Buscot Park, Oxfordshire

Buscot Park South Garden Front


North Entrance Front

The National Trust is nothing if not a broad church encompassing everything from back-to-backs in Birmingham to splendid blingtastic mansions such as the wondrously restored and goodie filled Rothschild’s Waddesdon Manor near Aylesbury.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/11/waddesdon-manor-buckinghamshire.html

What I particularly enjoy is the plurality of properties and approaches. Some are fully restored but others are “conserved” or kept at a particular time in their history. So the National Trust (to its great credit) does not adopt a “one size fits all” approach to the properties and nature reserves in its care. This plurality is reflected in Buscot Park which is actually managed with some aplomb by the 3rd Lord Faringdon of the Henderson Banking family who are also involved with Cazenoves, one of the last of the old time City Stockbrokers.


Entrance

A stipulation in the agreement with the National Trust stated that Buscot would be leased to the Barons Faringdon, enabling them to remain in residence. This arrangement has continued to the present day. The present and 3rd Lord Faringdon, with his wife, not only lives in the house, but is responsible for the day to day management and decoration of the mansion. Although Lord and Lady Faringdon have built a smaller house, the Garden House, in the grounds for their personal use during the summer months when the tourist season is at its peak, the interior of the house has very much the uncontrived air of a private residence rather than that of a public art gallery




Chairs commemorating the Battle of the Nile

However it does house a major portion of the Faringdon Collection which includes some outstanding Pre-Raphaelite pieces. The present Lord Faringdon has added many works of art to the collection, including contemporary paintings, ceramics, glass and silver. The house, gardens and grounds are open each year from April to September.
Buscot Park is an outstanding eighteenth century house (1780) in the Palladian style with a twentieth century garden. The garden is a prime example of the Italian mode of the Arts and Crafts style, designed by Harold Peto in 1912. It has a canal which steps down the slope through the woods, edged by hedges, urns and statues. The kitchen garden is now planted with flowers, to a design by Peter Coats, with hornbeam tunnels.


The water gardens, designed by Harold Peto, link the more formal gardens, close to the house, through the park to the distant lake.

We had an immediate introduction to the personal quality of Buscot when we went to the tea room on arrival. Like many before we were entranced the vigorous and colourful murals that decorate the Buscot tea room, which was converted from part of the eighteenth-century stable block in 1991. The murals, painted a secco (on dry plaster), between 1991 and 1994, are the work of Ellen-Ann Hopkins, and they evoke the Renaissance style of Veronese, who covered the walls of the Villa Barbaro with amusing portraits of the owner and his family. Here, the artist has included many symbolic objects whose full meaning is understood only by the family and friends of Lord Faringdon, though everyone will recognise the family lurchers, the black swans from the Buscot Park lakes, and various flowers from the Four Seasons garden. Rather than include her own self-portrait, the artist has allowed her faithful black Scottie, Macbeth, to stand in for her. Quixotic and enigmatic, the frescoes are also full of energy and colour and form a part of the continuing artistic tradition at Buscot Park.






Teahouse Murals

Buscot Park was built between 1780 and 1783 for Edward Loveden Townsend inspired by the architecture of the great Renaissance architect, Andrea Palladio. In 1859 his great-grandson sold the estate to an Australian tycoon, Robert Tertius Campbell. He died in 1887 after spending a fortune turning Buscot into a model agricultural estate. The estate (of 4,000 acres) was in some disrepair by the time 'Squire Campbell' bought it, but he employed one hundred men to help build a reservoir, delivering a state of the art irrigation system to the pastures, which would turn it into a hugely efficient farm. He had the - at the time, outrageous - idea to grow sugar beet, which would in turn be distilled to make spirit alcohol. He had a working distillery built at the estate (on a small island next to the lock - still called 'Brandy Island'). The distillery closed in 1879, after the French men he employed to run it were called back to France to fight in the Franco-Prussian War, and the Englishmen who took over didn't really know what they were doing. Mr Campbell also built a mill, a turbine, a gas works, and had a little railway; he was known for his fondness for state of the art machinery.


Saloon


Entrance Hall

He died (bankrupt) in 1885, and two years after his death the estate was sold to Sir Alexander Henderson, a highly successful city financier, later 1st Lord Faringdon whose descendants continue to live here. With catholic tastes in art, he bought paintings by Rembrandt, Murillo, Reynolds and Burne-Jones, establishing a solid core to the Faringdon Collection. He was Chairman of the Great Central Railway from 1889 to 1922, and died 12 years after retiring from that position. He passed on Buscot Park (and his title) to his heir, his grandson Gavin Henderson (born in 1902).


Orangery


Buscot Park, one of the two flanking wings designed by Geddes Hyslop in 1934 to replace Victorian additions, considered incongruous.

Gavin Henderson, the 1st Lord Faringdon’s grandson and heir, was also an enthusiastic collector of pictures, and he added the bulk of the pictures to be seen at Buscot today. He also remodelled the house by removing the heavy Victorian additions that had compromised the original design, as well as building the two balancing pavilions that stand to the east and west of the house. He was educated at Eton, then Oxford, and one of the 'Bright Young Things' depicted in novels by Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh.





Unusually, for someone in his position, he became a member of the Labour Party (and later the Fabian Society). He was a staunch pacifist, so during the Second World War, gave his energies to the Fire Service. After the war he became a Labour County Councillor in London, and after that served on the Historic Buildings committee of the Greater London Council once it was formed. He died in 1977.


Swimming Pool




Theatre and murals

Other notable frescos at Buscot are on the swimming pool pavilion at the side of the house. Painted by John Hastings (who later became the Earl of Huntingdon) at some time in the late 1930s, they portray friends of the 2nd Lord Faringdon, and some of the Buscot Park staff. Lord Faringdon himself is portrayed as a young man addressing a Labour Party rally in the scene on the left (as you face the pool), while above is a portrait of Mr Cowdray, Buscot’s Farm Manager, leading a prize bull, and Mr Bastion, the Head Gardener, with some exotic blooms. John Hastings’ self-portrait is in the adjacent roundel, and the lady portrayed in the roundel opposite is Susan Lawrence, one of the first women Labour MPs and chairman of the Labour party from 1929 to 1930. Two other well-known figures portrayed here are Lord Berners, who lived at Faringdon House nearby, and Lady Violet Bonham-Carter, both of whom are among the guests of Lord Faringdon seated at dinner. Altogether apart from their artistic merit these murals are a remarkable piece of political and social history.



At Buscot Park you will also find exquisite gardens, including the spectacular Water Garden designed by Harold Peto and the Four Seasons Walled Garden created by the present Lord Faringdon. The House is home to the Faringdon Collection which contains an extraordinary array of paintings, furniture and objets d'art. There is also a small purpose built theatre which is regularly used for concerts, plays and corporate hospitality.



The Faringdon Collection, which can be viewed at Buscot Park in Oxfordshire and the Faringdon’s London property in Beauchamp Place SW7, is the result of a century of collecting works of art by the Lords Faringdon. It includes paintings by Rembrandt, Reynolds, Rubens, van Dyck and Murillo, and there is a small but important collection of drawings. British art, especially of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is particularly well represented in the Collection, with some outstanding works by the Pre-Raphaelite artists Burne-Jones and Rossetti, and the present Lord Faringdon continues to acquire new works by contemporary artists.


View across lake

The Legend of Briar Rose is the title of a series of paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones which were completed between 1885 and 1890. The four original paintings - The Briar Wood, The Council Chamber, The Garden Court and The Rose Bower - and an additional ten adjoining panels, are located at Buscot Park.

The Legend of Briar Rose

The Rose


The Garden Court


The Council Chamber


Briar Wood

For more on Edward Burne-Jones see;

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2010/09/wightwick-manor-wolverhampton.html

To the west of the house, the mellow red-brick walls of the original kitchen garden now shelter the Four Seasons garden, bright with the blooms of spring bulbs, flowering trees and drifts of multi-coloured day lilies, according to the time of year. To the east, woodland walks lead to one of Britain’s finest water gardens, an unusual marriage of Italianate formality with an English parkland landscape.


Chinese Warriors in the garden

From the south front of the house, the carriage drive sweeps away to the south east, down through mature woodland. From the north front of the house, the views take in the Little Lake and the Thames plain beyond. From neither point is any clue given of the splendid water garden that lies to the east of the house, reached by following the steps from the north terrace.





This is a lovely place to visit. Having walked up to the main house and found yourself looking across the back lawns a stunning Anglo- Italianate box edged walk leads you down to a sublime view of an enormous lake, the view tightly constrained by the narrowness of the avenue and height of trees. Rooms occur within the Avenue/walk with colonnades of Juniper and sleepy water features and waterway tempting you down to the lake.

Read more: http://www.gardenvisit.com/garden/buscot_park#ixzz1Rpd8DMRp

In 1956 the Buscot Park estate was bequeathed to the National Trust, and the contents of the house were subsequently transferred to the Trustees of the Faringdon Collection. The present Lord Faringdon lives at Buscot Park, administering the house and grounds on behalf of the National Trust. He continues to acquire new works by contemporary artists to enhance the Faringdon Collection. With the combination of a wonderful Palladian Mansion, beautiful setting and gardens and the high calibre Faringdon Collection this would be a very rewarding place to visit. However the personal touches, the sense that this is a home still lived in and the obvious love and attention shown by the family lift Buscot Park to another level and make visiting here particularly rewarding.





Postal Address;

The Estate Office, Buscot Park
Faringdon, Oxon SN7 8BU

Information Line: Tel: 01367 240932

Telephone (Mon - Fri ): Tel: 01367 240786

Website; http://www.buscot-park.com