The long-awaited volume on Ham House, celebrating its 400th anniversary in 2010, is a treasure trove of erudition and enjoyment. Edited by Fellow Christopher Rowell, the book contains twenty-eight chapters, plus appendices of more than 100 pages, including full publication of all the early inventories for the first time. As one would expect from a volume devoted to one of the best-preserved (and best-loved) houses of the seventeenth century, many of the chapters deal with the types of luxurious ornament and furnishings that were typical of the day, all sumptuously illustrated.

Ham House was built in the Jacobean period by Sir Thomas Vavasour, who put the date 1610 over the front door, along with ‘Vivat Rex’, demonstrating a loyalty to the monarchy that would be one of the hallmarks of Ham’s later patrons. The first of these was William Murray (later first Earl of Dysart), to whom Ham was granted by Charles i. Murray had been the prince’s ‘whipping boy’ and good friend, travelling with him in 1625 for the unsuccessful wooing of the Infanta in Spain, where both developed a taste for fine, particularly Italian, art. The cabinet of curiosities that Murray later created at Ham, the Green Closet, is a rare survival of an early seventeenth-century Kunstkammer and a link to those created by Charles and Henrietta Maria themselves, which were dispersed in the Interregnum. Rowell gives a detailed account of this magical little room, its contents and the history of its display. Similarly, Fellow Susan Bracken puts copies after old masters into the context of Caroline collecting, a testament to how desperate English collectors were to display certain paintings, even if not by the original artist (acceptable as long as deception was not involved). Murray’s collection of copies, still hanging in situ along the Great Staircase, and his surviving cabinet are just two of the many reasons why Ham is crucial to our understanding of collecting and display in the Stuart period.

The book moves from subject to subject in a very agreeable way, with one chapter concentrating on a single room or item (Charles i’s prayer book, for example) followed by a chapter covering broader aspects of Ham’s interior. Fellow Claire Gapper’s illuminating discussion of the fine plaster ceilings at Ham demonstrates how Murray employed the plasterworker Joseph Kinsman to work in the style of Inigo Jones, whose deep-beamed, Venetian-style ceilings for royal buildings seemed to have sounded the death knell for English decorative plasterwork. Kinsman’s work at Ham (documented in a bill from 1638) is evidence of how plasterworkers adapted and ultimately survived.

Murray’s daughter Elizabeth inherited the title, becoming the second Countess of Dysart. With her first husband, Sir Lionel Tollemache, she established the family that would own Ham until the middle of the last century, but it was with her second husband, the powerful Duke of Lauderdale, that she would enlarge and embellish Ham, introducing a new wave of Continental luxuries: elaborately carved, inlaid, silvered and lacquered furniture; parquet floors; scagliola; trompe l’oeil ceilings; opulent textiles; splendid metalwork; and up-to-date sash windows, to name just a few. Chapters in the book cover these subjects in depth, often with technical explanations and diagrams, something one would expect from the scholars involved.

But there are also enlightening revelations. Although the north front of the house appears to be authentically Jacobean, there were a series of subtle alterations over the years, many of them recorded in topographical sketches and views. By the early eighteenth century, the house was deteriorating badly and in the 1740s the fourth Earl of Dysart employed John James and Joseph Martyr to carry out improvements, many of them structural. Fellow Sally Jeffery’s essay demonstrates how the work done in two costly building campaigns left its mark, but also how the fourth Earl’s respect for the history of the house kept these changes discreet. The earl’s sensibility to antiquarianism is considered further in Christopher Rowell’s chapter on the earl’s very fine collection of furniture and art, something that has often been overlooked because of the emphasis on seventeenth-century Ham. Horace Walpole, whose niece married the fifth Earl, found the house dreary and complained that it made his ‘spirits sink’. Still, the more positive and romantic interpretation of Ham as a ‘sleeping beauty’ endured.

Subsequent earls added to the collections (some nineteenth-century photographs show the house crammed with stuff) and repaired and renovated the house. But in the middle of the twentieth century, with the death of the ninth Earl, Ham House was passed on to the National Trust. In the final chapter, Fellow Simon Jervis carefully considers the very delicate negotiations with the Tollemache family over the contents of the house and the subsequent, but relatively short-lived, partnership of the National Trust (building) with the Victoria and Albert Museum (contents). It was during these years that Peter Thornton published his ground-breaking books on Ham and on seventeenth-century decoration, which the present volume has both built upon and eclipsed.

Ham House: 400 years of collecting and patronage is a monumental study of the architecture and interiors of an exceptional house, as well as of the evolution of its care. There is, however, one major criticism. Ham House was set carefully into gardens and a landscape that evolved, just as the house did, and that were the creations of the same patrons who lavished expense on the building. The records for the gardens at Ham are exceptionally good (and Fellow David Adshead touches tangentially on these several times), but there is no chapter devoted to the gardens or to the estate. One longs to put ‘the melancholy walk’ with its bench (itemised in the inventory of 1679) into a garden context. Some inventories also list the contents of still houses, laundries, dairies and (one can’t resist) ‘piggeries’. In addition to a chapter on gardens, a chapter devoted to the services (and the people who worked in them) would have added a social dimension that is missing, but without which the house – for all its magnificence – could not have functioned and certainly would not have gleamed as brightly.