.⁴⁷

Reconstruction of lost or altered displays is core work for art historians, but the Woodhall Park print room is almost entirely original in both its fabric and organisation, as proved by four surviving record drawings of the elevations and an associated catalogue.⁴⁸ The drawings, housed in an album titled “Plan of the Pictures”, are beautiful objects in their own right, carefully drawn and amplified with a light watercolour wash (figs. 9 and 10). They are functional, in numbering 287 of the reproductive prints in support of the associated catalogue (a later transcript of the original document), but they are also evidently presentation rather than working drawings. The sculptural and architectural prints are not identified, likely underscoring these as of lower status, but this material helps with identifying most of the images in the room, tells us which prints were originally on the wall to the right of the fireplace (removed when the door was inserted), and flags a very few later alterations.⁴⁹

In the drawing of the south wall, the frieze which runs along the top of the fireplace has been supplanted by a vital, but ultimately tantalising piece of information: “Design’d and Finished by R. Parker 1782”. Although print rooms have long been considered the domain of amateurs, it transpires that the one at Woodhall was the work of a contracted professional. There are certainly a number of examples which support an established image of elegant ladies (largely) whiling away leisure time with their scissors, not least the displays at Lucan House and Delville noted in the introduction.⁵⁰ But, once the fashion had become established, professionals began to offer their services, and the possibility of acquiring a print room without extensive personal time and effort. Thomas Chippendale’s firm, for example, counted this among their jobs at Mersham-le-Hatch, Sir Edward Knatchbull’s new house in Kent. As well as providing large quantities of furniture and putting up wallpaper, the company charged £14 10s. in 1767 for “Cutting Out the Prints Borders & Ornaments & Hanging Them” in a dressing room. The prints themselves were provided by Knatchbull, or another party, but Chippendale did also charge for the paper borders, corners, festoons, masks, and so on, used to ornament the scheme.⁵¹ This is the closest recorded parallel to the situation at Woodhall Park, but, unfortunately, “R. Parker” has left nothing like the paper trail provided by Chippendale, and has proved elusive to date. However, the fact that possibilities include a carver, a cabinet maker, and gilder indicates that he was likely one of the various craftsmen subcontracted to collaborate on Woodhall, perhaps providing this as one service among others.⁵²

Parker’s display is typical in balancing the use of series of prints and showcased works: the former sometimes a foil to the latter; at other times the source of those centrepieces. Engagement with this arrangement relies on the temporal process of looking, as some viewing needs to have been undertaken before the dynamics of framework and feature, background and foreground, become fully apparent. Various factors are at play in recognising the focal points. There is the hierarchy of the wall space, in which intuitive understanding of the centre as privileged over the periphery, and the middle over the upper and lower, is called upon. The hearth—drawing the eye as a dominant sculpted feature, the body as the source of warmth, and the mind as the sign of hospitality and home—inevitably directs particular attention to the prints above. Size clearly matters, as does the addition of a more or less elaborate border, with or without corner pieces, and the degree of ornateness in the “hanging” device chosen. Reshaping has mostly been reserved for subordinate prints towards the outside of groups, thus taking a more pronounced role in pattern making, and a more minor role in the “paper museum” (while participating in both). Finally, subject matter is key in two principal ways. On a basic level, a print attracts more attention if the main elements in its composition are larger, fewer, and more striking. Greater tonal contrasts and more dramatic lines play their part. But there is also an important appeal here to the “educated eye”. A vital part of the experience of this print room relies on traditional knowledge of the canon of Old Masters, and “celebrated works” in particular collections.⁵³ Looking towards the south wall, for example, the familiarity of Annibale Carracci’s Madonna del Silenzio (a major acquisition for the Royal Collection in 1766), or Anthony van Dyck’s portrait of the children of Charles I (of which there are numerous versions in British collections) ensure they leap out to those “in the know” (fig. 11).⁵⁴ This is a layered process, in which the display both relies on and confirms connoisseurial knowledge for its effect, the pleasure and affirmation engendered by recognition of images enhancing aesthetic response to the structured display.

Series of prints were widely available in the eighteenth century, not least for commercial reasons. They saved publishers time and money in the selling process, and served as attractive commodities in the marketplace, whether sold ready to be bound as books, with the possibility of framed display, or expressly for print rooms.⁵⁵ They were invaluable in helping to structure print room schemes: facilitating symmetry and providing a number of often thematically united prints of the same dimensions. They could provide strands of coherence in the display and encourage viewer engagement in tracing sets run across the walls. And, on a pragmatic note, the availability of series also meant that a good number of prints could be acquired in one fell swoop: invaluable when creating a display running into several hundreds. This last factor was surely in mind when Rumbold’s attorneys paid for subscriptions to two substantial publishing projects in the few years leading up to the creation of the print room at Woodhall. On 23 October 1778, they laid out £11 for the “Voy:Pictoursque”: Jean-Claude Richard, Abbé de Saint-Non’s celebrated illustrated Voyage Pittoresque ou Description des Royaumes de Naples et de Sicile.⁵⁶ While the text for the four volumes of this major publishing project was published from 1781 to 1786, the plates were issued in livraisons (parts) from March 1778 onwards.⁵⁷ Thirty-four of Saint-Non’s prints were used in the display at Woodhall, including topographical views, reproductions of various paintings in Neapolitan churches and palaces, and some antique images from Herculaneum. A later entry in the attorneys’ minutes, dated 16 March 1780, records a payment of £12 12s. “To Jos. Robinson[?] in full for Tableaux Topographiques”.⁵⁸ This refers to Jean-Benjamin de Laborde and Beat-Fidel von Zurlauben’s Tableaux Topographiques, Pittoresques, Physiques, Historiques, Moraux, Politiques, Littéraires, de la Suisse, published in four volumes by Jacques-Gabriel Clousier from 1780 to 1788. As in the case of Saint-Non’s publication, this was produced in Paris, with the bankers, Biddulph and Cox, handling subscription monies in London.⁵⁹ This monumental publication contained 430 images, eighty-eight of which were used at Woodhall Park, ranging from landscape, genre and historical scenes, through to portraits of notable Swiss figures.

Analysing the walls, it is clear that these two series were used to provide the bulk of the display (fig. 12). They are often used interchangeably, paired and grouped together, the transition between prints from the Voyage Pittoresque and Tableaux Topographiques eased through matched shaping and shared borders. Together, they effectively underpin the structure of the walls, providing a framework against which to display the more notable prints. Prints from these two series generally appear in the top and bottom registers around the room, and in clusters framing more prominent images. On the east wall, for example, the uppermost prints predominantly consist of Swiss landscapes from the Tableaux, framing Domenico Cunego’s print after Gavin Hamilton’s Juno on the left, and Robert Strange’s etching and engraving after Guido Reni’s Cleopatra on the right.⁶⁰ In each case, a strikingly posed female figure is thus set off by paired views of bridges, valleys, rivers, and gorges, broadly reduced to generic alpine scenes, denuded of the letterpress which provides the specific locations. They thus recede to the status of foils to the higher status works.

DOI Small oval portraits taken from the Tableaux Topographiques similarly function as predominantly formal framework, intermixed with similar portraits taken from George Kearsley’s Copperplate Magazine.⁶¹ With no apparent connection between Rumbold and Switzerland, it seems that the particular names and accomplishments of these Swiss soldiers, artists, historians, and medics are of no importance.⁶² Predominantly, the portraits in the room are dotted around the walls to break up the arrangements of larger prints: simple head and shoulders images to contrast with the more complex figurative works and landscapes. Indeed, as “suspended” from the bottom of those larger prints in a number of cases, they function on a par with the decorative festoons and tassels. However, there is one notable exception among these various portraits, where the significance and recognisability of the sitter, and the central placement of the image, ensures that it leaps to attention once noticed. This is a profile portrait of George III, after Allan Ramsay, taken from the Copperplate Magazine.⁶³ Suspended from a candelabrum placed on a bracket, this gives a respectful, if relatively modest, nod to the reigning king (fig. 13).

Series are not, however, necessarily background. The Piazzetta heads in the coving demonstrate this, with their striking formal qualities, privileged and separated off in this upper register, their significance underscored by the fact that every plate from the set of fourteen has been utilised. The twenty-one prints from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Vedute di Roma are another case in point, and worth dwelling on in some detail.⁶⁴ This etched series of images of Rome was started by Piranesi in 1747, published both individually and in groups, and continued until his death in 1778. By then, a complete set would have consisted of the title page and 134 views. The Vedute consistently catch the eye as one moves around the print room at Woodhall, not least as larger than most of the other prints arrayed on the walls. The need for substantial images to offset more readily available smaller prints in such a scheme was noted by Lady Louisa Conolly when she was working on her print room at Castletown, near Dublin. She wrote to her sister, Lady Sarah Bunbury, on 14 February 1768, to ask: “at any time that you chance to go into a print Shop, I should be obliged to you, if you will buy me, five or Six large Prints, there are some of Teniers engraved by LeBas, which I am told are larger than the common size”.⁶⁵ Piranesi’s Vedute fell into this desired category.

The Piranesis also attract particular attention as consistently prominently positioned: most notable is the exterior view of the Pantheon in a prime location over the fireplace on the south wall. But just as much attention has been paid to formal synergies between these compositions as with those lower-status prints from the Voyage Pittoresque and Tableaux Topographiques, their prominence in fact enhanced by the kinds of compositional echoes which elsewhere serve primarily to create a formally pleasing backdrop. On the east wall, for example, two landscape-format Piranesis have been centrally placed in both the left- and right-hand sections. In each case, an exterior view of a basilica, seen at a sharp angle from the right, has been positioned above an interior view of a nave, showcasing Piranesi’s love of spectacular perspectival effects.⁶⁶ Four more Piranesis have been featured in the central section of that wall, including a view of Trajan’s column paired with a similarly portrait-format print of the column of Marcus Aurelius in the Piazza Colonna.⁶⁷ All these relationships have clearly been carefully planned and thought through.

As well as their dramatic formal qualities, substantial size, and prominent placement, the visibility of Piranesi’s Vedute owes much to the recognisability of both the prints and the famed sites in Rome which they depict. Indeed, the multiple appearance of the Pantheon in the room—interior and exterior, viewed both near and from across the Piazza della Rotonda—underscores the sense of perambulation around sites of such renown in this period of the Grand Tour that a nod of recognition seems perhaps more invited than close study of their forms.⁶⁸ The Vedute were immensely popular across Europe in the eighteenth century, framing general perceptions of ancient and modern Rome.⁶⁹ As a result, it is not surprising to find that these Piranesis were used in other print rooms as well. There are ten in the display at Blickling Hall in Norfolk, including the exterior view of the Pantheon again in a prominent position.⁷⁰ The print room at Bretton Park in Yorkshire, now destroyed, was solely decorated with these prints (including that etching of the Pantheon yet again), densely displayed without borders or, indeed, any intervening space.⁷¹ The scheme at Beaufront in Northumberland is also long gone, but was once, according to the 1st Duchess of Northumberland, “fitted up with Prints (chiefly Piranesis) on a Buff Colour paper”.⁷²

The prominence of the Piranesis at Woodhall, together with the use of the Tableaux Topographiques and Voyage Pittoresque prints, underscores the fact that this is not only a paper museum, it is also a paper Grand Tour. Many tourists to Italy visited Switzerland, most typically on their way home, and Naples and Rome were key destinations.⁷³ This also contextualises the two central prints on the east wall, which take the viewer to a third major Italian site for travellers: plates 6 and 7 from Giuseppe Zocchi’s Vedute … della Città di Firenze, published in 1744.⁷⁴ These are not only very substantial and central prints, they are also positioned at eye level, and are further emphasised by their particularly finely detailed rocaille borders of leaves, shells, and garlands.⁷⁵ The virtual tour constructed through the topographical views in the room is echoed here in reduced form, as one is presented with complementary views up and down the Arno. In the left-hand plate, we look eastwards from the north bank towards the Ponte Santa Trinità. That view includes the position on the south bank from which the second, more proximate view towards the same bridge has been taken, inviting the viewer imaginatively to navigate the river. Use of this pair, isolated from the rest of Zocchi’s series, commutes them into “starring works”, more of the ilk of the Madonna del Silenzio (fig. 14).

Movement of the body and eye within the Woodhall print room is thus extended to remembered or imagined movement around the key tourist routes of Europe—at least for those with the ability to recognise the most significant sites. Rumbold and his family did go on a Grand Tour, but not until a few years after the print room was created, in 1786. Thus, this trip in print would have presented itself as, at first, access to unseen sites of knowledge and privilege, and only later as memento.⁷⁶ Awareness of Rumbold’s status as a nabob, and one of particularly dubious reputation at that, leads inexorably to conjecture that this statement of taste and learning—this reference to a rite of elite passage—was aspirational, perhaps defensive. It evokes the traditional position of the young male aristocrat inheriting the family estate, rather than that of a nouveau riche whose wealth had deeply problematic origins.

But the statement of taste and learning at Woodhall goes beyond the tour of countries and their landscapes, of cities, squares, and their key buildings, to major works of art within those buildings. As well as plates from the Voyage Pittoresque which show artworks housed in sites such as Naples Cathedral and the Charterhouse of San Martino, we significantly find all the prints from the final series with which I want to engage here: Gavin Hamilton’s Schola Italica Picturae, published in Rome in 1773.⁷⁷ This was a lavish publication, consisting of a frontispiece and thirty-nine reproductive engravings after sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian Old Master paintings. Some of the finest engravers in Rome at the time, including Domenico Cunego and Giovanni Volpato, worked on the project for Hamilton over four years, creating prints after canonical works by artists such as Guido Reni, Correggio, Domenichino, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian. It was a highly desirable commodity. In the year of its publication, Joshua Reynolds wrote to Benjamin West, “beg[ging] to know if Mr West can inform him where Mr G. Hamilton’s Prints are to be sold”.⁷⁸

Series such as the Piranesi Vedute are easily recognisable as a set, so that, once two or more have been noticed, the viewer is effectively invited to locate others around the walls. The images from the Schola, however, are only detectable as a series to those in the know. Otherwise, these fragment into celebrated Italian Renaissance Old Master pictures, familiar compositions attracting the eye as one looks around the room. One of the largest clusters is to be found on the south wall above the fireplace, ten of Hamilton’s plates encircling Piranesi’s view of the Pantheon, joined at the top by the Madonna del Silenzio (fig. 15). These are clearly to be looked at in some detail, but are still organised with attention to compositional echoes, size, and shape. The prints after Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam and The Temptation and Expulsion from Eden form a pair in both their elongated landscape format and their mutual origin in the Sistine Chapel, while Cunego’s etching and engraving after Ludovico Carracci’s Birth of John the Baptist only shares its broad dimensions with its pendant: Volpato’s print of Paolo Veronese’s Feast at the House of Simon.⁷⁹ There appears to have been no ready companion for Cunego’s print after Ludovico Carracci’s Providence, and so this has been coupled with another by the same printmaker, which sits comfortably within this scheme: Gavin Hamilton’s own Innocentia.⁸⁰ Notably, the principle of using shaping in the outer parameters of print groups is applied even here: plates after Correggio’s Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine of Siena and Federico Barocci’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt have been trimmed into octagons.⁸¹

Juxtaposing Antonio Capellan’s prints after Correggio and Barocci as used at Woodhall Park, cut into octagons, and unmodified impressions draws attention to the decisions and processes which have gone into the creation of this print room: to Parker’s handiwork. Engagement with material and technique always implicates manufacture, but the survival of unmodified materials renders it particularly vivid and accessible here, the business of “reverse-engineering” production encouraging us to “linger with patience in the space of making”.⁸² That accessibility is enhanced in this case by the fact that the physical processes at stake are non-specialist. That is emphatically not to deny the dexterity, time, and care involved, but the evident stages of cutting, pasting, and positioning connect with common craft practices. While the materiality of specialist printmaking techniques has to be conveyed by demonstrations, and perhaps hands-on experiments with a burin or an acid bath, the creation of a print room with the resulting engravings and etchings can speak readily to many viewers. Study of the kinds of tools that would have been used both enhances that immediacy and underscores the fundamental nature of the basic actions, if not the skill and patience required: small, scalpel-like knives and delicate scissors.⁸³

The process of cutting has also trimmed away the discrete number at the top right of each plate which indicates its position in the running order of the Schola. This underscores the setting aside of Hamilton’s sequencing in deference to the alternative priorities of the display. And it has removed all of the letterpress which originally ran below the image, including the name of the original artist and whereabouts of the painting, the identity and location of the engraver, and the date of the print’s publication. The material supporting the “tracking” system within the international print market—that key information about designers, engravers, and publishers—is thus lost.⁸⁴ But text has also been excised that, on unmodified prints in both separate sheets and bound copies of Hamilton’s series, would have framed the viewer’s response. The letterpress beneath the scene of the Virgin, Christ Child, and St. Catherine gives only the basic title, but that below Barocci’s picture provides a relevant quote from the Gospel of Matthew: “Accepit puerum, et matrem ejus nocte, et secessit in Aegyptum”; “he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt”.⁸⁵ The verse reminds the viewer of Joseph and Mary’s flight, and its urgency, as well as the moment of rest which is the focus of the image: Joseph passing some berries to his son; Mary taking some water; the donkey standing placidly by. The sense of respite from the journey becomes more dominant once the letterpress has been trimmed away, and the image left to speak for itself.

The print has thus been dislocated from its original source, and information gives way to visual effect. The reworking of such impressions for inclusion in a print room constitutes a second process of translation to that undertaken by Capellan, and one that demands serious scrutiny.⁸⁶ This is a process evocatively described by David Pullins as a “productive act of destruction”.⁸⁷ The print has been altered from an intermedial object in which text and iconography interact, to pure image. This is in line with the conceit of the paper museum, as the impressions are rendered as akin to paintings in a room, amplified by their added frames and the trompe l’œil hanging devices. The lettering would be hard to decipher much above eye level, and would no doubt look decidedly messy if retained, but its removal, above all, also shifts the print from being something one might keep in a portfolio, in a library, into a picture to be displayed on a wall.

It was most common for text to be trimmed away in this fashion when creating a print room, but Woodhall Park is a rare case as that lettering has a legacy, in the form of the catalogue which accompanies the elevation drawings.⁸⁸ The entries at first seem opaque, but a little investigation reveals that the cataloguer (perhaps Parker himself) simply transcribed whatever text was originally to be found immediately below the image, barring publication lines. The recording process was thus intimately connected with the making of the room, as the text must have either been transcribed before the prints were cut into shape, or subsequently, using strips of paper excised from the impressions. Owing to the variability of the arrangement of letterpress, the entries provide different kinds of information: attributions, titles, keys, dedications, and verses.⁸⁹ Matching the recorded letterpress with that on extant impressions gives the process of cataloguing, as well as that of cutting, a striking immediacy. This is enhanced as one follows the work of the cataloguer around the room. They started with the coving, before moving to the long east wall, working down each of the three sections in turn, left to right. The south, west, and north walls followed in turn. The reading dynamic is countered, however, by a strong emphasis on pairings, so that a broadly left-to-right pattern of recording is fragmented by a jumping between pendant images, whether on either side of a central print, or either side of a section of wall. The visual logic and patterning of the display thus ultimately triumphs.

The first stage of the making process—emphasised in this juxtaposition with extant unmodified plates and underscored by the transcription of the excised letterpress in the catalogue—is about loss and waste. However, the next stage concerns addition, most evident in the framing of the prints with those paper borders increasingly produced specifically for that purpose in the period. In a few cases, the decorative surround of the original print has been used to provide an integrated frame (fig. 20). However, the vast majority have been adorned with those borders, often mimicking the designs of wooden and gilt painting frames, which became widely available from the 1750s onwards. These were sold as strips, generally by the dozen. It is the use of these borders which completes the transformation of the intermedial object of the print into a two-dimensional, monochrome version of a painting, which can then be “hung” on the wall.

François Vivares was the most prolific producer of print room material in the period. By 1760, he was advertising a “Great Variety of Borders, Festoons, Trophies, &c.” in the press, his catalogue explicitly linking this material to print rooms: “all Sorts of the best Borders, Festoons and Trophies, Etc. Likewise all Sorts of Prints for Hanging Rooms”.⁹⁰ Vivares’s business supplied at least half of the twenty border designs used at Woodhall, and also he may well have been the source of some of the prints. The fact that the same conjunction of Vivares’s border and Piranesi Vedute is also to be found at Blickling could indicate that these vistas of Rome were acquired from his business, and that the combination was on his recommendation. As well as making prints into pictures, their paper frames add considerably to the decorativeness of and pattern making in the print room. They help to unite prints through the display: sometimes linking a series (the same border is used for all the Piazzetta heads in the coving, for example); sometimes connecting prints from different sets (as with plates from the Voyage Pittoresque and the Tableaux Topographiques). However, they foster variety as well as unity, amply demonstrated by the six different borders used for the prints from the Schola arrayed around Piranesi’s Pantheon, above the hearth.

Borders would be selected, cut from their sheets, and then fitted around the plates. But it is easy to overlook the degree of creative engagement at stake in this apparently simple process. Curved designs and complete round or oval paper frames could be purchased, but creators of print rooms often cut small lengths of the more widely available straight borders to negotiate prints of these shapes. Furthermore, a complex border might be used whole or split, providing thicker or thinner frames for respectively larger or smaller prints. The same paper border might be used in one orientation on one print, and then reversed for another. Internal portions could be excised to allow the paintwork of the wall to show through, creating porosity, tempering the boundary between print and support, and lightening the effect—or not. Corner pieces could be used if desired, and the hanging devices available on the market ranged from lions’ and satyrs’ masks through to rings and bows, both ribbon and cord.

Within the basic drive to frame and hang, the degree of creativity here is striking. The options available through selection, orientation, excision, and addition, and combinations of those processes, seem obvious when viewing the results, but likely primarily presented themselves through the act of making. But the business of taking apart and recontextualising, creating new entities, also extends to the reproductive material in the room. It is worth considering again that section of the display immediately above the fireplace in this context. The prints after Old Masters such as Correggio and Barocci dominate here, and attract most scrutiny. The conceit of the candelabra “sitting” on the mantelpiece offers a different attraction in its wit, and the adjustment of the eye that is always required by a trompe l’œil effect. The various hanging devices, floral and husk festoons, and diminutive prints linked by tiny paper chains create ornamentation that essentially replicates the decorative idiom of the Etruscan style in print. But it is also worth setting some of those smaller impressions against their source: a couple of pages of images from the Voyage Pittoresque, included in a chapter “De La Découverte d’Herculanum avec un détail sommaire de ses differèntes Antiquités” (figs. 21 and 22). As used at Woodhall, they cease to be illustrative to an accompanying text. They have been removed from their larger sheets, fragmented, reordered, and combined with small portraits to become a largely decorative component of the display, offsetting the more substantially proportioned and prioritised prints after Italian Renaissance paintings. The sum of the parts from Saint-Non’s publication is thus reduced to its component elements.

The Voyage Pittoresque is here dismantled, but prints are elsewhere reconfigured and amalgamated to create new objects. Of note is a dominant element in the centre of the west wall, between the windows: the frontispiece from Hamilton’s Schola, consisting of a tablet with a carved inscription, resting on two corbels (figs. 23, 24 and 25).⁹¹ Its inclusion in the display perhaps seems surprising, as frontispieces are often considered supplementary material to primary content, but it effectively serves to identify and draw together the disparate and variously formatted prints after Old Masters from Hamilton’s series around the walls. It is also a fine print in its own right, the tablet adorned with two ignudi from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, positioned either side of a roundel of Romulus and Remus being suckled by the wolf. However, the frontispiece has been combined with another print from the Schola, collaged to create a new, larger, and more dramatic printed element. Moses from plate 16, after a figure by Parmigianino, has been carefully cut out and pasted at the top of the tablet. The heavy foliate garlands thus become near seamless extensions of the drapery swathed across his lap. The new object assists in pattern making in the print room display. It provides a large single element to sit in the centre of an expanse of wall, offsetting an arrangement of substantial plates. Its verticality echoes that of the framing pilasters. But there is also iconographic play at stake here. The collaged frontispiece pays homage to the original arrangement of the depicted ignudi in the Sistine Chapel, as the figure of Moses brandishing the tablets of law above his head echoes the figure in the same relative position in Michelangelo’s scheme: God dividing light from darkness (fig. 26). The collaged print thus encapsulates the relationship between the decorative and the iconographic—between formal style and connoisseurial meaning—at play in the print room.

The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction is made idiosyncratic through individual engagement and creative practice in such acts of collage. As Freya Gowrley has observed: “[collaged] objects are compelling examples of composite cultural production, bringing together disparate elements in order to create new and highly personal narratives through a complex dialogue of consumption and production”.⁹² Commercially produced multiples are actively, physically engaged with and adapted, in a process which results less in precursors to the jarring meeting points which characterise much modernist collage, than in the seamlessness emphasised in the creation of new images by artists such as Max Ernst.⁹³ Instead of collision, the focus here is on accumulation, printed matter used as building blocks to create relatively seamless new wholes. This process is most evident at Woodhall Park, however, in the use of sculptural and decorative prints. Of particular interest here is the material taken from a publication surely purposefully acquired for use in the print room, although not recorded in the attorneys’ minutes: the series of 110 prints of Vasi, Candelabri, Cippi, Sarcofagi, Tripodi, Lucerne and other Ornamenti Antichi, published by Giovanni Battista Piranesi in Rome in 1778.⁹⁴

This is the source of those candelabra, vases, and urns which “sit” on the dado rail and mantelpiece, excised from individual and composite plates. It is also the source of the sculptural material placed on brackets around the room: sometimes taken whole; sometimes partial; sometimes formed of parts of vases and monuments spliced together from more than one plate. Such collaging of Piranesi’s paper productions echoes the processes which the artist himself undertook with some of the objects depicted in these prints. Items which he offered at the Palazzo Tomati in Rome were compiled from antique fragments, such as those excavated at Tivoli by Gavin Hamilton.⁹⁵ The candelabra prints on the mantelpiece at Woodhall, for example, constitute reduced-scale, etched versions of two of his most monumental confections, one of which (3.5 metres tall) was designed for his own tomb (see fig. 22).⁹⁶ Huge, fantastical constructions, these sculptures are capricci in marble—shrunk in the print room to appropriate proportions to sit on a mantelpiece in paper form. Dissection and assemblage of parts of the prints after these objects by Piranesi thus echoes the artist’s own practice, showing a creative liberty with his work both enabled by, and an homage to, his own avowed freedom with antique artefacts (itself an homage to the creative freedom of the Romans). Both are underpinned by an established belief in the eighteenth century that classical culture should be approached with, to quote Piranesi, “an Inventive … creative Genius”, paving “a road to the finding of new ornaments and new manners”.⁹⁷ Josiah Wedgwood and the Adam brothers followed Piranesi in this principle, fragmenting, appropriating, and recombining as they lifted motifs and translated them into other media.⁹⁸ And so too did Parker, dismembering Piranesi’s prints with the knife or scissors, in deference to the proportions and forms desired for a decorative scheme in a country house in Hertfordshire.

Material from Piranesi’s Vasi, Candelabri, Cippi has also been collaged on top of the paper pilasters which punctuate and thereby help to structure the walls at Woodhall Park. These come from the final set of prints which I want to explore here: the Loggie di Rafaele nel Vaticano. Published in Rome in three volumes by Marc Pagliarini, from 1772 to 1777, these plates document the second-floor loggia at the Vatican, decorated in the early sixteenth century by Raphael, Giovanni da Udine, and Giulio Romano, in forty-six large prints.⁹⁹ While the ceiling vaults of the loggia are adorned with scenes from the Bible, the rest of the gallery is covered with distinctive grotesque decoration, looking to ancient wall painting schemes: arabesque patterns, interspersed with animal and human figures. The loggia would have been admired by those who did the Grand Tour and could see the scheme at first hand, but its significance and influence was greatly enhanced by Pagliarini’s project, adding these designs to the pool of classical resources available for creative use by neoclassical architects and designers. One Father Thorpe noted the considerable impact of the prints in both Italy and England: 

Since the Vatican Pilasters have been printed & coloured, their ornaments are now put upon every thing. Coaches, Picture Frames, & all kinds of furniture are dressed up with them … These Ornaments & others in the Etruscan stile engross all the taste of the Gentry in this country; many of the little orders for Chimney Pieces intended for England are to be executed after the Etruscan manner in coloured Scagluiola, a platform for a grand Desart is just finished in the same material and manner.¹⁰⁰

As Hamilton’s Schola prints are acknowledged by the inclusion of the frontispiece on the west wall, so that for the Loggie is included at the centre top of the north wall (fig. 27).

The reproduction of each bay of the loggia is split across two plates in Pagliarini’s publication, and the logic of this segmentation is developed in their use at Woodhall (fig. 28). The nature of this print publication brings that sense of building block components in the business of collage to the fore. Single plates have been used for the short, printed pilasters which adorn the insides of the niches either side of the fireplace on the south wall, each of which thus amounts to half of one of the pilasters in the loggia. Here we encounter partiality and excision. Conversely, the tall pilasters on each of the north, east, and west walls are made up of four plates each (thus two of the pilasters from the Vatican loggia), placed one on top of the other. We therefore here find a combined process of elimination and augmentation. While those in the alcoves are shrunken, halved versions of the pilasters in Raphael’s scheme, their doubling creates architectural features beyond all rules of classical proportion, enhanced by their isolation from the wider bays of the loggia, and their consequent thinness. The invitation for the purchaser to join together the pairs of plates in Pagliarini’s volume, in order to create complete bays, is thus built on and extended, as something new is created. Furthermore, while the original pilasters at the Vatican loggia “carry” the arches over the windows, and the vaults of the ceiling, their printed counterparts at Woodhall instead bear only the evoked (lesser) weight of Piranesi’s urns and vases. The resultant, composite, whimsical entities have more of the flavour of the columns in the centre of the Roman piazzas, depicted in Piranesi Vedute around the room, than their originals.

Further whimsy is at play in the use of the prints after the doors at each end of the loggia, likewise each split between two plates in the publication, but united in the print room, and then trimmed around the arched shape of the lunette. These have been pasted onto the centre of the coving on both the east and west sides of the room, steps added below to create additional bulk and height, but also creating a nonsense of the reference enshrined in the frontispiece, in which one of those doors is visible at the end of the gallery. However, their inclusion on opposite sides of the room at Woodhall frames this as some kind of comparable space, the gap between those printed doors playfully echoing the space between the real doors in Raphael’s loggia.

In some ways, the Loggie prints sit alongside Piranesi’s views of Roman buildings and monuments, or the reproductions of paintings and frescos from that city, as documenting the sites at the apex of the Grand Tour. But, as architectural elements divorced from the view commemorated on the north wall, from their context, and as positioned around the print room, their inherently spatial quality creates an experience that is both more immersive and more confusing. Certainly, their reduction of scale, and the transformation of colour into monochrome, replicates processes evident in those other reproductions. However, the ease of familiarity with etchings and engravings after Old Masters (for example), standing in for paintings, is absent in the effect of these paper architectural features, removed from their own three-dimensional context, and strangely insubstantial echoes of their originals (fig. 29).

The print room at Woodhall Park is a liminal space in several ways. Designed as a billiard room, it sits between the main rooms and the service areas in one wing of the house: linked to the former by reverberating neoclassical motifs and stylistic language; its role as a less formal, less public space echoed by the translation of those motifs into the medium of paper. The use of prints is akin to a bound volume or sheets in a portfolio being laid out across the walls. But the scheme is also something between a gallery of sculpture and painting, achieved in trompe l’œil, and a particularly elaborate wallpaper. This was a mode of decoration which could be, and was, undertaken by amateurs, but in this case (and others) was the work of a professional. Home-made potential was capitalised on, taking the democratic actions of scissoring and slicing, positioning and pasting, into the realm of commercial enterprise. Furthermore, the Woodhall Park room is a deeply learned display, engaging with European cultures familiar to the eighteenth-century Grand Tourist. It features a host of historic sites and quotes numerous Old Masters: testament to the knowledge of the creator, “R. Parker”, and a compliment to the implied engagement and comprehension of the patron, Sir Thomas Rumbold. However, it is also a witty scheme, in which Piranesi’s pasticci of ancient artefacts were then recollaged through manipulation of their printed reproductions.¹⁰¹ The framing of the room as some kind of reduced scale, monochrome version of the Raphael loggia at the Vatican, meanwhile, pays homage to that High Renaissance touchstone for the grotesque style. But that scheme has been reinterpreted, dismembered, stretched, shrunk, and flattened to the fully two dimensional. Certainly, the antique in this period was often deployed with notable freedom and lightness of touch, used as a “magazine of common property, always open to the public, whence every man has the right to take what he pleases”.¹⁰² Adriano Aymonino and Viccy Coltman have shown how its forms could be transmuted via engravings into paint, plasterwork, furniture, silverware, and pottery.¹⁰³ But, at Woodhall Park, those engravings themselves were used to create a modish decorative scheme, stuck directly onto the walls. Commercially produced prints were cut up and pulled apart to be refashioned into something new, taking their place in the long history of collage, “reproducing the creative act that had brought the original into being”.¹⁰⁴

The Woodhall Park print room is also a liminal space in its position between iconography and decoration, between meaning and pattern making. Famous images leap out from the walls: Raphael’s Triumph of Galatea, for example, or The Creation of Adam from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. Images of famous places catch the eye, such as the Pantheon, which then encourage the viewer with time and interest to locate other Roman sites depicted by Piranesi, pasted around the room. But the viewer might not have time or interest. An encounter with this scheme might rather leave a much more diffuse sense of learning and travel: a general impression of alpine views and Italian cities, of familiar Old Master paintings and sculpture. Or—for another viewer, or perhaps the same viewer on a different occasion—the shapes into which these reproduced paintings have been cut, and the complex outlines of the excised prints of festoons, trophies, and sculpture, might leave a predominantly decorative impression. Renowned works of art and views of historic sites thus rise from or sink into the overall, symmetrical, and meticulously organised pattern of the walls. Neoclassical print rooms such as this engage with the stylistic language of the arabesque, in both use of specific motifs and the dynamics of trailing and swagging, of hanging and supporting. But, as Katie Scott has so eloquently shown, the arabesque—in its lightness, weightlessness, and instability—is a vehicle for play: “the three-dimensional world of figurative representation is caught, delimited, even undone by the flat tactics of an incursive ornamental surround”.¹⁰⁵

The digital features dovetailed with the text in this article have engaged with the print room’s liminality; with the various slippages between formal and informal space, professional craftmanship and home-made look, learnedness and play, iconography and pattern making. They are rooted in fruitful collaboration between the author, filmmaker, and photographer on a two-day shoot at the house. In an event held in his honour at the Paul Mellon Centre in October 2021, Mark Girouard was prompted to reflect on his relationship with the architectural photographers with whom he’d collaborated during his time as a writer for Country Life between the late 1950s and late 1960s. The standard process then, he recalled, was to mark up a plan with arrows, so the photographer could visit the property subsequent to the author and take the required shots.¹⁰⁶ With the luxury of more time and an interest in process, the possibility here of moving and animated as well as still images, and generous support from both the owner of Woodhall and British Art Studies, sustained on-site collaboration has considerably shaped work on this article. The underpinning conceit of balancing the informative and the experiential, of fulfilling the documentary imperative and engaging with kinaesthetic experience and temporally framed viewing, was fully developed during that time at the property. This text, standard and moving illustrations, filmed and animated sequences, carefully lit elevation shots and more atmospheric footage, are thus intended to have a cumulative, layered effect. Each technology makes a valuable contribution to the whole, offsetting some deficiencies in the others, showcasing the benefits of a varied “toolbox”. Only moving image can effectively engage with the complex spatial dynamics of a staircase, for example; only evenly lit, professionally focused photographs of walls can enable detailed study of the prints.

One aim of both text and images, still and moving, has been to connect the exterior and interior of Woodhall Park and to engage with the sequential experience of rooms, showing how the print room is embedded within the broader stylistic economy of the house. The interconnectedness of rooms can certainly be explored through scrutiny of the ground plan, but the considerable limits of such diagrammatic record are made readily evident in film, far more expressive of the pronounced transition here as one passes from the main body of Woodhall Park through to the wing and the print room. This approach builds on a drive in country house studies in recent years, towards fuller engagement with the total effect of such properties, engaging with landscape, architecture, décor, furnishing and both fine and decorative arts.¹⁰⁷ It counters a traditional tension between “envelope” and “interior” in architectural history, and the inevitable tendency to disaggregate parts of a building in analysis of drawings and photographs.¹⁰⁸ Furthermore, elevation shots privilege the frontal, fixed, focused viewpoint, and effectively follow the logic of the “developed surface drawing” which originated in the eighteenth century, showing all four elevations of a room as if they were folded out and flattened into the same plane, providing maximum detail.¹⁰⁹ But film engages more sensitively with architectural space. It captures proportion more effectively and reconnects surfaces, navigating corners, and engaging with the relationships between opposing walls.¹¹⁰

Film also engages with movement of body and gaze. We have sought to engage with the embodied, kinetic experience of a country house interior, and a particular room within it. Our concern has been the role of eye level and sight lines, of centres and peripheries, and the effects of oblique angles and partial views, complementing the purer information provided by professionally lit images of walls and prints. The technique of “pulling focus” in the moving illustrations, furthermore, has engaged with the critical experience of “noticing” in the room, exploring the processes by which prints variously catch the attention or recede into backdrop, and the mechanisms by which related images effectively call out to one another, and connect around the space. This is also an experiment in moving away from the traditional, desaturated elevation with a key: lighter on detail certainly, but an engaged and hopefully engaging means of identifying material within a dense display.¹¹¹ It is worth emphasising again, however, that this technique is emphatically an avatar for experience. This is analogous to embodied viewing, rather than an attempt at mimesis: an analytic tool, rather than a vehicle which claims to provide any straightforwardly immediate or direct access to an embodied encounter. The digital features are visual ekphrasis, to dovetail with textual ekphrasis. Both are fundamentally “rhetorical description”.¹¹²

The final film has allowed us to engage with materials, processes, and the temporality of making. The inevitable distance created by lack of experience and expertise can create problems with communicating complex artistic techniques such as engraving, oil painting, or stone carving, working with manipulable materials such as metal, paint, and marble. A valuable opportunity with collage lies in the graspability of how a print has been cut, reoriented, parts removed, and other elements added to create a new object.¹¹³ The options available at each stage render the choices and decisions made particularly vivid. Here, cutting as practice-based research has allowed engagement with the viscerality of the processes at stake. It quickly becomes evident whether the knife or the scissors is the most appropriate tool for a particular job; how the relative scale of images lies at the heart of collaging. As such, the digital feature engages with recent work which uses re-enactment as a valuable historical methodology for researching craftmanship, “a body-based discourse in which the past is reanimated through physical and psychological experience”.¹¹⁴

The immediate purpose of this article has been a detailed analysis of the exemplary surviving print room at Woodhall Park, using the lenses of space, display, and making to approach the room, prints, and decorative scheme in a variety of ways. But it is also intended as a contribution to the presentation of research on and engagement of audiences with interiors through a digital format. All works of art present their own challenges in the business of description and analysis, but architectural spaces and decoration are particularly challenging. We have here sought to explore how a textual account can interact productively with a range of still, moving, and animated images. Such a layered, multifaceted approach can help to navigate the sheer quantity of information involved in any such complex scheme. Detailed, readily reusable data in text and illustration is balanced against more streamlined, succinct, and immediate communication through film, animation, and documentary, able to express a point through a short sequence which would otherwise require a lengthy paragraph of text and numerous still images. Such range thus facilitates a deeper and richer encounter with space, engaging with both information and experience, and the various and complex shades in between.

This article is part of a larger project on the print room, supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2021–22. I am also indebted to Mr. Ralph Abel Smith for his extensive assistance with my work, and generosity with his knowledge and time. I would like to thank a number of colleagues for shared knowledge of and valuable conversation about print rooms, including Louise Voll Box, Esther Chadwick, Sarah Grant, Kate Heard, Anna O’Regan, and Clare Taylor. Finally, this article owes much to the British Art Studies team at the Paul Mellon Centre, and to the readers for the original submission, whose feedback considerably helped with its development.