Floorcloth recreated for the Entrance Hall at Attingham
(Article written for the National Trust)

Anyone who has attempted to investigate the little known subject of Floor-cloths will have encountered the 1827 sales catalogue description of the Attingham Entrance Hall Floorcloth: A HANDSOME SQUARE PIECE OF STONE AND SLATE COLOUR OCTAGON PANELLED ROSET-PATTERN FLOOR-CLOTH. It is mentioned in the authoritative Temple Newsham catalogue for the exhibition “Country House Floors 1660-1850. The description of the floor comes tantalizingly close to a precise instruction for the reproduction but leaves enough questions unanswered to be open to interpretation. This article will discuss aspects of both the historical background and the design process used for the recreation of the Attingham Floor-cloth, which will be in situ in the entrance hall when Attingham Hall opens for visitors at Easter 2002, about 100 years after the original Floor-cloth was finally discarded, having served for over eighty years.

In 1805, when the flamboyant Thomas Hill, 2nd Baron Berwick embarked on his ambitious remodelling of Attingham Hall to house the purchases from his Grand Tour, he employed John Nash to create the Great Picture Gallery and to redesign the Entrance Hall, which had been built only twenty years earlier by George Steuart for his father the 1st Lord Berwick.

Bitten by the decorating bug, Lord Berwick confessed to his brother in 1810 to “not having resolution to abstain from Building and Picture buying” . He continued his association with Nash, whom he commissioned to work on his Grosvenor Square House in 1812, possibly to celebrate his marriage in the same year to the seventeen-year old courtesan Sophia Dubouchet.

The finances of the estate deteriorated but Lord Berwick continued decorating at Attingham. In December 1818 a FLOOR-CLOTH was bought for the entrance hall measuring 20ft by 21ft for the not insignificant sum of £19.16.8. We do not know if Nash was consulted about this purchase. It is an interesting subject for investigation: to what extent were architects consulted for the purchase or the design of Floor-cloths? Some designed carpets of course, and Robert Adam has splendid examples at Syon, Osterley, Saltram and Audley End. Was the Floor-cloth too humble a subject for the attention of a great architect? Floorcloths had a contradictory status. On the one hand they were often placed in servants’ quarters and were sometimes referred to in a slighting manner. Robert Campbell wrote in The London Tradesman 1747: "In the Turner’s Shop we generally meet with Floor-Cloths, painted in Oil Colours, which is performed by a Class of Painters who do little else. It requires no great Ingenuity, and the Wages of Journeymen is the same as in other branches of Painting.” Later on the status of the Floor-cloth was raised, its manufacture became more sophisticated and during the Regency period Floor-cloths often took pride of place in the entrance halls of great houses. So did Nash know of this Floor-Cloth purchase? Perhaps. Although by 1818 he was kept busy by the Prince Regent at Brighton and on other grand projects, the large new Floor-cloth at Attingham would after all have been a significant addition to his beautiful Regency scheme where each component had been chosen to form part of a harmonious whole, and to blend in with the earlier Steuart ceiling and pilasters.

The new Floor-cloth was purchased from a John Dickens, purveyor of soft furnishings and carpets. He supplied not only the Floor-cloth, but the bill of 1818 lists a large number of items, ranging from six dozen buttons to a Brussels stair carpet. Throughout the eighteenth century the “upholder “ had served as a supplier of a multitude of household services and household articles; from undertaking to soft furnishings. He was sometimes a great manufacturer and entrepreneur such as Chippendale, who incidentally also made floor-cloths, and sometimes a middleman, such as perhaps our Mr. Dickens. The “upholder”often seems to have exerted a strong influence over his customers and performed the function of an interior decorator. Thomas Hope fumes indignantly in 1807 : “everyone of these articlesŠabandoned till very lately in this country, to the taste of the sole upholder, entirely ignorant of the most familiar principles of visual beauty” By the time the Floor-cloth was purchased for Attingham, however, it was often usual for the Floor-cloth manufacturers to deal directly with their clients. We know that the Floor-cloth had a border, which indicates that it must have been ordered as a bespoke item. Therefore, it is probable that it was ordered many months before its delivery because it would have hung for several months drying in the floor-cloth factory. The longer the floor-cloth was “seasoned”, the more durable it became. Unfortunately we do not know the manufacturer of the Attingham Floor-cloth. The most important firm of the day was Smith and Baber of Knightsbridge, from which incidentally the 1st Lord Berwick had bought an elaborate and glazed Mess Tent in 1798, perhaps to accommodate his Shropshire officers in some style at the outset of the Napoleonic wars.

The soft furnisher Mr. Dickens had to wait until 20th October 1819, the year after the delivery of the Floor-cloth before Lord Berwick issued him with a promissory note that the bill would be paid in five months time. He honoured his promise and the bill was paid on March 23rd 1820, nearly fifteen months after the delivery of the Floor-cloth. To be fair to Lord Berwick, this would not have been unusual. The practise of delaying payment was of course the norm amongst the grandees of the day.

By 1827 Lord Berwick had exhausted the family coffers and was made bankrupt. The contents of Attingham Hall were auctioned off to clear the debts and it is in this sales catalogue that the description appears which provides the only clue to the appearance of the Floor-cloth in the entrance hall. Entry 82 is described as “A HANDSOME SQUARE PIECE OF STONE AND SLATE COLOUR OCTAGON PANELLED ROSET-PATTERN FLOOR-CLOTH, bordered, 7 yards by 6 and 3/4 yards. Entry number 83 reads: Four pieces of yard-wide ditto, bordered (leading to doorways) 9 yards. The reserve price for the main Floor-Cloth was put at £8.18. It did not sell but must have been of a high quality since it lasted at Attingham at least until 1898 when it is described in the inventory as “much worn”.

In the summer of 2001 meetings were held between Julian Gibbs, the Nat ional Trust’s architectural historian in charge of Attingham Hall; James Finlay, paint consultant to the Trust, and myself. I had been given the task to design and recreate the cloth. One topic of discussion was the difficult balance that must be struck between the historically correct and the aesthetic. In this case the historically correct was a nebulous concept since so little is preserved as reference material in the form of patterns. There exists however an interesting volume of mid-nineteenth century manuscripts by the Floor-cloth manufacturer Robert Barnes in the V&A which has some designs for stencilled patterns. We let ourselves be guided by the design for a stencilled floor from this scrapbook, which is reproduced as fig. 83 in “Country House Floors.” It was therefore decided that the “octagon-panelled “ and the “slate” in the sales catalogue description would be made up of a simple 18” diagonal square interset by 4 and 1/2” black squares. As far as this part of the design we were on fairly safe territory. The octagons echo the original George Steuart entrance hall design of 1785, when the floor appears to have been the stone octagons with slate squares which had become virtually ubiquitous during the eighteenth century. The pavement pattern used for the Attingham Hall Floor-cloth also looks very similar to the pattern on a floorcloth illustrated to the right in a picture of the Smith and Baber Floorcloth factory from the Penny magazine of 1848. (Bodleian) Although this is thirty years later the patterns could have remained the same. The appetite for pavement designs remained undiminished throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Floor cloth manufacturers guarded their costly printing blocks jealously. Like wallpaper blocks, they were made of pearwood which did not warp and they lasted for decades.

The “roset-pattern” finally, (and thankfully) gave some scope for artistic interpretation, since there is no known visual reference to Floor-cloths with roset patterns. Our rosets are 6” diameter placed in the middle of each octagon. I designed these rosets taking inspiration from ornaments in Steuart’s Adamesque ceiling as well as the mosaic rosets on the gilt Italian tables, c.1800, in the Picture gallery, brought back by the 2nd Lord Berwick from his travels. The colours echo the beautiful but rather sombre palette of the faux-marble and the grisailles of Nash’s scheme. My rosets are silk-screened rather than block- printed in three colours, and have some hand-painted additions.

The original Floor-cloth would have been painted on a base of seamless linen flax, woven on an immense sailmakers’loom which could produce cloth up to 9 feet wide. Thick oil-paint was applied in several layers using a trowel. The surface was smoothed with pumice stone between the layers. It was not varnished so floor-cloth manufacturers offered a service of re-painting the cloths when they became worn. Although the new Floor-cloth is painted on linen flax, modern waterbased materials have been used. Several layers of primer have been applied before the final paint and print layers and as a concession to practicality it has been applied with many coats of acrylic varnish. It has taken nearly three months to complete.

The recreation of the Attingham Floor-cloth has provided an interesting case study from both an historical and artistic point of view and it will hopefully stimulate more interest into this fascinating but little known area of European design history.

Sophie Sarin March 2002

references

C.Gilbert, J. Lomax, A Wells-Cole, Country House Floors 1660-1850 (Temple Newsam Country House Studies 3) Leeds. 1987

R. Campbell, The London Tradesman, London 1747, p.245

Shropshire Records&Research, Shrewsbury, 112/6/47/19; 112/6/43/115; 112/6/47/19

T. Hope, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration Executed from Designs by Thomas Hope, London 1807. Introduction

National Arts Library IIRC H10, Robert Barnes, Papers in connection with the Early Floor Cloth Manufacture 1857