Those are the two key words in considering the magical collection of furniture at this most important of aristocratic British houses.. Of all the great British country-house collections the furnishings of Longleat are among the most remarkable - both for their quality and for their extraordinary diversity. It is unusual to find such an eclectic range of European furniture in a great historic house - not just the great French pieces, in which British collections were so rich, but also interesting examples of Italian, German and Dutch cabinet-making. What gives the rooms at Longleat their very special magic is the combination of these exotic and luxurious pieces with marvellously pure and untouched examples of 18th- and early-19th-century English furniture. The State Rooms are largely the creation of John Alexander, 4th Marquess of Bath (1831-1896), who commissioned the celebrated firm of Crace to remodel them between 1874 and 1882. One can only marvel at the courage and confidence of this remarkable man embarking on such a project in the fabled Elizabethan house of his ancestors 300 years after it had been built. The triumphant series of rooms he created with John Dibblee Crace is the most complete surviving example of the firm's work in the High Renaissance style. In his creation of the enfilade of rooms on the ground and first floors of the east front, the 4th Marquess swept away the alterations carried out by his grandfather, the 2nd Marquess (1765-1837), who had employed Sir Jeffry Wyatville to form a suite of rooms appropriate for Regency family life along the ground and first floors of the east front. A charming group of watercolours by his sister-in-law Mary, Lady Carteret, executed between 1836-1843, record the appearance of this relatively short-lived phase and conveys vividly that very particular Regency mix of grandeur and comfort. With the evidence of Lady Carteret's watercolours and the inventory of 1852, taken when his grandson was just 21 and before he started buying, it is possible to reconstruct Wyatville's scheme for the 2nd Marquess. Lord Bath employed a galaxy of the most fashionable contemporary cabinet-makers. Besides Morel and Hughes, who supplied a magnificent suite of giltwood seat-furniture for the Drawing Room (now the Red Library) and much lavish upholstery, there are also accounts from Thomas Parker, Robert Fogg, Gillows, Tatham, Bailey and Saunders - and George Oakley, who supplied a suite of oak seat furniture for the Green Library in the south-east corner. The pair of distinctive armchairs from this suite to be included in the sale are two of 'six large fauteuille Chairs with head Tablets highly finished' which cost £75, with their original 'bordered seat cushions' of green morocco leather costing a further £13 10s. The choice of oak, so appropriate for the great Elizabethan house, combined with 'carvings in the Grecian style', illustrates the combination of the antiquarian and the contemporary that is such a hallmark of Regency taste. The 2nd Marquess was the quintessential Regency collector, active at a time of enormous confidence and prosperity in Britain when so many of the great collections were formed. Like his contemporaries, and taking the lead of his monarch George IV, Lord Bath made extensive acquisitions of French furniture - most especially of 'buhl', so beloved by the English connoisseurs. The magnificent bureau-plat, remarkable for its majestic scale, is also a supreme technical achievement, as it has a Boulle marquetry top elaborately inlaid with Bérainesque designs. To avoid the inevitable movements in the carcass frame over such a large flat surface area, the cabinet-maker created a cradle framework on the underside - and the result is that the top has moved so little that it still retains some of its original engraving in the tortoiseshell. An object on a similarly sumptuous scale is the Boulle encrier, one of a group made in 1710 for members of the Parisian corporation des barbiers-chirurgiens, whose arms (three drug jars proper around a fleur-de-lys) ornament the blue-tinted horn centre. Engraved around the border with the names of 12 surgeons, it was probably an elegant example of self-promotional advancement by the surgeons, emphasising their academic status, and with the fleur-de-lys alluding to the Royal appointment of their premier chirurgien. Like the bureau, it is in a wonderful untouched state, with the tortoiseshell forming a rich golden brown ground for the remarkable engraving that remains on the brass. For all his antiquarian enthusiasm for oak and old 'buhl' the 2nd Marquess did not neglect the contemporary and nothing could be more up-to-the-minute for then, and indeed now, than the superb pair of ebony and lacquer meubles d'appui made between 1803 and 1813 by François-Honoré-Georges Jacob in partnership with his eminent father, the menuisier Georges Jacob. The panels of highly prized 17th-century Japanese lacquer are set off by the rich sobriety of the ebony enlivened by beautifully chased ormolu mounts. Of the highest technical perfection, these cabinets represent precisely the unobtainable French objects that the British collectors flocked to Paris to acquire during the brief respite in hostilities afforded by the Peace of Amiens in 1802-1803. It certainly appears that in the 1820s Lord Bath had an agent operating on his behalf in Paris, acquiring furniture and objects of the ancien régime. This is almost certainly the route by which he acquired the beautiful Louis XVI parquetry table à écrire by Martin Carlin. Though known to be stamped by the less well-known marchand-ébéniste Nicolas-Pierre Severin, it is of a form perfected by Carlin, and detailed examination of the table has now revealed Carlin's elusive stamp. In pristine condition, with the parquetry in an extraordinary state retaining not only its shaded engraving but its colouring, particularly in the interior, this table bears eloquent testimony to Carlin's complete mastery not only of decoration but also of line and profile, particularly exemplified by the refined legs. The splendid Louis XVI clock is clearly described in the 1852 inventory in the Drawing Room - 'Horizontal Clock on Massive Stand/and Glass Shade'. The model was probably designed by Jean-Guillaume Moitte and is recorded in a drawing in the Musée des Art Décoratifs attributed to Pierre-Philippe Thomire. Of the four other examples known, one is in J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. By the time Christie's carried out the next inventory in 1869, the 4th Marquess had considerably added to his grandfather's collection. In 1861 he married the Hon. Frances Vesey, daughter of 3rd Viscount de Vesci, grand-daughter of Catherine Woronzow, Countess of Pembroke, and great-grand-daughter of Simon Romanovitch, 3rd Count Woronzow, Russian Ambassador to the United Kingdom in the early 19th century. The 1869 inventory gives fascinating insight into his collecting and also to the way he reused his grandfather's pieces in his interiors. It also shows that by 1869 he had already acquired most of the palatial furniture that would be such an essential element of the Italianate interiors Crace would create for him in the next decade. Much of the furniture he purchased was appropriately Italian although current research has shown that some of the pieces he acquired as Italian are, however, even more interesting - such as the sculptural giltwood throne chair, which was in fact made in Holland for the Stadtholder, circa 1745, which remains at Longleat and will be published later. The work of Pietro Piffetti is rarely found in English collections and the presence in the collection of a sumptuous commode by him is a mark of Lord Bath's catholic taste and his connoisseur's eye for richly ornamented surfaces and sculptural form. Piffetti's skill at maintaining the tension between these two elements is brilliantly exemplified by the elaborate interlaced strapwork that is a leitmotif of his oeuvre. Three of the small number of other Piffetti pieces recorded in English collections were owned by Lord Bath's uncle, the 3rd Lord Ashburton (1800-1868), and it is possible they all had a common source. The scope of Lord Bath's acquisitions was remarkable and he was far in advance of his time in his appreciation of exceptional examples of the decorative arts. In the Back Drawing Room of his London house, 48 Berkeley Square, he placed the exceptional blue lacquered bureau-cabinet made in Dresden circa 1745 by Johann Gottfried Borlach and Christian Reinow, that was sold in 1944 and is now one of the great glories of the European Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum. At Longleat the technical precision of German cabinet-making is represented by its greatest exponent, David Roentgen. Described in the 1869 inventory as the work of David de Luneville, as he was always described in English 19th-century catalogues, the Longleat cylinder bureau shows him at his most technically accomplished. The illusionist marquetry decoration, with ribbon-tied flower swags threaded in and out over the surface of its neoclassical form, encloses an untouched interior fitted with Roentgen's typically ingenious mechanical devices, such as the dividing drawers either side of the kneehole. While Lord Bath concentrated on the lavish and sumptuous for the State Rooms, he furnished Longleat's many bedrooms richly but more soberly, in the main with French pieces, so that every bedroom had one if not two imposing commodes. Again his taste was catholic and his range broad - so, as well as the Louis XV pieces most in favour in the second half of the 19th century he also acquired restrained neoclassical furniture in the style that Dominique Daguerre had made fashionable in England almost a century earlier. The suite of Louis XVI mahogany furniture is a perfect example of this neat and restrained elegance. Comprising two pairs of encoignures, a commode and a console desserte it would have furnished, perhaps completed by a secretaire, the salon or bedroom of a private appartement. Alongside these splendid examples of European cabinet-making, Lord Bath assembled a superb range of decorative objects to ornament them. One of the most successful is the Louis XV ormolu-mounted Chinese porcelain pot-pourri vase and cover. The ormolu, which is struck with the C Couronné poinçon indicating that it was made between March 1745 and February 1749, sets off the distinctive blue glaze of the porcelain, amusingly decorated with flying horses. Lord Bath perhaps appreciated the skilled cabinet-making displayed in the early George III mahogany library table as he had it in his own private sitting room, alongside the Roentgen bureau. It was probably commissioned by his ancestor, the 3rd Viscount Weymouth (1734-1796), who succeeded his father in 1751 and was created 1st Marquess of Bath in 1789. His bank account at Drummonds shows him already making payments to Paul Saunders and John Cobb in his early twenties. Concave on all four sides, his library desk is fitted on one side with a baize-lined writing-drawer and on the reverse with four narrow drawers for filing receipts and accounts. Later in the early 1770s Lord Weymouth may have commissioned furniture from Mayhew and Ince, the fashionable London cabinet-makers, as there is a body of their attributable work in the house, including a splendid serpentine commode with finely engraved satinwood-ground marquetry and a small commode of yew-wood, a veneer they especially favoured. After the end of the war in 1945 the collection at Longleat was vastly enriched by assimilation of the contents of Norton Hall, near Daventry, the home of the extraordinary early Victorian antiquarian and bibliophile Beriah Botfield (1807-1863). Botfield's position among the greatest British book collectors will be discussed by Felix de Marez Oyens in the next issue of Christie's Magazine, while his distinguished collection of Dutch Old Master pictures is featured on the following pages. For practical reasons not all of the furnishings of Norton were transferred to Longleat but the pieces that were - especially some distinctive seat furniture and a library table - form a coherent group attributable to Gillows, probably commissioned by Botfield's father. This remarkable group of thrilling works of art, each with its own romantic history, illustrates 200 years of collecting by successive generations of the Thynne family. But equally thrilling is the panoply of wonderful objects that remain at Longleat and it is a tribute to the extraordinary collecting passion of the Thynnes that such a carefully chosen but nonetheless magnificent selection could be made, yet even more remain. Charles Cator is Chairman of Christie's International UK Limited. Back to top  |  Back to article list Sale 6594, Lot 400 By David Roentgen, the mounts attributed to François Rémond A German ormolu-mounted and brass-inlaid harewood, stained burr-yew and tulipwood bureau à cylindre, circa 1780 Estimate: £500,000-800,000 Sale 6594, Lot 305 A late Louis XV ormolu and Chinese blue-glazed porcelain two-handled pot-pourri vase and cover, the porcelain early Kangxi Estimate: £100,000-200,000