Lot Essay
This view shows the house Sir George Chudleigh is thought to have built c. 1735, about five miles south-west of Exeter. Comparison with the later view by Francis Towne, dated 1780, in the Tate Gallery (see J. Harris, The Artist and the Country House, London, 1979, no. 320), shows the previously held theory that the house was much extended by Sir Robert Palk in the later 18th Century to be erroneous, for the later picture shows a much reduced house of only seven bays. The ornamental park with domed temple, obelisk, pedimented temple and castellated eye-catcher on the hill behind the house, is previously undocumented, and may be emulating that at Castle Hill, Devon, as it was in the 1730s/40s. The eye-catcher was said to have been built by Sir Robert Palk in 1788 in memory of Major General Stringer Lawrence but may have been built earlier and only fitted out inside in 1788. The house was demolished in 1920.