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A Victorian Architectural Correspondence

The relationship between architect and patron is of crucial importance in determining the character of any building, and nowhere more than in a country house. Here the patron not only pays for a building; he also lives in it. He might well have decided views on what a country house ought to look like, views that could be influenced by scholarship, travel, a wish to emulate or surpass neighbours’ houses, family pride, or simply a vague sense of his position as a ‘natural leader of society’. Before the rise of the architectural profession in the eighteenth century, owners of country houses often acted as their own architects, usually working in collaboration with a mason or builder. By the mid-nineteenth century this practice had virtually died out. The owner now had to find some means of reconciling his ideas on the appearance and layout of his house with those of a man who possessed the prestige that attached to professional status, and, perhaps, the arrogance of the Romantic artist who saw the country-house commission as a means of self-expression. William Talman’s arguments with his clients in the late seventeenth century gave an inkling of the ‘vexations’ that might occur when professional architect and patron, each with ideas of his own, disagreed; while Vanburgh’s arguments with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, over Blenheim reached well-known and well-documented levels of vituperation. Such conflicts were by no means isolated occurrences.