8 - Treasure houses

Summary

Nothing symbolised the revival in the fortunes of British country houses so much as the Treasure Houses of Britain exhibition that opened in Washington DC in November 1985. Ten years on from the V&A's Destruction of the Country House exhibition, the Treasure Houses show saw more than seven hundred works of art from over two hundred of the largest and most prestigious of British country houses assembled at the National Gallery of Art. Arranged in the east wing of the gallery in a sequence of interiors conceived by curator Gervase Jackson-Stops, the exhibition brought together portraits of British royalty, furniture, tapestries, and works by Constable, Canaletto, and Velasquez.

The show had been a long time in the making. The minutes of the HHA's first annual general meeting in October 1974 recorded that a feasibility study had been commissioned into the possibility of a “Treasures of Britain exhibition” being toured in America in the winter of 1976. The original idea was for a show that would travel around the United States for six months – the condition being that it would need to be entirely “self-supporting”. The enthusiasm for the idea from the HHA's executive committee followed on from research trips that a number of them had made across the Atlantic (Lord Brooke had been unable to attend the 1974 AGM because he was on one of these trips). The Destruction show had been a direct inspiration. The director of the National Gallery, J. Carter Brown, had visited the V&A in 1974 to witness Destruction, and recalled the “sickening” sense of loss that the show had inspired. This sense of loss had stayed with him in the intervening period, providing some of the “driving spirit” behind the Washington exhibition. Treasure Houses was just as much a political statement as the Destruction exhibition had been, but now aimed to imprint on visitors another set of messages: that British artistic culture was alive and well, and continued to be looked after on the walls of its country mansions, which in turn were the powerhouses of the tourism and leisure industry.