Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

layer of dark stain to make it look homogenous. (Although oak darkens naturally with age the
sooty blackness of most old oak today, of any age, is due to its having been stained in the
nineteenth-century.) 10 At Strawberry Hill Walpole hung his miscellaneous collection of armour
in a dark part of the staircase to give the impression of a complete, ancestral collection. 11 At his
own home, Abbotsford, one of the most important and enduring of antiquarian interiors, on 29
October 1812, Scott reported that he had ‘just finished a well constructed out of a few of the
broken stones taken up in clearing the rubbish from Melrose Abbey…It makes a tolerable
deception and looks at least 300 years old’. 12 This literal or figurative piecing together, the
varnishing over of the cracks between past and present, self and other, were essential to the ethos
of the romantic interior.
How knowing it was, whether, as in Scott’s case at this stage in his life, it was intended to
deceive only at the level of art or whether, having been created, an interior took on a life of its
own in which distinctions between the authentic and the fabricated were subsumed, depended on
the creator. What was perceived as ‘forgery’ also varied and whether forgery mattered, was, as at
Lenoir’s museum, a moot point. Scott’s deception with the well at Abbotsford is knowing and
therefore acceptable to him. To be taken in by somebody else’s fabrication would be quite a
different matter. Scott surely intends Sir Arthur Wardour’s surname as a reference to Wardour
Street and the fact that Sir Arthur’s taste in antiquities was ‘neither very deep nor very correct’. 13
The Soho brokers had a (deserved) reputation for selling furniture that was made up from old and
new elements, a process known as ‘sophisticating’. The term itself, however, suggests an
ambiguity, reflected in the attitudes of individuals, towards the propriety of such interference
with historic objects and its consequences.
Before discussing particular interiors in more detail we might pause to consider how far
the popular image of the Antiquary’s Cell reflected reality for the antiquaries under discussion in
10
Ex inf the late Clive Wainwright.
11
See Wainwright, Romantic Interior, p.101.
12
Scott to Mathew Weld Hartstonge, Letters, 3, p.185.
13
Scott, The Antiquary, p.52. Wainwright, Romantic Interior, p. 35, says that there were still no brokers in Wardour
Street in 1817, though there were many cabinet makers. I think the coincidence with Scott’s character too
remarkable to be chance and suggest that some at least of those describing themselves as cabinet makers were also
occasional brokers or ‘sophisticators’.
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