West Wycombe Park

On the 21st of July 2024 the STONE-WORK team paid a brief visit to West Wycombe Park in Buckinghamshire, which is owned and maintained by the National Trust.

The original house at West Wycombe Park was built by Sir Francis Dashwood, c.1698, but was later incorporated into the core of the extensively remodelled house. This work was undertaken by Sir Francis Dashwood, 2nd baronet (1708-1781), between c.1735 and 1781. The long building period, which encapsulates changes in architectural style and the work of several architects, may account for some of the unusual or idiosyncratic elements in the building.

Dashwood, a bon vivant, who had undertaken a number of grand tours (including Greece and Asia Minor), and was a founding member of the Society of Dilettanti, championed the promotion of classical art and architecture in Britain, notably the publication of Nicholas Revett’s Antiquities of Athens (1762) and Ionia (1769). A number of architects have been associated with West Wycombe, including Roger Morris (east and north front), Robert Adam (design for west front) and Nicholas Revett (who built the West front in 1770-71), while Dashwood himself, along with other gentlemen architects and the architectural view painter John Donowell were also involved in the improvements.[1]

The use of materials at West Wycombe is particularly interesting, combining ambitious design and investment in expensive materials alongside cheaper options and imitative materials. The columns in the unusual, superimposed colonnade on the South front are rendered in plaster, to imitate stone. In 1754 a delivery of Portland stone, cut into blocks for columns, was sent to West Wycombe, perhaps intended for the North front. [2]

Internally the principal reception rooms include some fine examples of polychrome marble in the doorcases and chimneypieces, installed between 1748-50, while the Grand Hall (second campaign of works 1764-81) includes inlaid marble paving, alongside ‘marbled’ walls and columns, and painted ceilings of illusionistic coffering.[3]

Melanie Hayes

[1] Knox, Tim. ‘Sir Francis Dashwood of West Wycombe Park, Buckinghamshire, as a Collector of Ancient and Modern Sculpture’, Studies in the History of Art 70 (2008): 396–419, at 397. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42622688.

[2] Clare Hornsby, ‘The House and the Drawings Collection at West Wycombe Park: Dashwood's Educated Taste’, Art and the Country House, https://doi.org/10.17658/ACH/WWE518, citing Bodleian, MSS DD Dashwood C5/11/1a, letter from John Tucker in Weymouth to Sir Francis Dashwood, 28 October 1754.

[3] Knox, ‘Sir Francis Dashwood of West Wycombe Park’, 404, 407-8.