Old Place, Lindfield in Sussex, was the home of stained glass designer Charles
Eamer Kempe. He restored this Jacobean manor house, enlarging and enlarging it again, to create a stately pleasure dome that dazzled visitors and led Country
Life to write about it no fewer than four times in as many years. Variously
described as a House Beautiful and as a Palace of Art, its contents and its
gardens reflected Kempe’s taste, his passion for art and for the past. One
dazzled visitor was the sculptor and writer, Lord Ronald Gower, who wrote in
his Diary for 27th September 1889:
'I paid Mr Kempe (the great
artist of coloured glass) a short visit at his delightful home, Old Place, at
Lindfield. This is truly a ‘house beautiful’, every room in it, even the
bedrooms with their quaint old ‘four posters’, their tapestries, and stained
glass windows, artistic studies one and all. [….] The outside of Old Place is
as beautiful as the interior, the effect of crimson from the Virginia Creeper
on the grey stone walls, crowned by picturesque gables, harmonizes with the
wealth of colour within doors.'
Lord Ronald (doyen of the Aesthetic Movement’s demi-monde, model for
Lord Henry in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture
of Dorian Grey) became a frequent visitor to Old Place, his name appearing
often in Kempe’s Visitors Book. In July 1893, when the new East wing had just
been completed, he noted that ‘Old Place is now one of the prettiest places I
have ever seen,’ but added – as if
reluctantly – ‘Perhaps if one could find a fault with this almost perfect house
it would be that it is a little over-decorated. The new drawing room is a blaze
of carved roses in scarlet and gold, with superb oak carving on the walls.’
Another visitor in the 1890s was Henry James, to whom Kempe had been
introduced through his friends Field Marshal Viscount and Lady Wolseley, near
neighbours in Sussex. James signed his name in the Visitors Book for the first
time on 8th March 1897, and it’s tempting to think he might have had
Old Place in mind when he wrote The
Spoils of Poynton, his novel about a widowed lady, Mrs Gereth, who lived in
an ‘exquisite old house’ full of ‘the things’, antiques collected from all over
Europe with which Poynton ‘overflowed’. While writing this novel, James had
provisionally titled it The House
Beautiful, the same phrase Gower had borrowed for Old Place from Pilgrim’s Progess. Clearly, Lord
Ronald had thought Old Place overflowed; he would also have agreed with
James’s description of the house as ‘early Jacobean, supreme in every part, a
provocation, an inspiration, the matchless canvas for a picture’.
Kempe’s friends would have had no difficulty in recognizing what
James meant when he said that Poynton was
the record of a life. It was written in great
syllables of colour and form, the tongues of other countries and the hands of
rare artists. It was all France and Italy, with their ages composed to rest.
For England you looked out of old windows – it was England that was the wide
embrace.
The windows of Old Place too offered a vision of England – and
explicitly of early 17th century England: rose garden, yew walks,
sundials. When in 1885 he held a grand
garden party, Kempe opened the gates ‘to all who would see the England of their
forefathers’, he and his friends dressing up in period costume to add to the
atmosphere. A photograph taken on the occasion shows them sitting, rather
self-consciously, as if for an amateur production of Twelfth Night.
Surely, then, Old Place must have been the model for Poynton? Much
as I’d like to say so, I cannot be sure, for the novel was actually written
between 1895 and early 1896, and I have as yet no proof that James visited Old
Place before 1897. In any case, James preferred to work from a ‘germ’, a single
fleeting idea taking root in his imagination and lying dormant until he was
ready to let it develop. He did not want to be burdened with too many external
facts as he planned his stories. I think it likely that he’d heard about Old
Place, probably from the Wolseleys, but deliberately abstained from going there
until the book was written. Poynton, as he describes it, is simply James’s idea
of a House Beautiful stuffed with ‘things’, not Kempe’s.
I’ve been writing about Old Place myself, for my book on Kempe. I
can’t help feeling, though, that it belongs more to the world of fiction than
biography. And I’m not the first to have thought this. In Kempe’s lifetime Hugh Benson, the Roman
Catholic convert son of Archbishop Benson of Canterbury, wrote By What Authority? (1904) an historical novel
partly set in a house directly modelled on Old Place. More recently, David
Smith’s Love in Lindfield (2016)
updates The Spoils of Poynton,
setting the whole story in and around Kempe’s home.
The BBC once serialised James’s novel; in Smith’s story one of the
central characters is scouting for locations for another BBC adaptation. Smith
is careful not to imply that Old Place was
Poynton, but he makes great play with the idea that since Henry James had been
friendly with a number of Kempe’s friends who were avid collectors themselves,
one of them could have been the model for Mrs Gereth. This is especially true
of Viscountess Wolseley; Smith correctly points out that some of her ‘things’
had been literally spoils of war, brought back from distant corners of the Empire
by her husband, the Field Marshal (Garnet Wolseley, lampooned by Gilbert &
Sullivan as ‘the very model of a modern major general’).
Kempe isn’t a
character in the novel, but he is a haunting, ambiguous presence in it.
Appropriate, you might say, for someone who slipped effortlessly between the 17th
and the 19th centuries, and who, shortly before his death, even had
himself photographed as the Ghost of Old Place.
[Illustrations: (i) Old Place, the East Wing (1891); (ii) the gardens and sundial of Old Place - a glass transparency (c.1908) (iii) C.E. Kempe photographed as a ghost (1907).
All photos © copyright The Kempe Trust 2017.
Notes:
- Old Place is now divided into three private houses, with no public access.
- My forthcoming book, Kempe: the Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe, is due to be published by Lutterworth Press in 2018.
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