The Palladian Bridge at Wilton House, in Wiltshire, was built in 1736-37 for Henry Herbert, the 9th Earl of Pembroke. The design was his own, and such was his passion for building that he became known as the ‘Architect Earl’. The bridge crosses the River Nadder which forms the boundary between the formal gardens and informal landscape.

The bridge has been painted by many artists over the centuries including Richard Wilson, John Singer Sargent, Sir John Lavery and Winston Churchill.

But the artist for whom it provided the greatest inspiration was Rex Whistler. Whistler’s archive is in the collection at The Salisbury Museum, where a most enjoyable exhibition, Rex Whistler: The Artist and his Patrons, can be seen until the 24th September 2024.

In May 1925 Whistler first visited Wilton  to stay with his friend Edith Olivier, who lived in Daye House within the park. He was entranced, and later wrote to Edith to say that he could still ‘see in my mind’s eye all the intoxicating beautiful spots you showed me’.

Making the greatest impression was the Palladian Bridge, and within a year he had included it in his first major mural commission, In Pursuit of Rare Meats, which decorated the walls of a new restaurant at the Tate Gallery, London.

The bridge also made an appearance in Whistler’s mural for Sir Philip Sassoon at Port Lympne in Kent, and his preparatory drawing is included in the Salisbury exhibition.

Whistler became a regular visitor to Wilton. In 1927 he and his fellow ‘bright young things’ Cecil Beaton and Stephen Tennant were at the grand party to celebrate the coming-of-age of Sidney Herbert. Edith Olivier wrote in her diary that ‘all the beauties of England were there’ and the scene must have been enchanting as a ‘searchlight played on the Palladian Bridge’ and lit up the trees beyond.

In July 1933 Edith Olivier was visited by Lady Ottoline Morrell who took photographs of what was affectionately known to family and friends at Wilton as ‘the Palladian’.

Whistler was given a commission in the Welsh Guards in 1940, but he visited Wilton whilst on leave and continued to paint scenes including the Palladian Bridge. These would be his final views of Wilton: his division was sent to France in June 1944 and he was killed in action on 18 July 1944.

The Rex Whistler exhibition continues until 24 September and is highly recommended. The museum is close to the famed Salisbury Cathedral, and other nearby attractions are Mompesson House (National Trust) and Arundells, the former home of Edward Heath. For more on the museum https://salisburymuseum.org.uk and for Salisbury’s many attractions see https://www.visitwiltshire.co.uk/salisbury/things-to-do

The 2024 season at Wilton House ends on 12 September https://www.wiltonhouse.co.uk

Thank you for reading and please get in touch with any thoughts. The comments box can be found at the foot of the page.

In 1959 the inhabitants of Matching Green, east of Harlow in Essex, were horrified by the appearance of a 6 foot 3 inch statue of a naked lady in a village garden. The figure was the work of Horace Saville, the village blacksmith, and he claimed it was a model of how he wanted his future wife to look.

The statue had originally stood 5 feet high on Saville’s lawn, but after ‘somebody’ knocked it down he rebuilt it on a sturdy concrete plinth. The outraged locals included Mrs Harold Smith who thought the statue a ‘hideous monstrosity’ and Mr George Burnett who lived next door to Saville. He worried that the statue would attract day-trippers who would come to ‘gawp’. And presumably that is exactly what happened when Burnett spoke to the Daily Mirror and the paper published a photo’ of the statue. Saville was unperturbed and told the reporter that he was a ‘genuine bachelor’ who didn’t really know what a lady looked like ‘without her clothes’.

Saville (1904-1980) was 54 when he erected the statue of his dream wife and it doesn’t seem to have found him a partner. Nine years later he was still single, and it seems doubtful that his latest wheeze would attract suitors: he had taken to moulding his own dentures in concrete and coating them in a secret formula to make them sparkle.

The statue of a naked lady was soon joined by some other garden ornaments. In the years after her appearance Saville had sculpted a whole range of figures with no apparent connection. By 1973 there were statues of the Queen, Prince Philip, General de Gaulle, the broadcaster Cliff Michelmore, the Earl of Avon (presumably former Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden), the devil waving a top hat and Horace Saville himself. One of best records of the garden found to date is this sketch which Raymond “Tim” Fieldhouse sent to his friend Jones in 1973. Fieldhouse had met Saville in Matching Green and described him as ‘a great old Essex character […] every bit as weird as one of his own creations, a real old eccentric’.

Further statues included a policeman, a racegoer, a huntsman, an army officer, a horse and jockey, and a gorilla with a bunch of bananas. Smaller sculptures could be found in the long grass of Saville’s wild garden, all with piercing blue eyes made from marbles.

Saville was very serious about the project to which he had dedicated his retirement, and a sign in the garden announced his creations as ‘Concrete Art’.  Horace could often be found at his gate chatting to visitors and showing the tools of his trade – an old table knife and a saucepan. A Mr Tyle who was given a tour of the sculptures in 1966 wrote to a local magazine to say that ‘anybody who has not had the pleasure of viewing these fine works of country art is missing a unique exhibition’.

Whilst perhaps not always popular in the village (they became known locally as ‘Horace’s Horrors’), today the body of work would be celebrated as Outsider Art, defined by the Tate as ‘art that has a naïve quality, often produced by people who have not trained as artists’.  But sadly there is nothing left to see: after Saville’s death in 1980 the statues were swept away*.

You can at least see the man himself – here he is promoting margarine in 1954.

* UPDATE September 2024: Huge thanks to the many people who have shared their memories of Horace and his garden (see the comments below). Particular thanks to Patrick Streeter for the very exciting news that one sculpture does survive – and it is the head of the man himself, as seen bottom left in one of the photographs above. Horace can be found in the garden of the Feast Room by Matching Church.

And thanks to Sarah Sage for sharing an example of Horace’s personal stationery complete with autograph and what is presumably a self-portrait.

UPDATE OCTOBER 2025: Thanks to Richard Keil for sharing these two images from his family’s collection. Both are dated 1967.

Does anyone remember the garden and statues? Your thoughts and comments are warmly welcomed – please scroll down to the foot of the page to get in touch. Thank you for reading.

Barbara Jones is best known to readers of these pages as the author of Follies & Grottoes (1953, revised 1974), the first book to consider the subject of garden and landscape buildings in any detail. She also wrote books about popular art, erotic postcards and furniture amongst other subjects, and as an illustrator and designer her work appeared in magazines, on calendars, dustjackets, greetings telegrams and much, much more.

One of the more unlikely places where her work could be found was in an elegant little magazine called Pan. Published on behalf of the pharmaceutical company Schering A G Berlin, Pan was sent to doctors and medical professionals and featured advertisments for the company’s ‘sex hormone preparations’ alongside medically themed cartoons by the likes of Michael Heath. Issues were compiled and produced by Napper Stinton Woolley, an advertising agency based in London’s Soho.

Magazine number 61 appeared in January 1969 and contained a very entertaining review of the spoof ‘Post-Op Art Explosion’ exhibition at the fictitious ‘Medic’s Gallery’ (very clever) by the Yorkshire GP Leonard Rosenthal. There was also a most peculiar short story about aphrodisiacs, and then, incongruously, an article by Barbara Jones about Follies with a wonderful title illustration:

The brief editorial introduction suggested that readers might like to take a ‘cosy afternoon run in the car’ to find a hermitage, or ruined tower, or counterfeit castle, and then Jones is given three pages to elaborate.

She began with a definition, describing a folly as a ‘largely pointless fantastic structure built by a fashionable land-owner in the eighteenth century’, and concluded that they were ‘a very clear manifestation of a certain quirky streak in the English character and they may look something like this:’

Jones picked out some of her favourites: the Sham Castle on the Bath skyline (top picture), the Pineapple at Dunmore in Scotland, Clytha Castle near Abergavenny and Jack the Treacle Eater in Somerset (all of which have featured in these pages – use the search button to find out more).

Moving on from the curious tales attached to Jack the Treacle Eater, Jones recounted the then recent story attached to the monument to William Pitt at Burton Pynsent, also in Somerset: in 1948 a cow is said to have climbed the spiral stair and, after rescue attempts failed, fell to its death from the top. (There has been some debate about the veracity of this tale: newspaper reports in 1947 and 1948 tell of heifers climbing the tower, but on both occasions with a rescued cow and a happy ending).

After describing the thrilling chill of grottoes Jones declared that ‘the Hermitage type of Folly is much more cheerful’. Her accompanying sketch illustrated how they were ‘picturesquely confected from rocks, branches, moss and bark, with a simple room or two, a rustic sacking bed, tables and chairs made from tree stumps…’

Jones ended her brief introduction to follies with some words of advice that remain pertinent for anyone embarking on a folly-finding expedition today – take a map, a torch and a flask of tea.

Your thoughts are always welcome – just scroll down to the comments box to get in touch. Thank you for reading.

The Folly Flâneuse celebrated her birthday this week, and what better way to mark the occasion than with an enormous cake? Although sadly, this one is not edible. As many of the buildings featured in these pages are gone, it was a real birthday treat to see this new folly, recently constructed to ornament the Waddesdon landscape.

The cake is the work of Joana Vasconcelos, a Portuguese-born sculptor, and was commissioned by Jacob, 4th Baron Rothschild for the Waddesdon Manor estate in Buckinghamshire. The pair had collaborated in 2012 when Vasconcelos showed her Pavillon de Thé at Waddesdon – a massive wrought iron teapot.

A few years later Vasconcelos created a work featuring a drink more commonly associated with the Rothschild family – two candlestick sculptures made from bottles of the famous Chateau Lafite.

This latest Vasconcelos commission is on an entirely different scale, and has been five years in the making. The Wedding Cake celebrates love and marriage, and also continues the Rothschild tradition of offering hospitality in exuberant spaces. 12 metres high, it is built around a steel frame, and clad with 25,000 Portuguese ceramic tiles which echo the colours of the famous Sèvres porcelain in the collection at Waddesdon Manor.

The finishing touch, or perhaps the icing on the cake, is when two people climb the final steps to emerge on the top tier, and the cleverly-composed scale of the building is revealed as they become the happy couple who top many a traditional wedding cake.

The Wedding Cake has been described as ‘first and foremost a temple to love’, but when asked if it was a folly Vasconcelos said “yes”, and writing in the Times Adam Davy called it ‘the latest architectural absurdity in the great British tradition of the garden folly’. Top marks for describing the structure go to the editor at the Financial Times who came up with the headline ‘The Gateau at the Chateau’.

You can see this conjugal confection for yourselves as the Wedding Cake is open to the public on Thursdays and selected Sundays https://waddesdon.org.uk/whats-on/wedding-cake-tours/

Visitors to Jupiter Artland, the sculpture park close to Edinburgh, may have seen the vibrant Vasconcelos swimming pool there, or indeed have taken the plunge as there are public sessions over the summer https://www.jupiterartland.org/gateway-bathing-sessions/

Thanks for reading. To share any thoughts please scroll down to the comments box at the bottom of the page (note that only your name will appear and your email address remains private).