Great Drawing Room

The Clifford Children - Mather Brown (1761-1931)

There were various proposals made for the rebuilding of this part of the house during the 1760s and 1770s. However, following William's marriage to Catherine Langdale in 1775, he settled on a plan to create the Great Drawing Room. In 1776 the architect James Wyatt's (1746-1813) designs were accepted, and his bill of £246.6.0 for supplying French glasses for the mirrors was settled on 3 June 1777. On 29 August 1777 another bill of £273.3.4 was submitted by Wyatt for the marble chimneypiece carved by John Bacon (1740-99). At this point William Constable chose to employ the firm of Chippendale to execute Wyatt's scheme (Wyatt was notoriously unreliable), and during the following year Chippendale supplied the completed mirrors (incorporating Wyatt's glass into modified frame designs), a pair of pier tables (to support marble slabs acquired on William's Grand Tour), a large suite of seat furniture and a pair of window pelmets at a cost in excess of £1,100. The walls of the room were papered with green verditer (distempered paper) and apart from the exuberant gilded mirrors, pelmets and girandoles, there was little other embellishment.

All this changed when between 1843-45 the Clifford-Constables undertook extensive re-decoration. The ceiling plasterwork and all the woodwork was repainted - the details picked out in strong colours with gilded highlights and the walls covered in bright yellow silk. A new carpet was woven which incorporated the family crest into the design and the huge palm-tree ottoman was provided for the centre of the room. From the studio of the French painter Claude-Marie Dubuffe (1790-1864) the Clifford-Constables ordered four full-length family portraits.

In c.1900 the carpet was removed and the furniture cleared to create a ballroom and the room functioned as such for much of the twentieth century.

In 2001 a four-year lottery-funded project to restore the three Chippendale mirrors was completed and steps were taken to recreate the sumptuous Victorian interior.

Registered Charity No.1010121 Registered Museum No. 604

The Great Drawing Room