Horace Walpole’s novel, The Castle of Otranto: a story, published on Christmas Eve 1764, is typically presented as the first ‘Gothic’ novel.Footnote ¹ It was not until the second edition of Otranto (1765), however, that the work acquired the subtitle A Gothic Story: only then was it explicitly framed as a piece of ‘Gothic’ fiction. Walpole initially distanced himself from Otranto, instead presenting the narrative as a translation by William Marshal, Gent., from the ‘original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St Nicolas at Otranto’.Footnote ² The novel’s source, the Preface to the first edition tells us, was a work ‘printed in Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529’, which was ‘found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England’.Footnote ³ Although apparently of sixteenth-century provenance, the work is dated by Walpole, in the guise of the translator, to the Crusades – to the ‘darkest ages of Christianity; but the language and conduct have nothing that favours of barbarism’.Footnote ⁴ As if to obscure his authorship even further, Walpole did not have The Castle of Otranto produced at his private printing press at Strawberry Hill, a facility that he had set up in 1757.Footnote ⁵ It was, instead, published by Thomas Lowndes in London.

Walpole disclosed his deception, however, and acknowledged his authorship of Otranto in the Preface to the second edition published on 11 April 1765:

Thereafter the novel has been connected frequently, and understandably, with Walpole’s other notable Gothic ‘output’, his villa, or the ‘little Gothic castle’ of his ancestors, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham (constructed and furnished 1747/8–80).Footnote ⁷ Indeed, Walpole himself seemed to have prompted this identification when, in the guise of the translator of the first edition of Otranto, he writes that ‘the scene is undoubtedly laid in some real castle’.Footnote ⁸ Accordingly, like many other visitors to the house after 1765, once Walpole’s authorship of Otranto was disclosed, Frances Burney (1752–1840) found that the villa’s ‘unusually shaped apartments’ offered ‘striking recollections … of his Gothic Story of the Castle of Otranto’.Footnote ⁹ W S Lewis, the great collector of Walpoliana in Farmington, CT, and executive editor of the extensive forty-eight-volume Yale edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (1937–83), similarly repeats Walpole’s suggestion that Otranto was based upon a tangible structure:

Lewis continues by suggesting that it is possible to identify some of the rooms in Otranto as those at Strawberry Hill:

Sean R Silver also connects the building and novel, but suggests that Otranto reciprocally influenced Walpole’s villa. He writes that ‘Otranto was an experiment in the organisation and display of Gothic artefacts that extends, and in some ways anticipates, ongoing work at Strawberry Hill’.Footnote ¹²

The materiality and prevailing atmosphere of ‘gloomth’ at Strawberry Hill, together with its ‘active’ architecture that imposes upon visitors a range of transitory and contradictory experiences designed and ‘curated’ by Walpole and the ‘Strawberry Committee’, certainly had a hand in Otranto’s narrative.Footnote ¹³ The house and novel are, after all, both concerned with the Gothic past. Walpole had been working on Strawberry Hill for sixteen years before Otranto took shape and, given their shared interest in, and references to, medieval architecture and culture, it is perfectly reasonable to see the novel and house as symbiotic, though discrete, manifestations of Walpole’s broad fascination with the Gothic past.Footnote ¹⁴ Indeed, their connection is suggested numerous times by Walpole himself. In a letter from 19 June 1774, for instance, he states that ‘I am going to hang them [a pair of shields] by the beautiful armour of Francis I and they will certainly make me dream of another Castle of Otranto’.Footnote ¹⁵ Strawberry Hill’s interior, he implies, could spawn another Gothic narrative.

Walpole also anchors Otranto’s genesis firmly at Strawberry Hill in a well-known letter to William Cole (1714–82) from 9 March 1765, in which he recalls the moment in early June 1764 that the novel was born:Footnote ¹⁶

The staircase mentioned in this letter to Cole is surely that at Strawberry Hill: the Arlington Street townhouse could hardly be considered an ancient castle, nor was its classical style likely to have inspired Otranto by association. It may seem contradictory, however, to see in Strawberry Hill the ‘foundation’ of an ancient Gothic castle given that Walpole’s house was, after all, a modern, suburban villa. Walpole, nevertheless, considered and frequently referred to it in his correspondence as a castle – and an ancient one at that. Writing to George Montagu (c 1713–80) on 11 June 1753, for example, Walpole makes mention of the ‘castle I am building of my ancestors’, its newly built nature notwithstanding.Footnote ¹⁸ The house’s historical nature and faux antiquity is developed further in an undated holograph addition to one of Walpole’s personal copies of A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole (1774):

Thus, although Strawberry Hill was effectively a new and modern structure, it is not unreasonable and unprecedented for Walpole to consider and refer to it as an ancient castle.

In his Description Walpole also emphasises Strawberry Hill’s influence over Otranto’s narrative: ‘at least the prospect would recall the good humour of those who might be disposed to condemn the fantastic fabric, and to think it a very proper habitation of, as it was the scene that inspired, the author of The Castle of Otranto’.Footnote ²⁰ This is what Nick Groom terms the ‘Strawberry factor’ in his Introduction to the most recent edition of The Castle of Otranto (2014).Footnote ²¹ This ‘Strawberry factor’ was sufficiently powerful for Walpole, on occasion, to refer to Strawberry Hill as ‘Otranto’, of which he was the ‘Master’, while Thomas Chatterton (1752–70), the author of the Rowley poems (1777) whom Walpole later maligned, termed Walpole the ‘Baron of Otranto’.Footnote ²² In addition, a drawing by Lavinia Spencer (née Bingham), Countess Spencer (1762–1831), depicting ‘A young lady reading the Castle of Otranto to her companion; a gracefull and expressive drawing, done for a present to Mr. W.’, was hanging in the villa’s Red Bedchamber by 1784.Footnote ²³ Spencer’s drawing not only reinforces the perceived relationship between Strawberry Hill and Otranto in the Georgian period, but also the predominantly female readership of Gothic novels that is equally recorded by James Gillray’s engraving, Tales of Wonder, from 1802.Footnote ²⁴

The link between Strawberry Hill and Otranto, based upon evidence from Walpole and his contemporaries, appears irrefutable. This article does not attempt to challenge the connection and postulated direction(s) of influence between the house and the novel. Instead, it explores a small collection of remarkable and apparently unsolicited watercolours that depict scenes from Otranto. These paintings are mostly by John Carter (1748–1817), the well-known Georgian architectural draughtsman and vocal supporter of medieval architecture.Footnote ²⁵ Paying close attention to these images yields a nuanced reading of the relationship between Walpole, Otranto, medieval architecture and heraldry. Instead of promoting Otranto’s commonly held source as Strawberry Hill, he repeatedly, and occasionally ad nauseam, emphasises Walpole’s role as the novel’s creator: there is no trace of Strawberry Hill – beyond, of course, the broad aesthetic theme. Carter capitalises upon his and Walpole’s congruent interests in the form and visual language of Gothic architecture and heraldry to create bold artworks articulating the associationist powers of the medieval form. Importantly, and until now overlooked, these watercolours also demonstrate an understanding and sympathetic use of the coded language of heraldry, and Carter embraces this visual language to add extra layers of sophisticated meaning to his depictions of Otranto.

Upon publication, Otranto lacked illustrations, and the first engravings were not included until the sixth edition (1791), which was set and printed by Bodoni in Parma.Footnote ²⁶ The six plates included in this edition, after drawings by Anne Millicent Clarke, are not particularly sophisticated and offer only a basic, stage-like, two-dimensional rendering of the scenes’ architectural contexts; instead, it was figures and their clothing and equipage that drew her attention (fig 1). Critical of such illustrations, Walpole wrote to Bertie Greathead (1759–1826) praising four manuscript designs depicting scenes from Otranto by his son, Bertie Greathead Jr (c 1781–1804). In his letter of 22 February 1796, Walpole recounts that:

Fig 1

Theodore & Matilda, from Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: a Gothic story (1791). Photograph: courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (pl iii, opp p 142; from LWL, 24 17 791P copy 4)

As Walpole here concedes, illustration had the power to supplement and enrich scenes that had only been loosely sketched out in his literary imagination. In comparison with Clarke’s illustrations, those by Bertie Greathead Jr are complex, and the architectural contexts are convincingly three-dimensional (fig 2).Footnote ²⁸ Significantly, the settings are clearly influenced by eighteenth-century domestic Gothic Revival architecture, though they do not reference specific spaces at Strawberry Hill.Footnote ²⁹ Consequently, Greathead Jr’s drawings are more modest and relatable in comparison with those created by Carter, who produced by far the largest, most important and most ambitious illustrations to The Castle of Otranto.

Fig 2

Bertie Greathead Jr, Frederick and the Spectre, 1796, in Walpole’s copy of The Castle of Otranto: a Gothic story (1791). Photograph: courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (LWL, 49 3729)

Under Richard Gough (1735–1809), Director of the Society of Antiquaries of London (1771–97), Carter was employed from 1780 to record medieval architecture and its fragments, and he contributed significantly to Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain (1786–96), which the Preface to the first volume acknowledges.Footnote ³⁰ Carter had also been introduced to Walpole at this time, and in 1788 he was employed to record Strawberry Hill (fig 3), including its interiors and a number of objects within Walpole’s collection, such as the model of the shrine of St Thomas Becket (fig 4).Footnote ³¹ Describing his relationship with Walpole in his unpublished Occurrences in the Life, and Memorandums Relating to the Professional Persuits of J C F.A.S. Architect, Carter records that:

Fig 3

John Carter, The Holbein Chamber, Strawberry Hill, 1788. Photograph: courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (LWL, 33 30 copy 11)

Fig 4

John Carter, Model of the Shrine of St Thomas Becket, 1788. Photograph: courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (LWL, 33 30 copy 11)

In 1790, Carter produced The Entry of Frederick into the Castle of Otranto, a large-scale watercolour (602×503mm) of a scene taken directly out of Walpole’s narrative (fig 5).Footnote ³³ There is no evidence to suggest Walpole commissioned it specifically, though it is a natural extension of his commission to delineate Strawberry Hill: the novel was, after all, Walpole’s other significant ‘Gothic monument’. Walpole hung the watercolour in the Little Parlour at Strawberry Hill, and in his personal copy of the Description (1784) bequeathed to him by Walpole, Carter records that he ‘(Was paid for it 20 Guineas.)’.Footnote ³⁴

Fig 5

John Carter, The Entry of Frederick into the Castle of Otranto, 1790. Photograph: courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (LWL, 790.00.00.138dr+)

This watercolour is unique among the known corpus of Otranto illustrations as no other traced work tackles this part of the novel. Unlike Strawberry Hill’s modest scale and, indeed, that of the real castle of Otranto in Italy – Carter copied a watercolour of the ‘real’ Castle of Otranto in Italy from a drawing made by Mr Reveley (fig 6) – the architectural setting of The Entry of Frederick is vast.Footnote ³⁵ Nine distinct structures ranging in style from Romanesque through to Perpendicular Gothic form three sides of Otranto’s courtyard. These buildings are clearly informed by Walpole and Carter’s shared understanding of, and interest in, the forms and details of medieval architecture. For Carter, this was manifest in the preservation and delineation of buildings and their details, whereas Walpole reproduced medieval architecture and ornament for domestic purposes, including modelling chimney-pieces upon tomb canopies: the gabled-canopy (now removed) over the effigy of John of Eltham, Earl of Cornwall, in Westminster Abbey, was the model for the chimney-piece in Strawberry Hill’s library, and the screen of Prince Arthur’s tomb at Worcester Cathedral informed the wallpaper of the staircase and hall.Footnote ³⁶

Fig 6

John Carter, South View of the Castle of Otranto with the Acroccraunian Mountains of Epirus in the Distance. Copied from a Drawing made in March 1785 by M ^r . Reveley. given to M ^r . Walpole by Lady Craven, c 1788. Photograph: courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (LWL, 33 30 copy 11 Folio)

The sophisticated rendition of architecture in The Entry of Frederick clearly resonated with Walpole’s passionate belief that Gothic architecture inspires awe and imagination:

Indeed, one of the reasons for Walpole’s profound embrace of Gothic architecture and historic relics was their ability to call to mind associations. As I have shown elsewhere, the medieval arts were intimately associated with the idea of chivalry, but the associative principles of Gothic architecture covered other facets of the Middle Ages.Footnote ³⁸ Walpole, in his Books of Materials, writes that:

The power of association, cultivated in the eighteenth century by Walpole – and, among others, by Joseph Addison (1672–1719) in his Spectator letters (1710–11) – meant that architectural styles were laden with meaning and associated ideas.Footnote ⁴⁰ Gothic, as Alexander Gerard (1728–95) sternly criticised it in his Essay on Taste (1759), only satisfies those unfortunate enough not to possess ‘enlargement of the mind’: though it offered, for others, a fantastic repertoire of architectural form and ornament quite separate to everyday Georgian life and taste that resonated with ‘old Knights, Crusades, the Wars of York & Lancaster’.Footnote ⁴¹ Carter embraces the associative power of Gothic, and The Entry of Frederick is an elaborate response to Walpole’s novel: nowhere in the novel is the castle of Otranto referred to as a Gothic fabric (beyond in the first edition’s Preface where the ‘translator’ dates the narrative to between 1095 and 1243), and it is never presented (explicitly or implicitly) as a vast complex. These features, instead, arise from the novel’s plot, its subtitle (used from the second edition on) and the regard for Britain’s Gothic heritage that Carter and Walpole shared.

Carter’s complex rendering of architecture responds to his occupation as an antiquary and architectural draughtsman. It reproduces, for example, the clutter and omnipresent architectural surroundings of the frontispieces to his Specimens of Ancient Sculpture and Painting (1780–94), the first volume of which was dedicated to Walpole (fig 7): ‘Your kind Encouragement gives wings to my Ambition to continue their Publication, and under your Auspices, I have been able to bring to a Conclusion the first Volume’.Footnote ⁴² The Entry of Frederick, while a bespoke artwork, is consistent with, and based upon, Carter’s pre-existing canon of faux-historical, associational illustrations that are imaginative, yet shrewdly archaeological and architecturally elaborate. In essence, Carter is using Walpole’s narrative to create more of his extraordinary and highly personal representations of the past: The Entry of Frederick is indebted to Walpole, but what Carter achieves is certainly very different from Walpole’s villa and the objects accreted within it.

Fig 7

John Carter, Specimens of Ancient Sculpture and Painting (1780): frontispiece. Photograph: courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (LWL, Folio 46 780C)

Carter’s decision to illustrate Frederick’s entry into Otranto offered him a unique opportunity – one not taken up by other artists – to define and delineate the most complete and complex display of chivalry and pomp in the whole of Walpole’s novel. The themes presented in the illustration – medieval architecture, chivalry, inheritance and usurpation of title and station – are at the heart of Otranto’s plot. Carter realised a scene that Walpole had imbued with abundant descriptive detail, although the architecture, as typical throughout Otranto, is not defined. The passage in Otranto, of which Carter was clearly aware, suggests around 523 characters in Frederick’s retinue, and it is worth quoting the text in full to contextualise Carter’s vivid rendition of the scene:

The gigantic sword with its bearers (though far short of Walpole’s one hundred) – along with the heralds, knights, horses and attendant parts of the train – are admirably illustrated by Carter. En masse, they convey fully the pomp and circumstance of the scene. And Manfred’s affront to the scene – the usurpation of his station and title, Prince of Otranto – is equally captured. In particular, in the prospect behind Manfred’s left shoulder, we see the arms of Vicenza and Otranto quartered – indicating Frederick’s apparently legitimate dominion over Manfred’s castle and land (fig 8). Vicenza’s arms, that of a golden Lion of St Mark (for Venice), is a natural choice on Carter’s behalf, and Otranto’s arms is a subtle modification of those of Naples under the Angevins. This corresponds with Otranto’s setting and conceivably demonstrates Carter’s researches into, and awareness of, the novel’s purported age (the time of the Crusades) and of heraldry more broadly.

Fig 8

John Carter, detail of The Entry of Frederick into the Castle of Otranto, 1790, showing the portraits of John Carter and Horace Walpole and the back-to-front quartered arms of Vicenza and Otranto. Photograph: courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (LWL, 790.00.00.138dr+)

Subverting this historical awareness and his attention to detail, the architectural setting is not real: instead, at best, Carter loosely paraphrases building types and styles. The Perpendicular structure to the rear right of the courtyard responds loosely to the western facades of Bath Abbey and Winchester Cathedral, while not being either in the fine detail. The cross towering over the scene is loosely based upon that at Winchester, though, once again, modified: none of these architectural models have anything to do with the novel. Besides, Perpendicular Gothic architecture post-dates the supposed age of Otranto by a century, and is therefore surprisingly anachronistic given Carter’s heraldic research and otherwise robust attention to detail. This anachronism does not, however, disrupt Otranto’s narrative; instead, it creates a striking High Gothic context that is consistent with his other elaborate works discussed here.

Carter exploited the language of heraldry to great effect. He dots the arms of Otranto (Naples) across the painting, including on the entrance tower, the shield, banners and flags in the foreground, and the heralds’ tabards and flags in the middle-ground. This gesture, however, was not without error – the quartered arms of Vicenza and Otranto that enraged Manfred so much in the novel, depicted behind him and Isabella, shows the flag’s reverse side; here, the arms face as they would on the obverse, meaning that the Lion of St Mark is mirrored the wrong way. There is no firm explanation for this oversight: Carter may have simply made a mistake, though this is unlikely given the effort expended planning and executing the watercolour’s minute details. Perhaps it is a subtle indication of the invalidity of Frederick’s claim to the title of Otranto, which is an important element in the Otranto narrative. Despite the uncertainty surrounding this heraldic component, the scene in general celebrates the forms, motifs and styles of medieval architecture that the ‘heretical part’ of Walpole’s heart adored.Footnote ⁴⁴ It also weaves in the heraldic details pertinent to Otranto’s narrative, by which Walpole was fascinated, harnessing it at Strawberry Hill, as he did, to create a visual representation of his pedigree, particularly in the armoury on the staircase, and on the library’s ceiling.Footnote ⁴⁵ Moreover, as indicated in the passage quoted above, heraldry certainly guided Frederick’s reception by Manfred, the then apparent Prince of Otranto.

Aside from the style of the architecture, the deployment of heraldry and the fact that Walpole purchased it and hung it in his Gothic villa, The Entry of Frederick has little to do with Strawberry Hill. And yet, two figures in the lower right-hand corner of this watercolour are particularly unusual, and serve to link the scene with the eighteenth century. The person directly behind Manfred and Isabella looks out confrontationally at the viewer. This is almost certainly a self-portrait of Carter: the face correlates with the self-portrait (c 1817) produced with Sylvester Harding, now in the British Museum, and with another included in the frontispiece to his Occurrences; his attributes – the beret and roll of paper – support his identity as architect, draughtsman and artist.Footnote ⁴⁶ The second figure, in the bottom right-hand corner talking to a page, is almost certainly Walpole himself. The face and hair, quite distinct, like Carter’s, from the remainder of the watercolour’s caricature-like representations, matches Walpole’s appearance as recorded by Carter in his Three sketches of Horace Walpole in 1788 and the portrait (1796) by Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830).Footnote ⁴⁷

The Carter self-portrait was previously thought by W S Lewis to depict Walpole. This in part governed the price he was willing to pay to acquire the work from General Sir Henry Cholmondeley Jackson in 1962. ‘Because of its Strawberry Hill provenance plus the HW portrait,’ he wrote, ‘I do not think £500 is excessive.’Footnote ⁴⁸ His letter does not identify where Walpole is within the crowd; however, correspondence between Lewis and Sir Owen Morshead written ten days earlier furnishes the essential information, including the portrait’s ‘discovery’: Morshead recounts that the General ‘loathe[s] the whole notion of taking money for the drawing at all – which has acquired all the more value to me through Mr. Lewis’s discovery that the figure is H.W. himself’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Importantly, Morshead found the General ‘aglow at having just discovered [within the watercolour] a quite unmistakable Devil (with 2 horns) at the right-hand margin, apparently glaring towards H.W.’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Lewis later published this identification in his co-authored ‘The portraits of Horace Walpole’.Footnote ⁵¹ Walpole is almost certainly in the picture; however, the figure to the left of the ‘Devil’ is more likely to be Carter, whose confrontational gaze announces, in line with an established tradition in European art, the importance of his architectural genius and skill as a draughtsman. Carter is more prominent because he converted Walpole’s words to line, colour and shade. Walpole, if this reading is correct, is below, and to the right of, Carter. His importance to the form and appearance of The Entry of Frederick is subsidiary to Carter’s architectural vision. Walpole is nevertheless intimately associated with the narrative – as indicated already, this scene is one of the most prominent expressions of medieval spectacle in Otranto. Carter demonstrates Walpole’s authorial responsibility for the novel, but takes for himself the credit of interpreting and visualising the literary work. These portraits are, effectively, signatures that would have been instantly recognisable to Walpole, Carter and their circle of antiquarian friends.

Of course, this identification may appear hopeful and speculative – the hair, for example, is, after all, of a generically eighteenth-century style and form. However, Carter’s second illustration of Otranto depicting the death of Matilda (fig 9), and the related frontispiece to Specimens of Ancient Sculpture (1780) (see fig 7), suggest otherwise.Footnote ⁵² Walpole’s personal coat of arms was differentiated from that of the Earl of Orford (Or on a Fess between two Chevrons Sable three Crosses Crosslet of the Field) by the addition of a sable mullet under the upper chevron’s apex. He used it as the centrepiece to the heraldic scheme applied to the library ceiling at Strawberry Hill; it was stamped on the boards of books in his collection and also used on his bookplate (fig 10). John Chute (1701–76), one of the members of Walpole’s Strawberry Committee whom he termed ‘my Oracle of taste’, also applied elements from the differentiated arms onto a proposed facade for the cottage in the grounds of Strawberry Hill.Footnote ⁵³ Carter similarly harnessed Walpole’s personal arms, including them together with the Saracen’s head – the Walpole family crest – at the foot of the tomb-chest in the frontispiece to the first volume of Specimens of Ancient Sculpture (1780) (fig 11). Carter’s initial watercolour proposal for the frontispiece did not include Walpole’s arms, but instead another, though visually related, coat mostly hidden behind figures.Footnote ⁵⁴ By removing the figures obscuring the arms in the engraving, and by changing the armorial to Walpole’s personal, differentiated form, Carter visually reiterated the volume’s dedication to Walpole, albeit simultaneously by suggesting that Walpole lived and died in the Middle Ages.Footnote ⁵⁵ Including a portrait of Walpole in The Entry of Frederik is, therefore, consistent with this earlier engraving as a dedicatory signpost to the man himself.

Fig 9

John Carter, The Death of Matilda, c 1780. Photograph: courtesy of the Royal Institute of British Architects, London (RIBA SB52/5)

Fig 10

Walpole’s personally differentiated arms: a bookplate pasted into the title page of the manuscript of ‘The English baronage from William I to James I’, after 1763. Photograph: courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (LWL, 49 3499)

Fig 11

John Carter, Specimens of Ancient Sculpture and Painting (1780): detail of the frontispiece. Photograph: courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (LWL, Folio 46 780C)

The second monumental watercolour by Carter illustrating Otranto depicts the death of Matilda (see fig 9), and builds upon the imagery already considered, including The Entry of Frederick and the frontispiece to the first volume of Specimens of Ancient Sculpture.Footnote ⁵⁶ Like the frontispiece, it includes Walpole’s personally distinguished arms; but, instead of incorporating it once, Carter inserts it, on this occasion, in places: on a boss, above the high altar, at the end of the tomb and on its prie dieu in the foreground, on the front board of the Bible, on a side altar, and on another two tombs in the background. Walpole, and anyone familiar with Walpole’s personal coat of arms, would have understood this reference immediately: Walpole’s hand cannot be separated from the form, context and appearance of Otranto.

Carter, as with The Entry of Frederick, does not indicate Strawberry Hill’s role in the narrative – none of the tombs illustrated here, for example, were by Walpole to create Strawberry Hill’s interior, a fact of which Carter, having delineated the house, would no doubt have been aware. Instead, the very fabric of Otranto’s physical manifestation celebrates and dilates Walpoleian architectural associations writ large. Matilda’s murder in the church of St Nicholas, adjacent to the castle of Otranto, consequently takes place in what is effectively Carter’s reinterpretation of Walpole’s private Gothic chapel-cum-cathedral, realised on a scale grander than anything that Walpole ever achieved in reality: at Strawberry Hill, with The Castle of Otranto, or, indeed, at any other house, such as Lee Priory, Kent (1785), that emerged from Walpole’s circle.Footnote ⁵⁷ Walpole’s arms is the most frequently displayed in the scene: Otranto’s arms, for example, appears only six times in the illustration, and therefore is secondary to Walpole’s own. It is, perhaps, a little ironic, however, that Carter decided to place Walpole’s personal variation of his family arms on three separate tombs; the idea, nevertheless, is direct. Despite this intriguing decision, Carter’s drawings of Otranto and the related frontispiece for Specimens of Ancient Sculpture are the most compelling and extraordinarily complex historicist essays in late Georgian Britain equal to and excelling the engravings circulated by the Boydell Gallery, such as John Ogborne’s engraving after Josiah Boydell depicting Henry VI, Part I, Act ii, Scene iv (1790–5), and King Richard the Second, Act v, Scene ii, The Entrance of King Richard & Bolingbroke into London, by Robert Thew after James Northcote (1801) (fig 12).Footnote ⁵⁸

Fig 12

The Entrance of King Richard & Bolingbroke into London, from Shakespeare’s King Richard the Second, Act v, Scene ii (1801), Robert Thew (engraver), after James Northcote. Photograph: courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, Yale University (YCBA, B1977.14.20007)

It is clear from these three illustrations that Carter was, simultaneously, informed, imaginative and visually articulate. His use of heraldry, much like Walpole’s interest in the subject matter, was fundamental to his realisation of Otranto’s narrative, and through this he established Otranto’s relationship with Walpole. Heraldry is a coded language, and the clear and repeated use of Walpole’s personal arms emphasised his status as the true author and inspiration behind these works. Carter’s architectural quotations, such as the near-exact reproduction of the tomb of Aymer de Valance, Earl of Pembroke, Westminster Abbey, in the background of The Death of Matilda would have carried favour in Walpole’s circle, and certainly corresponds with Walpole’s own recycling of medieval tombs for domestic design purposes at Strawberry Hill. These representations of Otranto’s scenes, much like the frontispieces to Specimens of Ancient Sculpture, are hyperbolic and unnecessarily grand: while Walpole never indicates the castle’s dimensions, he never implies that it is on the scale depicted in Carter’s watercolours. St Nicholas, for example, is generally referred to as a church, although, on one occasion, Walpole calls it a cathedral.Footnote ⁵⁹ Carter certainly managed to capitalise upon this continuity error, and the setting for The Death of Matilda was designed to impress: its form, decoration and atmosphere were clearly indebted to Carter’s love and passionate defence of medieval architecture.Footnote ⁶⁰

Curiously, just over a decade after Carter had completed these watercolours, and following the death of Walpole in 1797, he turned on the late 4th Earl of Orford, his one-time patron. Writing in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1801 under the heading of ‘The pursuits of architectural innovation’, Carter spent the majority of the article critiquing Wren’s work: for example, the great modern monument of classical architecture, St Paul’s Cathedral, London, whose design ‘in the Corinthian taste being then thought to “exceed the splendour and magnificence of the old cathedral when in its best state”’.Footnote ⁶¹ However, in the same piece, Carter considers the contentious topic of ‘Gothic architecture revived’, a tendency, he continues, which has ‘within these few years been banded about the kingdom, and some of its dregs we find foisted on our sight, as the fronts of the courts in Westminster hall’ by William Kent.Footnote ⁶² Carter continues by claiming that:

After Walpole’s death, Carter criticised Walpole’s Gothic villa, a house that he had recorded in such painstaking detail in an extra-illustrated copy of the Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole (Reference Walpole1784) thirteen years before. And yet, during Walpole’s lifetime, Carter was happy to accept the patronage of a fellow admirer of medieval architecture. Indeed, in a previously unknown record he made of Walpole’s Chapel in the Woods in 1787, Very slight View of the Gothic chapel, which contains the Shrine of Sr. in the garden at Strawberry Hill, Carter overtly praises its fidelity to medieval architecture: ‘(This Chapel was Copied and executed with the utmost nicety and truth in Portland stone from part of the Dudley chapel, in the choir of Salisbury Cathedral, by Mr. Gafere Mason, Westminster)’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Like Walpole, who felt that Strawberry Hill was but ‘a sketch by beginners’, whose early parts had been designed and realised by his ‘workmen who had not studied the science [of Gothic design]’, Carter was certainly aware of Strawberry Hill’s flaws as a piece of Gothic architecture.Footnote ⁶⁵ He, nevertheless, appears pragmatic: Walpole was a friend and client who was equally enamoured with the medieval past, and alienating him would have been counterproductive. Despite this later criticism, their shared passion for the medieval period precipitated overtly reverential watercolours designed to recognise and flatter Walpole’s role as author of Otranto and as a prominent supporter of the Gothic past.