Wondrous Waddesdon Manor – home to the Rothschild Family

If you are reluctant to risk a trip to France this pandemic summer, there is an alternative. And we have the Rothschilds to thank for it.

On a small hill in Buckinghamshire, there is a neo-Renaissance chateau seemingly transplanted there from the Loire valley. Waddesdon Manor’s towers poke out from among the fir trees around it to provide an uninterrupted vista across the surrounding countryside. Familiar with the county from his family’s seven houses there and from having hunted foxes across its fields, Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild purchased the land on which the Manor House now sits from a financially challenged Duke of Marlborough in 1874. Ferdinand wanted a house suitable for weekends away from London and to entertain his many friends and acquaintances, including members of the Royal Family. He hankered after a suitably grand venue for a lavish and civilised life in the country, and he knew an architect who could realise it for him.

The French architect, Hippolyte Destailleur, specialised in the flamboyant and was favoured by aristocrats and plutocrats alike. His prominent clients included members of the wider Rothschild family in Austria, as well as England. Indeed, as Baron Ferdinand was having Waddesdon Manor built, Destailleur was also designing the Palais Rothschild for Baron Albert in Vienna. Recently built Rothschild mansions in Paris and elsewhere in France were no less palatial. And there was a style of interior decoration which though not peculiar to the Rothschilds, was characterised as the family’s particular taste and widely described as such: Le Goût Rothschild. The elements typical of this style are much on show at Waddesdon where heavy brocade curtains cover the window frames, tapestries cover the walls and parquet flooring and fine carpets are everywhere underfoot.

The Rothchilds originally took root in the ghetto of Frankfurt in the mid-eighteenth century and rose to financial power and influence on the back of the Napoleonic Wars. Famously, four of the five sons of Amschel Rothschild spanned out from Germany to set up banking branches in Paris, Vienna, London and Naples. In the cities in which they took up residence, they erected fine mansions or palaces. The family’s fortune was substantial and the brothers and their descendants spent lavishly on their homes. Their architectural and decorative aesthetic was shaped by eighteenth and nineteenth-century France; the Rothschilds loved all things French and showed this in their houses in Austria and England as much as in France.

The tragedy for the Rothschilds in the mid-twentieth century was that though they loved France, Occupied France (and Nazi Austria) did not love them. Not only did members of the wider family suffer personally but the contents of their mansions in Vienna and Paris were ruthlessly pillaged by Nazi regimes of one kind or another. The Rothschild family re-grouped after the horrors of the Second World War, but most of their mansions in formerly occupied Europe were not revived, or at least their liking for them had been fatally compromised. In the unchanged quiet of the English countryside, Waddesdon was different. It survived and was cherished.

The visitor to Waddesdon today approaches the main entrance across a wide expanse of plain neatly mown lawn. It is a stage set for pleasure marred only by two large and out-of-place glass structures formed of Rothschild magnum bottles which are illuminated in the evenings. What awaits beyond the front portico however is a house filled with beautiful paintings, sculptures, furnishings and decorations, mainly from the eighteenth century. More compact inside than the exterior might suggest, the vast majority of the 15,000 items in the Rothschild Collection are not on display in the house. What items are on display, though, are very remarkable indeed and generally exquisite. That said the total effect can sometimes induce a degree of cultural indigestion. It helps to stave off this effect if you stop from time to time on your tour of the house to look out through the long windows to the parterre garden with its fountains and sculptures and the endless countryside beyond.

Every visitor will have his or her own favourites from the collection. Mine include the pieces of Sèvres porcelain, the Beauvais and Gobelins tapestries on the walls, the Louis XIV French furniture and carpets and the armoury on the walls of the “Bachelors’ Wing”.  For me, the English paintings – which might be thought oddly out of place alongside the riches from France – are one of the glories of the collection too. They are a tribute to Baron Ferdinand’s determination not to have only French decorations and furnishings and to buy whatever he liked and wanted. Fine examples of the work of Reynolds, Gainsborough (my favourite being the splendid portrait of “Mrs Douglas”) and Romney hang prominently on the walls of the public rooms. In hidden corners are some small paintings by the likes of Millais, which, in less rich collections, would have been more prominently hung. The Collection is a living one; the new is subtly added to the old. A painting by Chardin was acquired a few years ago and a sparkling chandelier made up of broken plates and cutlery, made by the German designer Ingo Maurer, was added to the main reception rooms in 2003.

Some exhibits however are simply “too much” for my personal taste. The large white dining room, which at one end has a very large painting of Louis XVI, has as its centrepiece a silver dinner service originally belonging to George III. Laid out plainly on the long dining table it lends the room the appearance of a very superior salesroom. Though it is made of the finest silver it looks lost and – not in a good sense – museum-like, without decoration or any sense of occasion. These are quibbles from a visitor otherwise enchanted by the delights on display in the house.

There is, however, one oddity at Waddesdon. To my surprise, minimal effort is made to provide proper background on the Rothschild family members who lived in the house over the past 140 years. In a corner room organised as if a family scrapbook has been taken apart and attached to its walls, are photos and drawings and some paintings (including rather an attractive one of the current Lord Rothschild) which crave more explanation and context. Some photos have little or no information alongside them. It is as if the family have a certain reticence, an unwillingness to display themselves among their collection. That is a pity. Waddesdon was a family home until quite recently and is the product of Ferdinand’s and his successors’ cultural vision and taste. The visitor would surely like to know more about them all.  

This summer, don’t take Le Shuttle under the Channel but instead steer your car up the hill to Waddesdon and spend an afternoon savouring French deluxe without any of the hassles of travelling to France.  

And if the empty magnum bottles assembled on the front lawn tempt you to search out a full one, visit the cellars where thousands of bottles are stored. Some can even be purchased.