A view of Crewe Hall, Cheshire, from the south

Crewe Hall was built by Sir Ranulphe Crewe (1558-1648), Speaker of the House of Commons and Lord Chief Justice of the Court of the King's Bench (1624-6) between 1615 and 1636. On the basis of the costume of the various figures in the foreground the picture would appear to date to circa 1710 and was therefore presumably commissioned by John Offley, who succeeded his maternal grandfather to Crewe Hall and the Crewe estates and assumed by Act of Parliament the name of Crewe in 1708 and was Member of Parliament for Cheshire. By the time that J.P. Neale published a view of Crewe Hall in 1818 in his Seats most of the outbuildings to the left or West of the house had been demolished and a 'Jacobean' service wing had been built adjacent. In the 1830s and 1840s Hungerford, 3rd Baron Crewe (1812-1899) employed Edward Blore to restore the house and then in 1866, following a disastrous fire, Edward Barry was charged with reinstating it.

The earliest known view of Crewe Hall is an engraving by Wencelaus Hollar of circa 1655-56, for Daniel King's The Vale-Royall of England, or Description ... of the Countie Palatine of Chester (1656; part II, p. 75) which shows the entrance front (fig.1). Comparison with the present picture shows considerable alterations had been made to the fenestration in the years between the execution of the two views (J. Harris, The Artist and the Country House, A History of Country House and view painting in Britain 1540-1870, London, 1979, p. 32, no. 24). A smaller view of Crewe Hall, also showing the house from the south (33 x 66cm) but from a slightly raised perspective, rather than a birdseye perspective as in the present picture, which would appear to be by the same hand, is in a private collection (see fig. 2, J. Harris, op.cit., no. 151).