THE GUTTING OF STOWE

Evening Star, Issue 18137, 29 November 1922, Page 10

THE GUTTING OF STOWE

Stowe House, the most complete example left la M of a great eightccnthrentury mansion, is after all to suffer the final indignity of disintegration (says the ■ Manchester Guardian’). When tliis Georgian palace, with its attendant temples and lonnai arches, its gmves and lake, its statuary and beirt.iuns, changed hands for the trifle of fitly thousand pounds last July, its purcl i.-cr expected that it anight he kept i , I. her as a public school or a museum. ! only the State could support so raagi. i- cully useless a burden, arid the State 1 ; a t present more immediately pressing ■ i ;.ig.i to do with its insufficient cash. r'lmvp, therefore, will be sold qgain i: fragments next month, and the dioneer’s catalogue, itself a volume on :he Stowe scale with some beautiful illust; ’lions, is now issued to tempt any whom it can to annex some such fragment from the estate as a Temple of Victory, with twenty-eight lonic columns, or a tower of 115 ft, high, with an observatory on top. ! It, is an amazing list the hook offers. The house itself, with its drawing rooms, state, blue, green, and others, its eixtyfoot marble salon, and its suites that would house the population of a cone! durable village, is to ibe gutted of mantelpieces, frescoes, windows, panels, doom, handles, and even finger-plates .fashioned by the great masters of decoration. The grounds be stripped of a score of classic templea, pretentious monuments, formal arches, grottoes, pavilions, and the like. Of these many, If they find a purchaser’at all, will go, no doubt, for building material. For gigantic lead lions and life-size equestrian statues of George T, there can be no urgent demand. No doubt some of the dozen magnificent carved mantelpieces now to be raped from their Betting wilt reappear in American homes. Fragments of Stowe will survive to give distinction to great collections, «ad even to strike a disconcerting note of real dignity here end there in the domestic suEroiindings of the new rich. But this final explosion into atoms of one of the most pretentious and vast of the groat houses of England will scarcely reach the ears of any except collectors ami builders’ merchant*. The social conditions and the artistic canons it typified have crumbled long before it. It 'is not an age that .passes with Stowe, but a memorial. As such there is no finer of its kind, for within it all that wealth and taste could bring together In eighteantheentury England was housed and given the setting it demanded.