Gavin Stamp

Edwin Lutyens: Country Houses from the Archives of Country Life, Aurum Press, 2001

All of us, I think, have learnt to look at Lutyens through the photographs of his buildings taken by Country Life, either in the articles themselves or through those specially taken for Weaver’s book in 1913 which were then recycled in the Lutyens Memorial Volumes. This marvellous book by Gavin Stamp presents a selection of these photographs again, beautifully reproduced, and many, it must be admitted, are familiar friends. However, included with each house are photographs which I have never seen before and they are particularly thrilling, giving us fresh glimpses of exteriors and interiors as they were at the time they were built – the drawing room at Crooksbury, for example, garden steps at Plumpton or a view of the southern garden at Gledstone looking out over open country. Those showing the authentic interiors are especially valuable as the character of many of his finest houses has been much altered in recent years. The sections on Penheale Manor and Abbey House also do much to reinstate these comparatively neglected buildings as important works, both in that ‘abstracted Tudor style’ which we are growing to appreciate today.

But this is not just a picture book. As well as providing detailed descriptions for each building illustrated, Gavin Stamp has written a brilliant introduction cover many aspects of Lutyens’s work and analysing his complex architecture, as well as charting the rise and fall of interest in his buildings in the last century. He describes, for example, how the editorial policy of Country Life has affected how we value Lutyens – how Country Life ignored at the time the ‘New Art’ buildings: The Ferry Inn at Rosneath, Berrydown and Le Bois des Moutiers, for example, only photographing the latter in 1981 at the time of a new interest in the work of the late 1890s generated by Roderick Gradidge’s Dream Houses and the Hayward exhibition. However, he also makes the point that although Lutyens was criticized by some of his contemporaries for being a ‘Society’ architect and ‘in with the right sort of people’ through his marriage to Lady Emily Lytton, many of the connections that mattered actually came via Gertrude Jekyll and Edward Hudson, the proprietor of Country Life.

Margaret Richardson