The Rothschilds’ Waddesdon Manor: Not Your Typical English Country House

A French château look, porcelain, silk, and paintings galore, plus an automaton the size of a baby elephant

W hen I was in London in October, I visited Waddesdon Manor, the Rothschild weekend house in Buckinghamshire. I’d been once, about 30 years ago, to see the Starhemberg service, the magnificent Sèvres dinner and dessert service commissioned by Louis XV in the 1760s. It had just come to Waddesdon, a National Trust house, in lieu of death duties, and the house had just reopened after a long renovation. Thirty years is a long time, and Waddesdon’s a trove of great painting, furniture, porcelain, silver, and, of course, architecture. Built in the late 1870s from scratch by Ferdinand de Rothschild (1839–1898), it’s in a French Renaissance château style that, having collided with high Victorian taste, combusted into a unique caprice.

There’s a lot to experience. The once revered National Trust, owning 500 properties in the U.K., is a hardened pellet of woke ideology now. I wondered as well if that has affected Waddesdon. It’s good news to see it hasn’t. This isn’t necessarily a Christmas story. The Rothschilds are, by and large, Jews. Still, Waddesdon has the Christmas spirit, and if hearth and home are part of Christmas, there’s no house that does a full-bodied plush snug as this.

The Rothschild family has always been deeply involved in Waddesdon. Jacob Rothschild (1936–2024), the Fourth Baron Rothschild, was a constant presence, and a rich one. The Rothschild Foundation still supports the place. The immense Rothschild banking fortune stayed in the family’s five branches, called the “Five Arrows” — a cohort each in Paris, London, Naples, Vienna, and Frankfurt — and, traditionally, Rothschilds married Rothschilds, so money wasn’t scattered. What can the prim and priggish, the swivel-eyed scolds, say? That the family is a huge patron of Jewish causes and of Israel? The family’s too rich, too connected, and too committed to Waddesdon’s integrity. By 1900, the Five Arrows owned dozens of grand houses. Only Waddesdon’s left in its original, impeccable state.

Waddesdon was built and packed with art by Ferdinand to be enjoyed only as a weekend party house, from May through August. He built the house on farmland, a Sisyphean task involving piping water from eleven miles away and installing electricity and central heating. It was both a pleasure palace and an art gallery.

The first few rooms we see at Waddesdon show us the essential character of the place, which is as spellbinding as it is lux. The Rothschilds, starting in Paris in the 1840s, were the first collector connoisseurs to revive 18th century high-end French interior design in its purity, creating rooms with original paneling, chairs with perfectly preserved silk, and weaving reproduction draperies using 18th century techniques. Rooms are dark so textiles don’t fade. Two Guardi views of Venice from the late 1740s are, at 116” by 163” each, immersive, to say the least. We’re seeing views of San Giorgio Maggiore, St. Mark’s Campanile, and Santa Maria della Salute from the middle of the Grand Canal. Don’t rock the boat, baby.

There’s a group of monumental, white porcelain models of birds and animals made in the early 1730s in Meissen, near Dresden, for Augustus II the Strong, Saxony’s elector. The Saxons had just learned how to make porcelain, replicating the recipe the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese had kept secret for centuries. Porcelain was as prized as gold among European elites, but these figures are extraordinary for their size and complexity. They’re not vases. One’s a nanny goat feeding her suckling. Another’s a turkey puffing its feathers. Not even the Asians knew how to make porcelain this big and sculptural without killer furnace cracks.

Then there’s the elephant automaton, made in Paris by Hubert Martinet, around 1770.

It’s a bronze elephant carrying a canopied seat held by servants with flowing robes. There’s a supporting cast of cannons, Roman soldiers, a rocky platform packed with critters, all and more made from bronze, colored paste, and mother of pearl. It’s more than four feet tall and does indeed automate, playing, as figures do, the 1770 version of the Hustle.

Ferdinand Rothschild called it one of his “gimcracks,” a bit of self-deprecation since the automaton is a magnificent thing made in Paris for aristocrats not in Europe but anywhere between Istanbul and Kyoto. Was he a connoisseur? He bought the very best of its kind and had an overall vision, but, by the 1880s, the Rothschilds, based in world capitals, were sophisticated collectors with curators advising them and hooks in every high-end market from clocks to jewelry to armor to tapestry to paintings to porcelain. And Waddesdon isn’t your typical English aristocratic country house. No centuries of accumulation, no horse portraits, and no ancestor portraits.

What’s the overall aesthetic, then? Red Drawing Room combines French 18th century decorative arts — furniture, textiles, moldings, porcelain, and clocks — with 18th century English portraits, so it’s Sèvres and Savonnerie meets Reynolds and Gainsborough. Ferdinand liked the ladies, and he was a widower, so he chose paintings such as Lady Hamilton as Calypso by Romney, Mrs. Robinson, a famous actress painted by Gainsborough, and Mrs. Jordan, also by Romney. Each had a scandal or two waiting in the wings. Mrs. Jordan was an actress and the mistress of the Duke of Clarence, with whom she had ten children. They lived openly and happily until this son of George III looked set to become William IV one day, which he did.

All of these women have that flirty, come-hither look. They’re everywhere. Displayed in rooms with sinuous furniture, lush satin and silk, arabesques and mascarons, and ticking clocks framed by bronze nymphs. They’re part of a sexy, elegant look. There’s nothing stilted or antiquated at Waddesdon.

Even dinnertime’s got sex appeal. The porcelain Starhemberg service was commissioned by Louis XV as a gift to the Austrian Prince Starhemberg, who had negotiated an alliance between Austria and France. Starhemberg later negotiated the marriage between Louis’s son, later to be Louis XVI, and the Austrian princess Marie Antoinette. The service is the zenith of French porcelain flower painting and among the top hits for Sèvres, porcelain makers to aristocrats from Paris to St. Petersburg.

The set’s displayed in a porcelain gallery that’s not a period room but a traditional museum space.

When I was there, I saw a scholarly show on the ornithology of porcelain bird-painting.

Waddesdon’s an academic place with accomplished curators and conservation specialists who are also good teachers. “Please Touch” stations in some of the rooms invite us to touch materials used to make furniture and moldings. A video in one room shows a conservator opening an 18th century French desk, compartment by compartment. Interpretation in spaces like the Red Drawing Room and the dining room is economical.

The great French silver master Robert-Joseph Auguste’s dinner service was made in Paris in the late 1770s for George III’s palace in Hanover, Germany, where he worked double shift as its elector, or ruler. Only kidding. He never went there, but he still ran the place and had a palace there, and what’s a proper palace without silver for 72 diners? Tureens, ice buckets, verrières, cruets, and candelabra assured that they not only ate and drank till they burst but that they did so in splendor. The service is sculpture, designed with panache and cast and chased with aplomb and, as far as we know, was used in its entirety only once: in 1805, at Windsor Castle, to celebrate its reopening after a renovation sponsored by George IV. Bouncing back and forth between Hanover and London, it spent decades at a time in vaults. It came to Waddesdon as a Rothschild Foundation purchase in 2003.

Splendid exhibitions are to be found off the beaten track, and, very often, the smaller and tighter the show, the better. Guercino at Waddesdon: King David and the Wise Women is five paintings uniting the artist’s King David from 1651, on long-term loan from the Rothschild Foundation to Waddesdon, with his Cumaean Sibyl with a Putto and Samian Sibyl with a Putto, both also from 1651, and painted to accompany King David. Both belong to the National Gallery in London.

Displayed also are a version of Cumaean Sibyl without a putto, from the collection of King Charles III, from 1651, and an early Guercino depiction of Moses. It’s a perfect Christmas show, though I saw it on Columbus Day.

David was a Jew, as was Moses, and the sibyls were pagan prophetesses, so why do I think that “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”? That’s how Christians in Guercino’s day would have seen them. David, the king, psalmist, prophet, and ancestor of Jesus, reads from a psalm predicting “glorious things from thee, oh city of God,” which Christians believe is among his promises that the Messiah would come to Jerusalem and make it a city of reconciliation and worship. The two sibyls predicted that a savior of the world would be born to a virgin. This put them on the same page as figures from the Old Testament and the world of the Greek and Roman gods predicting Jesus’s birth.

The artist, Giovanni Barbieri (1591–1666) is called Guercino after the Italian word “guercio,” which means cross-eyed. He was a star in the Bologna art world, drawing from both Caravaggio and the Carracci family of artists and blending a dark overall look, splashes of bright color, and figures that are solid, solemn, and drawn from everyday life. Out were ethereal, twisting, prancing saints in neon colors — think the Mannerists — and in were psychological and perceptual depth and pathos. He worked for Pope Gregory XV. Charles I tried to entice him to London as his court painter after van Dyck.

Why Moses? Both he and David are descendants of Abraham, but Moses is in the show as a special treat. A serendipitous turn in the middle of the exhibition’s planning brought Guercino’s early depiction of Moses to Waddesdon. It’s from 1619, so Guercino was still early in his career, and it was sold in a Paris auction in 2022 as an unknown painting by an anonymous follower of Reni with a high estimate of around $6,000. It’s a case study on how dealers make big bucks. Old masters dealer Fabrizio Moretti was among the professional auction stalkers who thought Moses was something better and bought it, but not before bidding soared to $600,000. In a dig at the auction specialist who deemed it a work of a follower of Reni, Moretti said “You can tell from a hundred meters it was by Guercino.”

That’s risk-taking, not on the order of Moses leading the Jews into a vast desert, but still. In the painting, Moses raises his hands to the sky as if to say “Madonna” in astonishment at the bidding war. Or “Oy gevalt” might be more culturally correct. In any event, Moretti had it cleaned, scholars studied it, Moses was deemed an early Guercino, and the Rothschild Foundation bought it — for around $2 million: a tidy profit. Now it’s at Waddesdon. I love stories like this. Moses might not have made it to the Promised Land, but the picture made it to Waddesdon, the best substitute possible.

Guercino’s King David isn’t the young shepherd with a slingshot and formidable aim. He’s not the horny, full-of-himself autocrat having just spotted Bathsheba, nude and fresh from her toilette. Here, he’s got gravity. He’s in good shape, dressed by Jerusalem’s Savile Row, and sporting a psalm, a reference to his talent as poet and musician. The red, blue, pink, and yellow in King David are in the two sibyl-and-putto pictures, and the three are compositionally united. Guercino did the three as a group meant for a single buyer, but he was offered a better price if sold separately. Finally, after nearly 375 years, they were reunited, if only for a bit.

For the Rothschilds, though, King David was no Jew for Jesus. There’s a fascinating family-history gallery that treats, in part, Rothschild involvement in negotiating the Balfour Declaration and, later, the establishment of Israel. Rothschild money paid for the construction of the Knesset. The family’s philanthropy for Jewish charities is ongoing. Waddesdon is decked out for Christmas, but it’s mostly outdoor lighting and a Christmas tree here and there. The house is a tribute to the family, but it’s also the community museum for this part of England, so this makes sense.

It makes sense, too, since Waddesdon’s a Rothschild house, to have galleries on the history of wine, appropriately in the house’s vast cellar. Château Lafite and Château Mouton are Rothschild producers, so the galleries focus on them, but there’s plenty of good information on the history of Bordeaux wine, which starts in the 13th century.

There’s a 15,000-bottle wine cellar with vintages from the late 1860s to the present and, yes, vintage wine’s for sale in the Waddesdon wine shop. Artists such as Picasso designed wine labels, and these are fun to see.

I have no quibbles about Waddesdon. It’s a unique, unforgettable experience. For tourists, it’s a day trip from London, but there’s so much else to love about Buckinghamshire. Cliveden, Disraeli’s house in Beaconsfield, as well as Missenden Abbey and Bletchley Park are nearby. Bletchley has a good code-breaking museum. Cliveden was a hub for Tory intellectuals, and where lots of John Profumo’s mischief unfolded, but is a luxury hotel today. Hughenden — Disraeli’s home in Buckinghamshire — is a temple to Victorian politics. The missions of many historic houses in Britain have been consumed by popularizers, marketeers, and fundraisers, and, in many regions, curators have been pushed to the margins. This is tragic since they’re the keepers of care, history, and standards. I’m happy to see this hasn’t happened at Waddesdon.