Thirty-one Houses in Twenty Days
on the Attingham Summer School Tour
Every summer, the Attingham Trust for the Study of Country Houses and Collections in England runs a nearly three-week course for museum professionals and scholars. This year, Stenton’s curator, Laura Keim, had the privilege of attending, having received a generous scholarship from The Royal Oak Foundation as the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire Scholar and the support of the NSCDA/PA for travel expenses.
Reporting on the experience, Laura writes:
Our instructors warned us about the physical rigors of this course, and rigorous was the schedule – packed with wonderful buildings and collections to encounter everyday, in addition the morning and evening lectures, and constant conversation while traveling on the coach in the company of fellow museum professionals from the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, Russia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands. We visited mostly big houses, but also small houses, museum houses, private houses, ruins, outdoor museums, a work house, castles, art museums, a town house, and of course – country houses, collections and landscapes – a study of buildings and their contents in context.
At right, curator Laura Keim (second from left, in hat) with classmates atop the roof of the Brighton Pavilion, in Brighton, England
The volume of places we experienced is the greatest value of the course. Because we saw 31 sites, patterns in design and floor plan development began to emerge. As a result, I began to understand the country house organism as a living, evolving thing and developed my own mental framework for placing the various buildings and collections in my mindd. This experience of being in places and studying them with the people who regularly think about them or live in them was real in a way that no book or slide lecture could ever be.
A new concept for me, and one which I very much appreciated, is the interpretation of ruins, which is not practiced much in America. For Britons, even remnants of buildings are worth preserving. I am struck that so many house museums in America are in a sense, lifeless. Family life is not able to continue in the size houses that become museum houses in America. In Britain, however, so many houses we visited continue to be inhabited by families who have owned them for generations. The ruins in a way are more like the uninhabited American house museums.
The course has helped me to think about Stenton. In a British context, Stenton is a 12-hearth version of the brick
Anglo-Dutch country house in the Coleshill idiom. The visit to Uppark, a c.1690 country house in Sussex, was especially resonant in comparing floor plans and cellar arrangements, and the dolls’ house there contains so much visual information that is helpful in thinking about Stenton’s original furnishings and room functions. Another example of this resonance took place for me at Blickling learning about the library of Richard Ellys, who was collecting books at the same time as James Logan. Thinking about the library helped me to see how book collecting, which Logan was most obsessive about, was one of the ways in which he was able to transcend his class and status as a colonial on his return visits to England in 1710 and 1723.
The course offered insight into the ways two major organizations, English Heritage and The National Trust, work for the preservation and interpretation of historic resources in Britain. Most importantly the visits revealed how Britain expresses its value of heritage. I was impressed by the “inalienability” of the National Trust, and I was also impressed by the National Trust’s marketing slogan, “Forever for Everyone.” In our American democracy, we struggle with including everyone in our preservation efforts, and preservation is still seen as a cause that brings gentrification and has overtones of elitism.
The words used to express some of the concepts in the museum industry are different in Britain and America. In Britain there is house “presentation” as well as “interpretation.” I like the idea of keeping the two concepts separate, that presentation can be settings, how rooms present to the eye of the visitor, whereas interpretation, is the information and stories imparted to the visitor, either through a guided tour or guide book.
At left, the Attingham class of 2007 on steps at Holkham Hall in Norfolk with estate owner Lord Coke.
The course broadened the framework in which I understand the visual world of houses and collections and has enhanced my thinking about the presentation and interpretation of the historic houses with which I am professionally involved. It was rewarding to meet and get to know a range of like-minded colleagues with diverse specialties and across a broad age range. I felt that the time on the course was not just a time for sharing minds, but because we were so close in a relatively short amount of time, it was also a time for sharing hearts, and I know that I made connections with others, some Americans, some from across the oceans, that I will preserve and keep because of their special quality.
I am most grateful to have been able to undertake the Attingham Summer School and to have had this special learning experience that has shaped me professionally and personally and will certainly continue to enrich my work and my life.
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