Conservation: My Window on the Past
Leah Warriner-Wood is a part-time PhD researcher and lecturer on the Conservation of Cultural Heritage programmes at the University of Lincoln. Her PhD research originated from her postgraduate training as a conservator. It considers tapestries in English country house interiors as material culture to interrogate the role of the domestic in men’s fashioning of masculinity in the 18th century. Specifically, the research draws on Doddington Hall to argue for 18th century landowner John Delaval’s ‘material self-fashioning’ practices. Connect with Leah on Twitter or LinkedIn, and find out more about her through her staff profile.
“And how did I get here?” I hear you ask. And well you may ask. How does a conservator end up studying eighteenth-century masculinities in the country house? Allow me to explain…
I had long had an interest in textiles (I blame my grandmother – she was a seamstress for Burberry, so I’m told). And I had always had a curiosity about history. Not the type of history you read in books, so much as the history you breathed in by visiting castles, museums, and stately homes. I ran my hands down country house banisters when I could barely reach them, secretly imagining that I was gliding down to dinner in my voluminous gown, the silk swooshing on the plush carpet, and my hair ornaments glittering in the candlelight. ‘What did people talk about in these rooms?’ I wondered. ‘How did they go about their daily lives?’ If only I could slip back in time and find out.
Much later, as a student on the MA Conservation programme at the University of Lincoln, I found a way of doing just that. I was empowered to find out the stories of people’s everyday lives through the objects they surrounded themselves with. Only, it turned out not to be silk skirts or pin-tucked petticoats that took me back in time most vividly. It was filthy tapestries.
I’ll admit it: I hadn’t ever really considered tapestries, in all my imagined country house stories. They were always just sort of…there. In the background. Hidden. But then Doddington Hall (a privately owned country house not far from Lincoln that is open to the public) contacted my tutors to recruit a group of student conservators who could document, take down from display, and clean a set of seventeenth century tapestries as part of a Heritage Lottery funded conservation and engagement project. It was a no-brainer: I had got married at Doddington Hall only a few years previously, and the work would allow me to tick ‘work behind the scenes at a stately home’ off of my bucket list.
Over six weeks or so, a team of classmates and I photographed, drew, measured, plotted, removed, hoisted, vacuumed, measured again, stitched, rolled, and packaged eight pieces of tapestry, the largest measuring 5.4 x 3.6 metres. It was tiring, it was dirty, it was heavy – I loved it.
Me vacuuming a section of tapestry to reduce loose dust and dirt. The mask was to avoid breathing in dirt particles, not because of Covid!
Most of all, though, I loved the story that the tapestries began to tell. They dated from the 1600s, but they had been taken down and then re-hung in 1760-1762 on the orders of John Hussey Delaval, who had inherited Doddington from his mother, as a second son, and set about ‘Georgianising’ the Elizabethan manor house. Sounds gentle, doesn’t it? Except that ‘taking down and then re-hanging’ the tapestries actually involved cutting them up and stitching the pieces back together in novel composites, cutting out areas to accommodate a new fire surround (the cut even followed the stepped profile of the mantel!), and patching up holes or weak areas with fragments cut from other tapestries – from where? Other rooms, it turned out. Whose tapestries had also been taken down, cut down, and re-hashed in the 1760s.
This was one big, woolly jigsaw. The more we looked, the more pieces we saw. But what was even more exciting was realising that some of the changes could be ‘reverse engineered’ – that we could slip back in time and digitally undo the eighteenth-century alterations, to see how the tapestries might originally have looked, where they might originally have hung, and how.
One of the tapestry 'jigsaws' - a digitally engineered composite, showing patches cut away from the once complete tapestry and used elsewhere in repairs, etc.
Once two centuries of dust and dirt had been vacuumed away (but kept – it made a wonderful piece of visitor interpretation!) the tapestries were shipped to a specialist facility in mainland Europe to be washed. They were then returned to Doddington and underwent painstaking conservation stitching over
the next few years, to support them so that they could be re-hung once more. I, meanwhile, kept trying to answer the unanswered question: why? Why were the tapestries kept in the 1760s, when they were already antiques and damaged, and when the rest of the property was being given a Georgian makeover, complete with fashionable classical details? Why were they cut up and stitched back together in the way they were? What motivated all of that? My love affair with material culture (and my PhD) had begun.
Over time, I realised that I couldn’t unravel the tapestries’ story from John Delaval’s. I also realised that dismally few archival documents alluding to the tapestry alterations remained – one letter, and two payments for threads and remuneration to ‘mend’ them. But I’m a conservator anyway – I’m happiest examining the material past. And the materiality of the modifications was there to be unpicked, in abundance. There are inserted patches where the design has been aligned up beautifully but where the weave (which normally runs horizontally) has been rotated, that speak of appearance, and not understanding of or respect for the tapestry medium, being the eighteenth-century priority. There is a hierarchy visible in the repairs, too, where the tapestries in the best condition have been repaired with the second-best, the second-best with the third best (now discarded altogether, apart from the tantalising patches used in repairs), and so on. This reflects what would have been the operational hierarchy of Doddington’s domestic spaces in John Delaval’s time, where the rooms with the best tapestries are on the social circuit and for use by guests, while the more fragmentary ones are beyond the drawing room, in the rooms reserved for family use.
And so, while the historian’s traditional sources may be mute in this case, the tapestries themselves are, as Lorraine Daston has suggested, more talkative (see ‘Introduction’ in Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, 2004). They speak of a young man, newly established as a landowner and ambitious to navigate gentry society, who materially mediated his social authority through curation of Doddington Hall’s domestic interiors: in one room fashionable and affluent, with an eye and a purse for the new luxuries popular among his contemporaries; and in the next descended from a long and established family dynasty, able to acquire and pass down old luxuries such as tapestries for (re)use by a succession of estate owners of the blood.
I’m immensely glad that fate’s twists and turns brought me to country houses, to conservation, and to tapestry. My time travelling (and my PhD) continues.