A seafarer's choice?

The Velvet Room at Ditchley Park, Oxfordshire, is decorated with a highly unusual silk. Annabel Westman offers a new interpretation of its imagery and purchase

- Annabel Westman

IN August 1778, Mrs Philip Lybbe Powys, née Caroline Girle (1738–1817), visited Ditchley Park and wrote in her journal that: ‘A bed-chamber with hangings, bed, and furniture of crimson and yellow velvet is shown as a great curiosity, but I think ugly. The pattern is all pagoda.’ Echoing the words of the housekeeper who had conducted the tour, she added: ‘It [the velvet] was a present of Admiral Lee, my Lord’s brother, who had taken it taken out of the loom in China, and the loom broke that no one else might have the same.’

Lybbe Powys’s critical comment on the design was hardly surprising in an age when the delicate patterns of neo-Classicism had superseded the bold colours and curvaceous lines of the Rococo. She was viewing a room furnished in about 1740 that was still—as we know from an inventory of 1772 —complete with wall hang- ings, a bed with mahogany posts, two festoon window curtains, five maho- gany armchairs and two stools. All were hung or covered with ‘Rich figured Genoa Velvet’, a cut and uncut patterned velvet on a satin ground. As John Cornforth has observed, ‘the effect must have been overpowering’.

Ditchley Park is well known to readers of COUNTRY LIFE, the house having been the subject of numerous articles since the first one was published on October 22, 1904. It is, therefore, fitting that new analysis, prompted by the recent conservation of the velvet wall hangings by Zenzie Tinker Conservation, should be recorded in these pages.