Art & the Country House Is Now Live

Explore the collections of Castle Howard, Doddington Hall, Mells Manor, Mount Stuart, Petworth House, Raynham Hall, Trewithen and West Wycombe through the Paul Mellon Centre's new online publication Art & the Country House.

Involving research by over forty authors, Art & the Country House brings together detailed catalogues, document transcriptions, commissioned essays, films and an abundance of specially commissioned photography. Through its search facility, objects, artists, art works and bibliographies can be located and compared in what we hope will prove new, productive and more rapid ways.

Each of the houses has been carefully selected so as to ensure a broad range of research topics and to provide an appropriately varied set of examples in terms of geographical location, scale, patterns of ownership, chronologies, collections and displays.

Essay topics include the evolution of customised picture galleries; the conscious preservation of the past; women’s collecting and display strategies; country houses as homes and tourist destinations; and the economic and political structures that underpinned the extravagant acquisition policies of the owners of so-called ‘power houses’.

Art & the Country House, as with all other Paul Mellon Centre digital publications, is open access.