Abstract

This paper will outline how a revisionist approach to the study of interiors in the eighteenth-century English country house is yielding new histories of elite masculine identity and its relationship with the domestic. Drawing on my PhD case study on Doddington Hall – a privately-owned country house in Lincolnshire – I will first outline the history of a collection of seventeenth-century tapestries there, and in particular how they were re-displayed for Sir John Hussey Delaval in 1760-1762, on his inheriting the Doddington estate through his maternal bloodline. Making use of methodologies rooted in conservation practice and material culture studies, I will scrutinise select material evidence for repairs, reorganisation, and relocation of the tapestries to argue that, at Doddington Hall in 1762, the antique tapestries’ traditional functional and physical characteristics were subordinated by their potential as communicative symbols. I will explain how this practise, which has not before been characterised in histories of tapestry or the eighteenth-century interior, was predicated on the tapestries’ history as family heirlooms; old luxuries passed from Delaval’s distant ancestors and used by him in novel ways. Based on this analysis I will move to frame the 1762 decorative interventions at Doddington Hall as an act of self-fashioning: a curation of elite masculine values, negotiated via a network of dynasty, house, and objects, in which tapestry was a symbol of both memory and personal autonomy; past and present. In concluding the paper, I will argue that exploring country house interiors in this way offers original insights into how elite identities were embedded in men’s relationships with domestic material practice.