Had I not been sent this year’s art books to review, the one I would most have liked to receive as a present would be Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill edited by Michael Snodin (Yale, £40). J. H. Plumb — the historian who achieved the unusual distinction of being shouted out as a wrong answer by a schoolboy in Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film If.... — dismissed the creator of this delectable Gothick meringue of a house as ‘incurably mannered and irrelevant’. Earlier, in a passage oddly not quoted in this book, Lord Macaulay had put the boot into Walpole still more effectively:
After the labours of the print-shop and the auction room, he unbent his mind in the House of Commons. And, having indulged in the recreation of making laws and voting millions, he returned to more important pursuits, to researches after Queen Mary’s comb, Wolsey’s red hat, the pipe which Van Tromp smoked during his last sea-fight, and the spur which King William stuck into the flank of Sorrel.
In Snodin’s book that red hat is illustrated, along with so much of Walpole’s magpie hoard. But Macaulay and Plumb were grossly unfair to Walpole. The many volumes of his letters alone, devotedly edited by W. S. Lewis and others, are an essential resource for any historian of the 18th century. Gossipy, yes; but as a prime pinister’s son (sort of exotic flower of a cactus) he had an ‘in’ politically as well as culturally.
Snodin is a splendid cicerone to the house and the collection. He gives us Walpole the man as well as the connoisseur, including an assessment of his sexuality. (Walpole was clearly besotted with his cousin, General Henry Seymour Conway, though whether the two actually had sex, as William Guthrie alleged in a scurrilous tract of 1764, is open to doubt.) I cannot over-emphasise how admirable this book is, both as a read and as an eye-feast. I do not think another book on the subject will ever be needed.
The most festive of the new art books is Star Pieces: The Enduring Beauty of Spectacular Furniture by David Linley, Charles Cator and Helen Chislett (Thames & Hudson, £40). I happen to think Lord Linley the best living designer. I possess only one artefact of his, a sycamore key-ring holder (it has not come to bits in ten years); but every time I walk past — sometimes into — his shop in Albemarle Street, I marvel not just at the quality of the individual pieces, but at the harmony between them — table, cushion, cigar box, glass vase.
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