BY OWEN FINDSEN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
![[burghley]](/editions/1998/11/22/burghley_100x214.jpg)
'Gold and enamel horse,' Spain, ca.1600
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When you visit British Elegance: Decorative Arts from Burghley House at the Cincinnati Art Museum, you'll yearn to visit the grand 16th-century English estate where these treasures reside.
At Burghley House, paintings, sculpture, gold, silver, jewels and incomparable cabinets fill grand state rooms. But you can get a better look at these splendid decorative arts in Cincinnati. The house and rooms are so overwhelming, it's easy to miss specific objects.
If you do visit the houes while British Elegance tours five American museums, you're not likely to notice anything missing - there's so much there - even though its most significant pieces are in the exhibit.
Almost half of the 120 works on tour aren't displayed in Burghley's public rooms anyway. They are part of the private apartments of current residents Lady Victoria Leatham and her husband, Simon. Others are stored in a huge vault the house staff calls "Aladdin's cave."
It's possible that a 14-foot square tapestry filling a wall in the CAM gallery may never have been taken out of its shipping box since it was made in approximately 1670.
Even away from Burghley House, all these lovely objects are intimately linked to it. That the tapestry was never hung tells us something about the owners. So does the rare porcelain figure of two Japanese wrestlers that served for decades as a doorstop.
British Elegance tells the story of a family through the things they acquired for their home. One of the oldest and largest of England's stately houses, Burghley was built between 1555 and 1587 by William Cecil, the first Lord Burghley and treasurer to Queen Elizabeth I.
Little in the collection, however, dates from the Elizabethan Age. Later Cecils, particularly the fifth Earl of Exeter in the 17th century and the ninth Earl in the 18th century, modernized and redecorated the house. They toured Europe to gather artwork, furnishings and decorative arts to fill Burghley House's vastness. (It has 35 major rooms and 80 lesser rooms.)
Cincinnati Art Museum's task was to associate the objects with the house as much as possible. Anita Ellis, CAM director of curatorial affairs and decorative arts curator, spent more than a week at Burghley House examining the objects in situ, as curators say, planning the Cincinnati installation.
The museum has installed the treasures in context with the house. Wall-size photographs of rooms fill walls behind objects taken from them. Informational text along the walls provides anecdotes about the life and times of the family.
It begins with large portraits of Lord Burghley and his collecting descendants. The pair of portraits of the fifth earl and his countess are outstanding examples of English portraiture as well.
At Burghley House, everything is seen in daylight. Here, the objects are enclosed in plexiglass cases and spotlighted so they can be studied individually. To link them to the house, they are arranged in groupings to fit with Lady Victoria's 45-minute audio tour of the exhibition.
In many exhibitions, audio tours and video presentations are optional. Here, they are critical if you want to understand the show's purpose.
The story is told in detail in the official program, published by the Enquirer, in the WKRC-TV video tour of the house, led by Lady Victoria, who also narrates
An educational area for children within the exhibition space has programs and projects to help them appreciate the collection. A gift shop has appropriate English gifts as well as catalogs for this and other Burghley House exhibitions. Even the museum cafe has been transformed into a charming English tea room.
There is also an adjacent exhibition of teapots from the Norwich Castle Museum.
Contemporary to its time
To us, all Burghley House's treasures of jewelry, porcelain, gold and silver, are antique, but to the lords and ladies who collected them, they were contemporary art. They were purchased to adorn the house with the latest fashions. Artists and the finest artisans were commissioned to create objects specifically for the house.
The tapestry is of English make, from an Italian design of naked babes harvesting grapes in front of an Italian cityscape. Because it has not been displayed, the delicate vegetable dyes have not faded, making it a rare example of the true colors of the tapestries of the time.
The Cecils bought so many works of art in Italy that the Archduke Cosimo III of Tuscany gave them a present in 1684: the grandest piece of furniture in the house and the exhibition. The Florentine cabinet is a masterpiece of marquetry, made of ebony with colorful inlays of bone, marble and mother of pearl.
Made to look like the facade of a Tuscan villa, it has 17 drawers and doors decorated with charming pictures of flowers and birds. Curiously, the reserved, classical cabinet is set on an ornate gilded baroque base, but it contrasts nicely with the refined cabinet.
John Cecil, the Fifth Earl of Exeter and his wife, Anne, were the most prolific collectors. Anne was an incredibly rich widow who shared her husband's passion for fine things. She also had inherited her mother's jewelry, which are among the most fascinating works in the exhibition.
Changing tastes
British Elegance is more than an exhibition of a collection. It is a collection of collections: a jewelry collection, a Japanese porcelain collection, a portrait miniature collection, a gilded silver collection.
The collection is diverse because Burghley House is still a home, and its objects reflect the changing tastes of a family over time.
Today, instead of adding to the collection, Lady Victoria concentrates on researching and cataloging it and making it available through exhibitions.
Previous exhibitions have focused on Burghley paintings (there are more than 700) and Japanese porcelains. Burghley House was the largest single contributor to the popular 1985 exhibition The Treasure Houses of Britain at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
This is the first exhibition to survey the scope of its decorative arts. It premieres in Cincinnati and travels to the Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, Fla., the New Orleans (La.) Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara (Calif.) Museum of Art and the Columbus (S.C.) Museum of Art. The objects won't return home until April 2000.
British Elegance: Decorative Arts from Burghley House, Cincinnati Art Museum, Eden Park, through Jan. 17. 721-5204 or http://www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org.
![[burghley]](/editions/1998/11/22/burghley_257x550.jpg)