PREPARACIÓN DEL CONTACTO

As might be expected, different dining spaces also had different décor, whether to distinguish the breakfast room from the dining room, or a servants‘ eating space from an aristocratic one. Figures 40-43 show the various named dining spaces at Osborne House while figures 44-46 show the fireplaces – the main surviving fixtures – from the servants‘ hall, housekeeper‘s room and first floor dining room at Audley End. Figures 47-49 are those from Harewood‘s servants‘ hall, steward‘s room and dining room after the alterations of the 1840s. Figure 49, the dining room fireplace, was originally situated in the long gallery, and was moved by Barry into the dining room as part of a complete overhaul of the decorative scheme there. The ceiling was raised and Adams‘ mouldings replaced by larger, more ornate plasterwork to elevate the status of this one room,

emphasising its importance over the other public rooms as well as over other dining spaces. Elsewhere the eighteenth century decorative scheme survives intact. The fireplace was put back into the long gallery in the 1980s and the dining room was written off as ‗irredeemable‟ (Mauchline 1992, 151).

The status differences between both rooms and fixtures are immediately evident. At Audley the repeated conversion of rooms left earlier fixtures and fittings in place. The fireplace in the servants‘ hall conceals the remains of an earlier range and bread oven; that of Harewood looks to have been similarly altered to fit the space. In contrast, that in the Audley housekeeper‘s room would not look out of place in a multi-purpose middle class parlour (which is what the room effectively is), while the mock-Jacobean fireplace from the dining room was installed to match a genuinely sixteenth century example in an adjoining room which

became part of an enlarged space when the dividing wall was taken out in c.1825. Previously the two rooms had been part of a suite constructed as private rooms for an earlier occupant, rendered obsolete by changing living arrangements in the house. Retention of the late seventeenth century fireplace, Jacobean ceiling mouldings and construction of the rest of the room‘s dcor to match, reflects a carefully constructed decorative scheme intended to reinforce the impression of dynastic longevity.

Dining room imagery in the early seventeenth century could be straightforward: the original fireplace from Harewood no longer exists, but that in the

neighbouring music room is an example of directly connected imagery, with a design integrating musical instruments into the decorative scheme. Windsor Castle has a dining space containing food-related elements in the ceiling mouldings; however, even in the 1750s dining room imagery was not just connected with food or its procurement. With the development of enclosed sets of multi-functional public rooms as at Audley and Harewood, obvious links of this nature declined in favour of more subtle decoration. Country houses have often been studied in detail and continuous motifs identified across rooms in the interior scheme (Lancaster 2003 unpublished), but dining spaces have not hitherto been cross-referenced to demonstrate the way in which interior design was used to maintain order and communicate family values to invited guests, kept captive in a designated space. When they are considered as a data set in their own right, it is possible to identify shared elements unique to dining rooms.

As chapter 3 demonstrated, Georgian dining was predicated on diners knowing how to conduct themselves without recourse to etiquette books, which did not appear en masse until the nineteenth century. Though not commonly recognised, this made service à la Française a far more difficult social experience than the codified structures of à la Russe. Décor could increase that pressure. In country houses, as discussed above, two familial dining spaces were usual: one for informal dinners and one for formal occasions, often with invited guests. The décor of the latter room seems on occasion to have been quite plain – Adams specifically planned to have no paintings in the revamped dining parlour at Audley (Oxford Archaeology 2001 unpublished). However, more common from the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century is the hanging of family portraits (see for example, Beatniffe 1773, 65; Bartell 1800, 46). In figure 40 the Queen‘s dining room at Osborne contains pictures of her immediate family, which are still in situ. In contrast the Household dining room has pictures of land- and seascapes. The display of family members around the walls of dining rooms can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand it denotes the intimacy of dinner: by the nineteenth century it was recognised that to be invited

to dinner (as opposed to tea or a lesser meal) was to be invited into the heart of a family – to be accepted in public as a fitting social companion (Strong 2002, 273). Displaying dead or absent family on the walls emphasised this connection. For the invitee, it was a reminder of the weight that an invitation carried. On the other hand, portraiture can be read as a conspicuous display of lineage, a way to showcase illustrious connections lacking from the average arriviste‘s family tree. For families such as the Braybrookes, whose title had only been awarded at the end of the eighteenth century, it was a vital means by which to identify with previous owners of the estate and gloss over the indirect way in which it had descended through the family line since the seventeenth century. This was not only socially exclusive, but could also be educative. If, as Jewry (c.1875, 19) suggested, ‗you will find the style of your table one of those unconscious home-

influences which will form the taste and tone of your children‟s minds, and

greatly act on their manner‘, how better to impress upon them the weight of their ancestry and future responsibilities?

Landscapes were also popular. In an aristocratic context these appear more frequently in the eighteenth century than the nineteenth, when portraiture

becomes more usual. This confirms the interpretation set out above, and suggests that in an era when money could increasingly buy membership of the elite, including a country estate, those who held estates by right of descent sought increasingly to display proven personal connections and standing, rather than simply show a relationship to the land. The latter connection was still important, however. Property was, after all, the foundation of aristocratic wealth, and it is unsurprising that dining room choices in the earlier period also included views of the estates of the hosting family. In 1745 the inventory drawn up for sale at Audley (AE 1745 unpublished) referred to ‗the print of Audley End and fifty six

others‟ hanging in the dining room. This was the year that Audley changed hands

after the Earls of Suffolk became extinct. When Sir John Griffin Griffin inherited the house in 1762, it was refurnished to suit a new owner with his own priorities for communication. The 1797 inventory (AE 1797 unpublished) sadly does not list paintings, so it is impossible to tell whether the newly ennobled Baron

Braybrooke chose to establish himself temporally through familial links, rather than spatially through pictures of his estates.

The middle class experience

Middle class interiors are difficult to investigate in the absence of the inventories commonly compiled by early country house admirers in their enthusiastic quest to expose upper class interior design. Few depictions of middle class settings exist, and these are normally idealised. However, although table settings, neatness and context may have been slightly altered to fit the purpose (for

example in selling billiard tables as in figure 52), certain aspects remain constant. Pictures are one of these: familial portraits do not feature as conspicuously in middle class settings as they do in elite dining rooms. Preferred themes are landscapes and classical buildings (fig. 50). Most middle class families would not have had relatives wealthy enough to commission portraits in the pre- photography period, and even if they did, care would have had to have been taken not to indicate inadvertently a fall from previous social levels. Moreover, the presence of a seascape as opposed to a relative would immediately have struck the dining room observer, marking the room as being class-specific. In a display of group solidarity it may well have been that the exhibition of family connections flouted accepted consumption patterns among the middle classes in the mid-nineteenth century. Middle class reticence when choosing objects for public display supports Young‘s (2003) argument that middle class identity was based on shared values with an emphasis on economy, practicality and, in this case, individual effort.

Landscapes could also be used to indicate learning, in exactly the same way that Grand Tourists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries invariably brought back a portrait of themselves amidst suitably classical ruins. The middle class ethic of self-improvement favoured the display of personal achievement rather than inherited wealth, and this was more easily communicated by associative pictures than by portraits of dead relatives. Additionally, as shown in chapter 3, for the middle class mistress, dinner was a tool by which personal prowess could be demonstrated and relative status defined. Portraits, by necessity, favour the

individual, whether s/he is depicted or merely descended from the sitter. In aristocratic marriages, women were expected to identify with their husband‘s families (Horn 1991), subsuming personal identity in favour of that of their new line, at least in the choice of décor for public areas. As a titled wife, being surrounded by portraits of one‘s husband‘s family was an indication of that loss of personal identity. Middle class households, in contrast to the elites, tended to be tenants, or purchase houses later in life. They did not usually inherit rooms already decorated, but were able to choose their own schemes, new at every move, and the women who largely made such choices seem to have opted not to subsume their identity beneath a selection of pictures tied uniquely to their husbands. Rather, they used the dining room to display to outsiders a sense of communal and familial identity based upon their household unit, making it distinct from previous generations on both sides, and emphasising their dedication to their household in the immediate moment, and not to nebulous links over which they had no control.