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After the catastrophe of the conflict with Prussia, the Emperor Napoleon III went into exile in 1870 in England, accompanied by his Spanish spouse Eugénie and his son the Prince Impérial. They settled at Camden Place in Kent and when Napoleon died in 1873, his spouse added a chapel (with memorial) to St Mary’s Roman Catholic church at Chislehurst, designed by Henry Clutton. In 1879 the Prince died preventing with the British military within the “Zulu Battle” and the next yr Eugénie purchased the Farnborough Hill property in Hampshire. It was near Aldershot, the place the Prince had been stationed, and to Windsor, handy for Eugénie’s friendship with Queen Victoria.
This e-book describes Farnborough Hill home and its contents. Inbuilt 1860 for the writer Thomas Longman, to the design of H.E. Kendall Junior, Farnborough Hill is a strikingly showy constructing of brick and half-timber,with fancy gables and tourelles. Eugénie had it enlarged and the interiors remodelled in a French style between 1880 and 1884. She additionally commissioned a church-mausoleum. The architect was the Paris-born Hippolyte Destailleur (1822-93), the scholar and collector, greatest identified for Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire and for his Recueil d’estampes kin à l’ornamentation des appartements au XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (most of which is now within the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris).
The architectural historian Anthony Geraghty, a professor on the College of York, offers an in depth account of the home and of the outstanding collections it contained. A few of these objects had been allotted to the Empress by the French state, and a few had been purchased from the Paris Salon by her and her husband. Collections previously adorning the imperial residences at Marly, Saint Cloud and the Tuileries Palace included portraits by François Gérard, Henri-François Riesener, Franz Xaver Winterhalter (together with the big portray, Empress Surrounded by her Girls in Ready), two big copies of the aspect panels from Rubens’s Descent from the Cross, previously within the chapel of the Tuileries however relocated to the transepts of the mausoleum, a collection of Gobelins tapestries illustrating scenes from Don Quixote, now within the Virginia Museum of Effective Arts, Richmond and furnishings which had belonged to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Among the many sculptures was the celebrated group of the younger Prince Impérial together with his canine Nero, by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux.
Eugénie’s need to have the home and its contents preserved after her loss of life, which happened in 1920, was annoyed by the shortage of endowment, and the household bought off many of the contents. Geraghty does his greatest to account for his or her current whereabouts: many are in French public collections. The beneficiant illustrations report the rooms as they have been and as they’re, together with many displaying the objects previously in them.
He additionally offers an authoritative evaluation of the structure of the church, which has a dome and an apse, detailing its French fashions. Eugénie needed it to be staffed by a non secular group, like a medieval chantry, and the Benedictines are nonetheless there. The crypt homes the tombs of herself, her husband and son. Makes an attempt by the French authorities to get the our bodies returned to France have been rebuffed by the monks. The church suffered a brutal reordering, with the unique altars and pulpit being destroyed. Nevertheless, the closure of St Joseph’s Faculty at Mill Hill led to 4 of its altars being put in at Farnborough in 2008, notably the excessive altar by Leonardi of Rome, of marble with inlaid work. As that is proven in illustrations, it might need been talked about within the e-book. Total, the e-book is precisely proofread, which makes it stunning that the architect Mansart seems as Mansard.
Luckily, the home was purchased in 1927 by the Non secular of Christian Training, an order of nuns, to be used as a ladies’ faculty, which survives. They’ve handled it properly and made additions that embody a chapel by Adrian Gilbert Scott. The e-book brings again to life a forgotten “palace” and its treasures.
• Anthony Geraghty, The Empress Eugénie in England: Artwork, Structure, Accumulating, the Burlington Press/Paul Holberton, 271pp, £40, printed 23 September 2022
• Peter Howell was the chairman of the Victorian Society from 1987 to 1993. His newest e-book is The Triumphal Arch (Unicorn Publishing 2021)
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