We paid a visit to the Penrhyn Castlewith Picnic in the park today (£ 9/Person)
We arrived at 10:15 pm


BANGOR

A cathedral and university city — and a major centre of the mussel industry — Bangor incorporates a wide variety of architectural styles that remind the visitor that this is not only an interesting and stimulating place but also one with a long history. A monastic community was founded here as AD 525 bySt Deiniol, some 70 years before Canterbury, the town's name, derived from wattle fence which surrounded saint's primitive enclosure, a gori", is still used in parts of es to describe the plaiting of twigs in a hedge. However, there were settlers in the area long before St Deiniol, including the Romans at nearby Segontium, and the Bangor Museum and Art Gallery (free) is just the place to discover not only the past 2000 years of history of this area of Walesbut also to see the reconstructions of domestic life in days gone by. The Oriel Art Gallery presents a variable and changing programme of arts and crafts by mainly professional artists.

The mother church of the oldest bishopric in Britain, Bangor's Cathedral dates from the 13th century and has probably been in continuous use for longer than any other cathedral in Britain. During the Middle Ages the cathedral became a centre of worship for the independent principality of Gwynedd and the tomb of Owain Gwynedd became a starting point for pilgrims setting out on the arduous journey to Bardsey Island. Restored in 1866, the cathedral also contains a life-size carving of Christ dating from 1518 while outside there is a Biblical garden that contains plants associated with the Bible.
Until the slate boom of the 19th century Bangor remained little more than a village, albeit with an impressive church. Its position on the Menai Strait made this the ideal place for nearby Penrhyn Quarry to build their docks and the town soon flourished in its new role as a commercial centre. Its importance increased further when the University College of North Waleswas founded here in 1884. Improvements in the roads and then the coming of the railways to the North Wales coast helped Bangor to continue growing in both size and importance.
Jutting out into the Menai Strait from the town is the 1500 feet long Victoria Pier, the youngest of the structures, which was built in 1896. As well as being attractive, the pier is a pleasant place from which to view Snowdonia, the coast and the busy lanes of small boats passing by, and to admire the houses, some of them magnificent, which stand beside the water. Both pleasure and fishing trips can be taken from the pier head.
To the west of the town and overlooking Beaumarison the Isle of Anglesey stands Penrhyn Castle (National Trust), a dramatic neo-Norman construction built by Thomas Hopper between 1820 and 1845. It was die home of the Pennant family who had made their fortune first through their sugar estates in Jamaica and later from their nearby slate quarry. Whilst the exterior is very rerniniscent of Norman architecture, the interior is decorated, at times with overwhelming opulente, with a variety of styles as well as materials that seem to occupy every available space. Remarkable features include a Grand Staircase that took 10 years to build, extensive Victorian kitchens, some superb furniture, one of the best art collections in Wales — and a one-ton slate bed made for Queen Victoria. The grand stable block adjacent to the house contains both a Doll Museum and a Railway Museum, and within the extensive grounds are a Victorian walled garden, adventure playground, a licensed tearoom and many woodland walks.

THE BUILDING OF THE CASTLE

George Hay Dawkins (1764-1840) took up his inheritance on the death of Lady Penrhyn in 1816, assuming the additional name and arms of Pennant in accordance with his benefactor's will. He was the second son of Henry Dawkins II of Standlynch, Wiltshire, and of Over Norton, Oxfordshire, and his wife Lady Juliana Colyear, daughter of the 2nd Earl of Portmore. Dawkins was also the great-greatgrandson of Gifford Pennant of Jamaica. His first wife, the Hon. Sophia Mary Maude, bore him two daughters but probably never set eyes on Penrhyn. She died at the age of 4o, after only five years of marriage, in 1812. Two years later Dawkins married Elizabeth, daughter of the Hon. William Henry Bouverie, brother of the2nd Earl of Radnor.

It is tantalising that we know so little of the life of a man who could call into being so fantastic and original a building as Penrhyn Castle. Like his benefactor before him he was a Member of Parliament, for Newark in Nottinghamshirein 1814-18 and New Romney in Kent in 1820-30. From the little evidence that does survive he comes across as a reserved, almost austere, character, driven by what the German traveller and horticulturalist Prince Herman von Pückler-Muskau, visiting Penrhyn during its construction, described as 'buildingmania this wealthy man lives with his family in a humble cottage in the neighbourhood, with a small establishment; he feasts once a week on the sight of his fairy castle, which, after the long continuation of such simple habits, he will probably never bring himself to inhabit. It appeared to give him great pleasure to show and explain everything to me, and I experienced no less from his enthusiasm, which was agreeable and becoming in a man otherwise cold.'

In Parliament Dawkins-Pennant consistently opposed the movement for reform of the electoral system that led to the Great Reform Bill of 1832, and the emancipation of slaves within the British Empire. (He received compensation of £14,683 for the 764 slaves on his estates, when this measure was effected in 1833.)

Dawkins-Pennant moved to Penrhyn the year after Waterloo had put an end to two decades of war. He had had eight years in which to contemplate improvements. As the result of the war and its taxes, unemployment and destitution were serious problems in Caernarfonshire, as elsewhere. In 1818 for the first time a nightly patrol had to be established in Bangor for the control of vagrants, and the Select Committee on Telford's Holyhead Road urged that the work be accelerated, both to take advantage of cheap labour and for the sake of employing the large numbers out of work. It is not hard to imagine Dawkins-Pennant seeing an opportunity as well as a duty in this situation.
However, to see the building of Penrhyn Castle merely as an exercise in job-creation would be absurd, for there were a number of other influences that must have borne on Dawkins-Pennant at this time. The house he had inherited in 1808 was still barely thirty years old, and not insubstantial, but if in 1798 it could have been faintly praised as 'a good specimen of the military Gothic', it was now fast becoming unfashionable. One writer was to compare it unfavourably with Lime Grove, the agent's house, which 'in point of chasteness and technical purity' was deemed superior. Meanwhile, along the coast at Abergele, Lloyd Bamford Hesketh had been building himself a castle called Gwrych, in many ways the most successful Picturesque building of all. `The site is lofty', wrote C. F. Cliffe in 1851, 'and the structure, which is a mimic one to a considerable extent, has been built for effect. lt is said to be 48o yds. long, with a splendid terrace in front. There are 18 towers, the largest of which is 93 ft. high.' Gwrych was completed c.1816, but it was only the

nearest of a great number of new castles to have been thrown up in the first years of the nineteenth century.

Pückler-Muskau was one of those who witnessed the building of the new Penrhyn Castle, and in his astonishment at the scale of the enterprise he mused on the castles of William the Conqueror's time: 'What could then be accomplished only by a mighty monarch is now executed, as a plaything, — only with increased size, magnificence and expense, — by a simple country-gentleman, whose father very likely sold cheeses'.

In one major respect he was wrong. DawkinsPennant's father had owned a substantial country house that had been bought by the nation for the descendants of Lord Nelson; his aunt, Lady Caroline Colyear, had married the ist Lord Scarsdale, builder of Kedleston Hallin Derbyshire, and his uncle, James Dawkins, had led the expedition that rediscovered the ruined cities of Baalbec and Palmyra in 1751. The selling of cheeses did not figure in this pedigree. On the contrary, the fusion of these elements — antiquarianism, architectural patronage on the grand scale, two West Indian fortunes and a burgeoning agricultural estate and industrial enterprise — was tantamount to alchemy.

lt is not clear how Dawkins-Pennant came to appoint Thomas Hopper (1776-1856)as his architect; prior to Penrhyn (and Gosford, Co. Armagh, begun slightly earlier) his country-house work had been confined to remodellings and alterations. His most significant commission by far had been the construction of a new conservatory for the Prince of Wales at Carlton House in London in 1807, a fantasia on the chapel of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey, replete with ancient Welsh heraldry and vaulted in cast iron.
In October 1817 an unremarkable payment is recorded in Dawkins-Pennant's Cash Book: 'John Williams Coachman, for a Xmas box' — five shillings. Curiously, the following May there occurs the further entry: 'To John Williams, Coachman of the Prince Regent, a Xmas box', again five shillings. Williams was similarly rewarded (and described) in July 1820, by which time work was proceeding on the new castle. If Williams actually brought the Prince to Penrhyn at these times, the recommendation of Thomas Hopper must have come with him.

It seems unlikely that Hopper was responsible for the two anonymous proposal drawings that survive, one for a great hall and the other a perspective from the south west. Although the perspective prefigures the shape of the principal block, and the hall design shows some of the devices later employed by Hopper, the drawings have none of the boldness and assurance of his executed work, and must represent a rejected proposal by a lesser architect.

What must be by Hopper is a single, unsigned plan inscribed `Ground Plan of Penrhyn Castle/ Dawkins Pennant Esqre', but not dated. Most of this plan was adopted; the major differentes lie at the northern end of the west front, where a massive square block with circular towers at the corners was proposed, containing an one side a 'Great Drawing Room' 76 by 36 feet and lit by five windows facing south. Even at Penrhyn this would have been a prodigious room, and it is not known whether it was ever begun, but its omission may explain the somewhat inarticulate appearance of this elevation today. Hopper certainly lived up to his famous dictum that 'it is an architect's business to understand all styles and to be prejudiced in favour of none', but the reasons for the choice of the 'Norman' style at Penrhyn are not obvious. Whereas at Gosford, Co. Armagh, where Hopper also began a new castle in 1820, the Norman style must have seemed the obvious choice in an Ireland conquered by Strongbow, in north Wales the conquerors' style was the Tate thirteenth-century Gothic of the great royal castles built by the Plantagenet Edward I at Caernafon and Conwy.

Here, perhaps, an `earlier' style was deliberately used 'to suggest a more ancient, and therefore native, lineage'.

How much of the design was left to Hopper, and how much was stipulated by his client? The view of one early visitor that `Mr Pennant has delivered himself over entirely to his Architect, who delights in rearing a Mass of Building to his own [taste], without the slightest consideration for the comfort of the family', cannot be credited, even when Dawkins-Pennant's son-in-law said jokingly, `Mr Hopper used to come in after breakfast and ask leave to add another tower', and Capt. Francis Maude, his brother-in-law from his first marriage, recalled how Dawkins-Pennant once said to him, `they want to add a Keep out there Francis, I don't know what they mean by it'. The evidente of the surviving letters from Hopper to his client — albeit concerned with the fitting-out rather than the construction — points rather to a very dose collaboration in the minutiae of the project.
The building chronology has been confused by writers on Penrhyn, but Pückler-Muskau's statement in 1828 that `it is now seven years since the Castle was begun ... and it will probably take four years more to complete it', seems to be more or less accurate on both counts. The earliest date seems to be April 1819, when William Baxter, `who superintends the works carrying on at Penrhyn Castle',1° was sent to Penmon on Anglesey to agree prices for stone from a number of quarries around the promontory. When the thirteen-year-old Princess Victoria visited in 1832, she found the castle 'not near finished yet'," and although the number of visitors rose dramatically from 1833, the furnishings were not yet complete in the early months of 1835,

when Hopper was still preoccupied with candelabra and other fittings.
The work began with the construction of a new park wall, 7 miles in circuit, which displaced six farms and the main road, which Dawkins-Pennant re-routed. The wall was built of rubble stones from the Cochwillan and other quarries, and topped with a coping of rough Penrhyn blue slate slabs laid on edge. The Grand Lodge was begun, possibly by the masons recently employed on Lord Anglesey's column at Llanfairpwll, and the massive gates hung. Yards for the carpenters and masons were established (where the car-park is today) and by July 1819 the carpenters were at work, presumably preparing the scaffolding. The walls of the new castle were probably rising by 1821.

For the next few years the accounts fall silent, but by October 1826 the Library Tower, the Oak Tower and the Grand Hall were all completed and were being slated with `Queens' from the quarry. A drawing of this date by Dawkins-Pennant's eighteen-year-old daughter, Juliana, shows no sign of the Keep. While the works were in progress, she went on a sketching tour which took in Warwick Castle (where she drew Guy's Tower), and Charlecote church. Two years later, Pückler-Muskau was shown the `eating hall' [the Grand Hall], by the architect himself, and was able to describe many of the out-offices, in particular the laundry. The plasterers were on site by the spring of I830, when 400 bushels of cow hair were delivered, and lime was brought from the kilns at Port Penrhyn. In June and July 292 polished plates of glass arrived from the Ravenshead works of J. Crockford & Co., and from a drawing dated 9 October, it appears that the Keep and the other principal towers had risen to their full height. The drawing shows the outline of the stables in a dotted line, and these clearly constituted the last major phase of work, between August 1831 and June 1833. The very large quantity of slate slabs delivered from the quarry in 5834 presumably included those used for the stalls and mangers, as well as for paving the yards.
Throughout the building period there are large numbers of accounts for building stone, from the Anglesey limestone quarries around Penmon, Red Wharf Bay and Moelfre, to an almost equally large number of suppliers. The external walling is not, as has often been suggested, of `Mona Marble' (a serpentinite used for some of the chimney-pieces), but of Penmon limestone, a dark grey or black stone with many large fossils and other defects. In view of these drawbacks the exceptionally fine jointing — in places even narrower than can be found in the best freestone ashlar work — speaks highly of the master masons, of whom Nathan Ryan, Griff Jones and

William Pritchard are named in the accounts. From the frequency and size of his payments on account, one Edward Jones of Llandygai appears to have been the principal contractor.

Chimney-pieces were supplied by Thomas Crisp in 1833-4. The narre of the master plasterer has not emerged, but the work is of such high quality that the firm of the leading plaster craftsman of the day, Francis Bernasconi, has been suggested. Robert Offer, a native of Bath who died at Bangor in 1829 and was described as `many years foreman of the plasterers at Penrhyn Castle', may not have been responsible for the ornamental work.

Penrhyn Castle can be seen as the masterpiece of the stonemasons and carpenters of North Wales in any period. 'Mr Pennant deserves the thanks and admiration of every friend of Wales', wrote Angharad Llwyd in 1832, 'for the almost exclusive encouragement he has given to the native artificers of every kind and Adela Douglas-Pennant later wrote that 'the entire work was carried out by local workmen under the superintendence of the architect Mr Hopper'.She adds that most of the Norman furniture was made by the estate carpenters. The fact that none of the oak columns, the dadoes and the neo-Norman furniture is carved from the solid, but rather composed of applied, precarved, repeated elements gives credence to this claim. Taken together, this combination on the grandest scale of Welsh oak, limestone, slate and marble shaped by 'native skill' can be seen as the expression of pride in the raw materials of his adopted region by a rich squire who was also a prodigious `extractor'.
Hopper employed not only local craftsmen, but in Thomas Willement the leading stained-glass designer in Britain. Willement supplied superb glass, featuring the signs of the zodiac, for the Grand

Hall, and may have provided designs for the decoration of the Dining Room. As Heraldic Artist to George IV, he must surely have had a say in the heraldic programme as a whole, but, surprisingly, he was not asked to supply armorial glass; that was provided by David Evans of Shrewsbury.

The total cost of the work is not definitively recorded, and early estimates varied considerably. lt can, however, hardly have been less than the £123,000 suggested by Catherine Sinclair, who describes Penrhyn in her book Hill and Valley (1839). Money was certainly not a problem for Dawkins-Pennant. At his death in 1840, his income was estimated at £8o,000 per annum, and his personal property `sworn under £600,000'.

Penrhyn is to such an extent unique that it has persistently defied description or categorisation. 'To wander through the wondrous halls of Penrhyn', wrote Louisa Stuart Costello in 1845, `is like struggling along in a bewildered dream occasioned by having studied some elaborate work on the early buildings of the Saxons or Normans.'14 To early visitors, whether they thought it Saxon', 'Norman', 'Roman', or `one of the most complete castellated baronial mansions in the kingdom', Penrhyn was never unimpressive, and always counted a success. Though Hopper's building would not for an instant deceive anyone with an idea of what a Norman castle actually looked like, in his compilation of architectural types and decorative elements spanning at least three medieval centuries, he produced a castle that was at once more `archaeological' than its near-contemporaries, and yet eminently Picturesque. Of course, the site was exceptional, and ancient, but the distant view of the clear and commanding outline of the Keep suggests a strategic importance it never had. In the distant landscape it makes for a composition worthy of the seventeenth-century French landscapist Claude, and it is no surprise that more than sixty engraved views of the castle and its surroundings were published in the thirty years following its completion, and countless drawings and watercolours.

Closer to hand, given the extreme length of the building and the way that the ground slopes away on all sides, almost no complete `elevation' can be seen. The fact that the most frequent views of the exterior are oblique also offered Hopper the greatest scope for deploying his towers for compositional effect. The relationship between the Keep and the other, lesser towers and turrets frequently disguises the distances between them.In all its massiveness and cyclopean scale, Penrhyn partakes of the Romantic notion of the

Sublime, the infinite or immeasurable, perhaps best appreciated at the foot of the Keep. Most importantly, despite the necessity for adequate windows in place of loopholes and arrow slits, the castle also looks defensible. No other late Georgian castlebuilders went to such trouble in this respect; most would have been content, for example, with conventional — perhaps mildly Gothicised — stables, where Hopper and Dawkins-Pennant threw up a high curtain wall with four titanic towers complete with `murder holes'. Penrhyn was a genuinely secure fortress; secure also, therefore, from Pugin's famous swipe at modern castles: `who would hammer against nailed portals', he asked in 1841, 'when he could kick his way through the greenhouse?'Whether the fortification of Penrhyn was due simply to a desire for historical accuracy or to actual fears of a possible siege is a matter for speculation.
The choice of an exotic style — whether Norman, Gothic or (as at Brighton Pavilion) `Hindoo' — presented architects with formidable technical challenges, not the least of which was the placing of chimneys. At Penrhyn, with 70 roofs of sharply differing heights, Hopper was forced to distribute the smoke from his fireplaces by the most tortuous and unlikely routes (no fewer than seventeen flues converge in the upper storeys of the Housemaids' Tower, for instance), but in some respects he was able to draw an new technology. The ducted hotair system which heated the Grand Hall and neighbouring rooms was among the first to be installed in mainland Britain.

Piped water was a rarer luxury. Miss Sinclair writes that 'in each dressing-room, instead of a window-seat, a bath is placed, with pipes of hot and cold water perpetually ready ... It is to be hoped that the progress of luxury and comfort will at last introduce this indulgence into every house and dressing-room in England.'Water-closets were lavishly provided, some of them an the upper floors spectacularly top-lit by lofty skylights or lanterns.

Lighting was at first by oil; gas fittings were subsequently installed, which were replaced with electricity in 1927-8 by A. V. Gifkins & Co. of Victoria St, Westminster. Most of the bronze lamps are of the type named after the Swiss inventor Aime Argand, and they were not uncommon in British houses by the 1820s. By his patent, the oil (which from 1834 was generally colza oil from crushed rape-seeds, later superseded by paraffin or naptha) was fed by gravity from a font or reservoir, and the etched glass funnels accelerated the flow of air to the cylindrical wick in the tubular metal burner. The provision of more than one burner minimised the shadow cast by the reservoir.

The pursuit of sources for the design of the castle, its interiors and furnishings, may never end. There seems little doubt, however, that the Keep is derived from that of Hedingham Castlein Essex, where Hopper served as County Surveyor for forty years. In the arrangements of the towers, and particularly the northern (entrance) elevation of the stable block, there are dose similarities with Raglan Castle in Gwent.Among more recent castles,Eastnorin Herefordshire(by Robert Smirke, c.1812-2o), despite its basic symmetry, prefigiares Penrhyn in the play of square and round towers, and especially in the use of tall, round towers leading the eye round each angle.

For the interior, medieval precedents are less easy to find for the architecture than for the decoration, even in the case of the Grand Hall (sometimes compared with the nave of Durham Cathedral). For precedents in the revived Norman style, one authority has proposed a volume of stage designs for the Berlin Theatre by Karl Schinkel,published in 1819-24.

Perhaps closer still, since they actually show domestic interiors in the Norman style, are the unexecuted designs for Lea Castle, Worcestershire, by John Carter, produced a year before his death in 1818. An unsuccessful architect, Carter made his name as a draughtsman and engraver of medieval buildings and their decoration. His masterpiece was The Ancient Architecture of England (1795-1814), a compendium of engraved plates of details mainly from ecclesiastical buildings, which has as much of the character of a pattern-book as a purely antiquarian treatise. It was almost certainly a major source of designs for the decoration of columns, capitals, arches and doorways at Penrhyn (Dawkins-Pennant's own copy survives in the Library).
One book that was unquestionably drawn upon was Joseph Strutt's Sports and Pastimes of the English People (i8oi), a scholarly survey of the popular

recreations of `Olden Time' with illustrations chiefly taken from the margins of medieval manuscripts. Many of these were copied directly for the carved decoration at Penrhyn. Strutt's work also provided valuable source material for Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe,published in 1820, the year Penrhyn was begun. Scott and Hopper faced similar difficulties in reconstructing the Middle Ages, and just as the dialogue in Ivanhoe was not written 'in AngloSaxon or in Norman French', Hopper allowed his castle the anachronisms of fitted carpets, water closets and plate glass.
Dawkins-Pennant indulged to the full Hopper's considerable ingenuity in designing new furniture and carpets in a `Norman' style. For, surprisingly, he seems not to have shared the passion for collecting `baroniar furniture and fittings that affected many other castle-builders of the time.
Some time after the principal rooms at Penrhyn were finished, Col. Douglas-Pennant commissioned a series of lithographs illustrating some of them, along with several views of the exterior, from the little-known printmaker G. Hawkins. lt seems odd that his invaluable series of views was not intended for publication with commentaries, as was done for Fonthill in Wiltshire in 1823 and for Toddingtonin Gloucestershire in 1840. Dawkins Pennant died in December 1840, only a few years after his castle was completed, and was buried in the Dawkins family vault at Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire.Perhaps if he had had a little longer to enjoy his creation before his death, he would have published such a volume, and prevented so much later speculation.




THE DOUGLAS-PENNANTS OF PENRHYN

George Dawkins-Pennanthad no children by his second marriage, and so his two daughters (known as the Slate Queens', or the Queen of Diamonds and the Queen of Hearts) were his heirs. The elder, Juliana Isabella Mary, who inherited Penrhyn, was married in 1833 to Edward Gordon Douglas(1800-86), captain in the Grenadier Guards, and grandson of the 14th Earl of Morton; he was promoted colonel the following year. In 1824 Edward Douglas had been one of a crew of six officers who for a bet had rowed a wherry from Oxford to Westminster in under sixteen hours. According to his youngest daughter, Adela, this younger-son-ofa-younger-son hesitated to propose to so great an heiress, but was encouraged by Mrs Dawkins-Pennant, who was his first cousin. Her husband seems to have found the idea not to his liking and after a stormy interview, Capt. Douglas removed himself and his luggage to the Penrhyn Arms Hotel. The marriage eventually took place at St. Marylebone, and 150 workmen sat down to supper in their honour at Port Penrhyn, consuming 473 quarts of ale in the process. The couple lived in Yorkshire until Dawkins-Pennant's death in 184o.
In 1841, in accordance with Dawkins-Pennant's will, they became the Hon. Edward and Mrs Douglas-Pennant, and in that year Col. Douglas Pennant was elected as MP for Carnarvonshire (which he continued to represent until elevated to the peerage in 1866). The following winter, Juliana caught a chill while climbing Snowdon, having lent her cloak to another of the party. The ailment worsened and on the advice of the surgeon Sir Prescott Hewett, the family set out for the Riviera to effect a eure. Juliana caught a fresh chill at Pisa and died there in April 1842.
In 1846 Col. Douglas-Pennant took as his second wife Lady Maria Louisa Fitzroy, daughter of the 5th Duke of Grafton, having met her hunting at his Northamptonshireseat, Wicken Park (which he had leased from the Mordaunt family in 184o and later bought). Douglas-Pennant and his family lived at Penrhyn for only part of the year, residing principally in August and from October to Christmas. The rest of the year was spent at Wicken and at Mortimer House in Halkin Street, Belgravia, the family's London home from 1859. The family's whereabouts dictated the hours during which the castle was opened to the public (tickets were sold at the Penrhyn Arms and other local hotels). Julius Rodenbergdescribed his arrival in 1856:

The whole castle ground was full of people — ladies with leather gloves, not unlike fencing gloves, and blue silk parasols above their straw hats; gentlemen in checked taps, their necks encased in still collars — for a gentleman cannot make himself completely comfortable, even when on holiday. The curiosity of this monstrous crowd was satisfied in batches: every quarter of an hour the gate opened, to let two dozen out and another two dozen in. In the meantime I had leisure to study the coat of arms on the door. It was an antelope driven by a scourge with the inscription: Aequo Animo . . . Truly it required great equanimity to allow oneself to be herded through a castle with 24 gentlemen by a withered, gloomy, suspicious old woman, and a castle of exquisite splendour, giving evidence of the warmest enjoyment of the best things in life.

Col. Douglas-Pennant added greatly to the Penrhyn estate (see Chapter Eight), especially in the Meillionydd district of the Llyn Peninsula, and to the collection of pictures (see Chapter Five). In 1859 he entertained the Queen and Prince Albert at the castle. They planted trees in the grounds, toured the Nant Ffrancon valley and the slate quarry, and after dinner at the castle heard the Llanllechid choir sing choruses from the Messiah in Welsh in the Grand Hall. Douglas-Pennant's daughter, Adela, later recalled the visit:

A man was specially had down from Miller's the great lamp Shop in London, to see after the lighting of the house during the Royal visit, instead of trusting to the services of the ordinary "lamp man" of the House. This man deserted his duties, to see the arrival of the Royal guests and omitted to light the corkscrew staircase up to the keep, so that when my mother took the Queen to her room, she found the stairs in complete darkness. My Mother begged the Queen to wait while she ran upstairs for a light, but an returning to the head of the steps, she found the Queen had laughingly groped her way up behind her in the dark.
Col. Douglas-Pennant was created 1st Baron Penrhyn of Llandegaiin 1866. Never a frequent speaker in either House, none the less he was constantly busy in committees. He was well acquainted with Gladstone, and their political differences did not prevent Mrs Gladstone's frequent presence at Penrhyn, for the families had much in common. Gladstone's father had been a Liverpool merchant who owned substantial sugar plantations in the West Indies. Like Lord Penrhyn's father-in-law, Gladstone had begun his political career as MP for Newark and in his maiden speech in 1833 he had stoutly defended the West Indian interest. The Gladstones habitually spent a month's holiday along the coast atPenmaenmawr, and while staying there in September 1861,

they spent a few nights at Penrhyn. Mr Gladstone enjoyed himself very much, despite having to submit to being weighed — 11 st. 10 1/2 lbs — and measured — 5 ft 11 in. in his shoes — by Col. DouglasPennant's daughters.

More remarkable was Col. Douglas-Pennant's friendship with prominent local politicians such as John Morgan, owner of a small factory at Cadnant, a Welsh radical and editor of a Welsh newspaper whose opinions Adela Douglas-Pennant described as 'advanced'. Her father was prominent in public works: he gave land for schools and churches, improved the Bangor infirmary, and contributed to the restoration of Bangor Cathedral.His restoration of the parish church at Llandygaimay have had more to do with landscape improvements, since the tower became a feature in the principal distant views of the castle.

When Col. Douglas-Pennant was raised to the peerage in 1866, his son, George Sholto, succeeded him as MP for Carnarvonshire. When the seat was next contested, in 1868, George Sholto was defeated by W. J. Parry, a Liberal, the son of a Bethesda quarryman but himself a young professional with diverse business interests. This event is perhaps symbolic of the passing not only of an era in Caernarfonshirepolitics but of the old order of the paternalistic landlord in the county.

George Sholto Douglas-Pennant was born in 1836 and educated at Oxford. As a young man he travelled in Egypt, Syria, the Holy Land and the Balkans, and in America he is said to have witnessed Blondin's tightrope walk across Niagara. Returning from his travels in 186o he married Pamela Rushout, daughter of Sir Charles Rushout of Sezincotein Gloucestershire. She bore him seven children, and they were a devoted couple. Her death only nine years after their marriage threw him into a decline, which was only arrested by two further years abroad in the early 1870s, collecting curiosities and corresponding regularly with his young family. In 1875 his recovery was completed by his marriage to Gertrude Jessy Glynne, a niece of Mrs Gladstone; Jessy is said to have reminded him of his first wife.

George Sholto succeeded as 2nd Baron Penrhyn on his father's death in 1886. He had assumed the ownership of the quarry a year earlier, and his reign is chiefly remembered for the great strike of 1900-3 . The 2nd Baron maintained an interest in archaeology throughout his life, probably acquiring for the castle both the Egyptian artefacts on display, the `Book of the Dead' papyrus and the stone figure of Osiris. He subscribed to the publications of his first cousinAugustus Lane-Fox (later known as General Pitt-Rivers), and was also a keen naturalist. His patronage of the firm of Morris and Co., whose wallpapers and fabrics were ordered for the Keep bedrooms in the 1890s, reveals another facet of his complex personality.
The numerous racing trophies in the castle are evidence of the 2nd Baron's success as a breeder and trainer of racehorses, both at Penrhyn and at Exton in Lincolnshire. Like his father and his son he was an active Master of the Grafton Hunt, but as Bailey' s Monthly Magazine of Sports and Pastimes reported in 1888:

Fond as he is of silk and scarlet, he is, perhaps, more devoted to his `rod' than any other sport, for in early spring and Tate autumn he never fails to spend a few weeks on Dee side, and until he succeeded to the cares as well as the houses of the title and estate, he was an annual visitor to Norway ... The i2th finds him on his Welsh moors, whence nothing can Jure him till the saddling bell at Doncaster sends forth its Leger clang.
Lord Penrhyn's family was large and spread over a wide range of ages. Among the daughters of his first marriage were the artistically inclined Alice, who published a catalogue of the family pictures in 1902, and was renowned for her prowess at skating, and at swimming in Samuel Wyatt's Marine Bath; Hilda, a dose friend of Lady Ottoline Morrell; and Violet, who worked as First Insurance Commissioner for Wales under Lloyd George, and later commanded the WRAF during the Second World War.
When the 2nd Baron died in 1907, he was succeeded to all his estates by his eldest son, Edward Sholto Douglas-Pennant, 3rd Lord Penrhyn. He had met his wife, Hon. Blanche Fitzroy, at Wicken, and as an asthmatic she greatly preferred the climate there to the maritime air at Penrhyn. Edward Sholto was MP for Southern Northamptonshire from 1895 to 1900, and subsequently spent some time living at Glan Conway, the house his grandfather had bought as a shooting lodge on the Ysbyty Ifan estate .
In the First World War, Lord Penrhyn's eldest son and heir, Alan George Sholto Douglas-Pennant, and his two half brothers — children of his father's second marriage — George and Charles, were all killed in action. After the war, Lord Penrhyn lived at Wicken, which he left to his widow on his death in 1927.

His only surviving son, Hugh Napier DouglasPennant, succeeded him as 4th Baron. In 1922 he had married Hon. Sybil Mary, daughter of the 3rd Viscount Hardinge (the marriage was dissolved in 1941, and Lady Penrhyn later remarried). She was a cousin of the Hon. C. S. Rolls, and it was at her instigation that in 1936 Lord Penrhyn acquired the Rolls-Roycethat still belongs to the family. Their time at Penrhyn is remembered as a golden age of entertaining and weekend house-parties. Although they had no children, the many grandchildren of the 3rd Baron were frequent visitors, and Lady Penrhyn furnished the rooms with comfortable sofas and cut flowers to overcome the exaggerated formality of the Victorian age. Lord Penrhyn was Lord Lieutenant of Carnarvonshire from 1933 to 1941.

Like many other country houses, Penrhyn was pressed into unlikely service during the Second World War. On 23 August 1939, after months of careful preparation, the National Gallery's collection of Old Masters was evacuated from London to Aberystwyth, Bangor and Penrhyn to be beyond the range of enemy bombers. Penrhyn was chosen because it was one of the few buildings in Wales with doors large enough to admit the biggest of the National Gallery's paintings, Van Dyck's equestrian portrait of Charles I. The pictures were stored in the

Dining Room and two coach-houses, but this refuge proved only temporary. The fall of France in 1940 increased the threat of bombing, and it was thought safer to move the collection underground to a slate mine at Blaenau Ffestiniog. From 1940 to 1945 the castle was the headquarters of the Daimler motor company. At the same time (1940-3) the BBC's variety department occupied a hall in Bangor built in the 1860s for the coming-of-age of the 2nd Lord Penrhyn. Arthur Askey, Kenneth Horne, and Tommy Handley's ITMA were all broadcast from here.
In 1949, the 4th Lord Penrhyn left Penrhyn Castle to his niece, Lady Janet Marcia Rose Harper (nee Pelham) and the title became separate. Frank Douglas-Pennant, 5th Baron, is noted for having won the 1908 Grand Nationalwith the 66-1 outsider, Rubio, which had seen service between the shafts of a hotel omnibus at Towcester, and for having made his maiden Speech in the House of Lordsat the age of 1oo in 1967.
In respect of her uncle's will, Lady Janet and her husband, Mr John Charles Harper, assumed the surname and arms of Douglas Pennant. They lived in Penrhyn for a few months only in 1949, then moved to the agent's house, and subsequently to a new house nearby. In 1951, Penrhyn Castle and the Ysbyty Ifan and Carneddau estates (except for Glan Conway House and two farms) were accepted by the Inland Revenue under the then National Land Fund procedures, and transferred to the National Trust. Lady Janet and her husband continued to be closely involved with the castle and the Trust's work there. Following the death of Lady Janet in 1997, Richard Douglas Pennant, her son, inherited the estate, and, once again in lieu of death duties, the Trust acquired further paintings, furniture and silver gilt.

THE PICTURES

Penrhyn has been called 'the Gallery of North Wales' and in terms of quality, it certainly deserves that title. The Douglas-Pennant pictures also form a rare intact survival in Britain of a nineteenth-century collection. The family, which still owns the collection, has in recent years generously increased the number and importance of the paintings on loan, so that visitors can enjoy them in the surroundings for which they were originally acquired.

Apart from some earlier family pictures, most of which are portraits, the collection is almost entirely the creation of one man, Col. Edward Gordon Douglas-Pennant, Ist Baron Penrhyn (1800-86). What is more, it was to a considerable extent acquired through the agency and on the advice of one dealer, the Belgian C. J. Nieuwenhuys. It thus has a homogeneity rare in nineteenth-century collections. Indeed Douglas-Pennant appears to have chosen for Penrhyn only paintings whose scale and forte of character would enable them to hold their own in the overpowering context of its neoNorman interiors. This is particularly true of his Dutch pictures; the smaller and lighter works all seem to have been allocated to the family's London home.

This aptness of the pictures to their surroundings at Penrhyn reflects the reputed origin of Col. Douglas-Pennant's activity as a collector. According to some manuscript reminiscences of Adela Douglas-Pennant:

Mr Dawkins-Pennant, besides wishing the property to be extended, had expressly desired that a good collection of pictures should be made at Penrhyn by his heirs, and my Father [Col. Douglas-Pennant] took pains to carry out his wishes. It was a task in accordance with his tastes, for although he had not much time in his youth for the study of art history, he had some talent for sketching, and he was a lover of pictures and no mean judge of them.

What may have begun as a duty imposed, undoubtedly gathered its own momentum. Col. Douglas-Pennant started slowly: although he inherited in 1840, few if any purchases are recorded from that decade. Among the first, assuming that Douglas-Pennant bought it when it was exhibited at the Royal A cademy, or shortly thereafter, must have been St John the Baptist preaching to Herod (No. 149, Passage to Keep) of 1848 by J. R. Herbert. Herbert was a forerunner of the Pre-Raphaelites, much influenced by the German Nazarenes, who turned to painting religious subjects of this kind after his conversion to Catholicism. That it was an early purchase, in a taste that he subsequently outgrew, is suggested by Alice Douglas-Pennant's terse statement: `Bought by Edward, Lord Penrhyn (who afterwards disliked it very much).
In or around 1850, Douglas-Pennant bought his first Old Master, not from a dealer but from his son's tutor, a Mr Scoltock, who had in turn bought it when travelling on the Continent with Lord Ashburton. This was the solitary masterpiece of its kind in the collection, the Dieric Bouts of St Luke painting the Madonna and Child (No. 92, Ebony Room), a picture whose quality would be much more evident were it still on panel, and were it not for the losses that it suffered in the transfer to canvas, and before. Some of this damage must be attributable to the fact that 'Lord Penrhyn never cared for it at all', and that it was among the pictures relegated to the top of the castle. Taken together, the two purchases, with his subsequent reaction against them, suggest that Col. Douglas-Pennant began with a taste for the primitive, whether in its original form or in its revived manifestations, but soon underwent revulsion from this. (He may have turned against the

Herbert on discovering that the artist was a Catholic convert, and against 'primitive' paintings like the Bouts because of similar associations.)
lt is dangerous to presume too muck from the somewhat random survival of evidence for Col. Douglas-Pennant's purchases, but it would appear that there was a hiatus, and that he did not start collecting again until 1855, when he made three or four purchases, all of Old Masters, and all from Nieuwenhuys. There are even indications that it was only once he had acquired Nieuwenhuys, not simply as a dealer but as a mentor, that he began to collect paintings in earnest. Nieuwenhuys's letters to Col. Douglas-Pennant detailing what had been bought sound more than mere dealer's patter; they convey the trusted advice of a man who, bred in the business of buying and selling paintings, and moving freely between the art worlds of Brussels, Paris, London and Amsterdam, simply had a breadth of experience to which Col. DouglasPennant could not aspire, and to which he naturally deferred.

Christianus Johannes Nieuwenhuys (1799-1883) was the son of a Netherlandish dealer active in Paris, who seems quickly to have seen that the future lay in England. One of his earliest successes was the sale of Correggio's Madonna of the Basket to the newly founded National Gallery in 1825. In 1834 he published A Review of the Lives and Works of some of the most Eminent Painters, partly puffeng his own activities; and in 1837 and 1843, catalogues of the collection of King Willem II of Holland.He was a substantial buyer at the Northwick Park sale in 1859, and he seems to have had a hand in forming the Beaucousin Collection which was bought en bloc by the National Gallery in 186o. Little is known of his private life, other than that he married his niete in 1826, who died after only three months' marriage, and had remarried by 1856. He lived latterly at Oxford Lodge, Wimbledon, and Adela Douglas-Pennant recorded that `mang times did we drive there with my Father to inspect any treasures discovered by the old man at sales'.

The concentration of Lord Penrhyn's collection an just a few categories of picture strongly suggest that, once he had started collecting in earnest, he was sure of his own taste. There appear to have been three kinds of picture that primarily appealed to him: Dutch seventeenth-century, with a particular partiality for large landscapes and dignified figural subjects; Venetian sixteenth-century conversationpieces; and Spanish seventeenth-century, with an especial predilection for somewhat austere portraiture (Col. Douglas-Pennant had served in Portugal and visited Spain as a young man). Otherwise — with the Signal exception of the Rembrandt (No. 19, Breakfast Room) — portraiture seems to have interested him but moderately, despite the fact that both his favourite Dutch and Venetians were amongst its supreme exponents. There is no Frans Hals, for instance, and his relatively cheaply acquired Tintoretto was kept at his London house. There was good reason for this, in that — in addition to the usual accumulations of family portraits — the castle contained a number of portraits of historical personages bought by its builder, George Dawkins-Pennant — some of them at the sale of Lord Charles Townshend in 1819.
lt was exceptional, subsequent to the Herbert, for Col. Douglas-Pennant to buy anything from a

contemporary artist. A Creswick (not shown), a Frederick Lee (No. 111, Grand Hall Gallery), a Clarkson Stanfield (No. 109, Grand Hall Gallery), and three ambitious watercolours by Carl Haag(Nos. 234-6, Keep Bedroom) are about the sum of it (leaving portraits aside again). Even then, personal associations accounted for most of these: the Lee shows the artist fishing, accompanied by a friend of Col. Douglas-Pennant and his Keeper, and was painted when the artist came to stay; the Haags were painted by a protege of Col. Douglas-Pennant's mentor in matters of watercolour, the eminent surgeon and amateur watercolourist, Sir Prescott Hewett Bt (1812-91). The Stanfield, now sadly ruined, is itself an interesting illustration of the recidivism of his taste, bought as it was in the 187os. For Stanfield was one of those artists initially praised to the skies by Ruskin, but later condemned by him as meretricious, once Turner had opened his eyes to the true observation of Nature and natural effects, and the Pre-Raphaelites had chimed with his aspirations for moral renewal through art.

According to Alice Douglas-Pennant, whose privately printed catalogue is almost the only source of information that we have an many of the pictures, Col. Douglas-Pennant was constantly changing the arrangement of his pictures. This was mostly to accommodate new purchases, but he also relegated all the earlier accumulations of pictures to the upper floors, and housed his own in the two Dining Rooms, and in his own and Lady Penrhyn's Sitting Rooms. A major rationalisation took place in 1899, when the znd Lord Penrhyn had the pictures all restored and cleaned, taking the opportunity to rehang them by School — Spanish, Italian and English in the Dining Room; and Dutch primarily in the Breakfast Room. This (like Alice Douglas-Pennant's catalogue) was under the direction of Sir Walter Armstrong, who, as Director of the National Gallery, might be expected to countenance this somewhat unusual rationalisation for a private house. But Penrhyn has been open to the public since its earliest days, so perhaps the survival of some of this didacticism in the present arrangement is not inappropriate.

THE CASTLE

THE CARRIAGE FORECOURT

The view over the parapet of the Carriage Forecourt must have decided Hopper and his patron in favour of placing the main entrance on this side of the castle, although both earlier houses on the site had been approached from the west, or opposite, side.
The two eminentes in the distance are the Great and Linie Orme, with the isthmus of Llandudno in between. Along the coast are the headlands of Penmaenmawr and Penmaenbach, and the high plateau of the Carneddau, with the peaks of Carnedd Dafyddand Carnedd Llywelynto the right. Further round, just out of sight in the cleft in the mountains, lurks the mighty Penrhyn slate quarry. Away to the left (north east) isPuffin Island(Priestholm), lying off the southeastern tip of Anglesey, opposite the headland of Penmon, the source of the limestone from which the castle is built. Standing on the Forecourt it is possible to take in the three `compartments' of the castle's plan. To the south, the great Keep rises to 115 feet, containing the family

bedrooms and living rooms arranged on four floors. In the centre is the principal block of 'state' rooms, always intended for occasional use, sumptuously furnished and open to the public from the start. To the right is the vast range of domestic, stable and outoffices that kept the castle going, starting with the Housemaids' Tower and ranging beyond the high curtain wall of the stables.
Above the entrance are the crests of the Dawkins and Pennant families:
Out of a ducal coronet an antelope's head tufted, horned and crined and A dexter arm embowed ensigned with a crescent holding a battle-axe blade charged with a rose.

THE ENTRANCE GALLERY

This was one of the later parts of the principal block of the castle to be built, the foundations starting in 1829, by which time the Keep was being roofed. The great oak door, with its carved surround, may not have been fitted until as late as 1835.
Inside the narrow, low Entrance Gailery the impression is of a Norman cloister, clearly designed to accentuate the impact of the Grand Hall beyond, which is partly hidden from view by the deliberate offsetting of the doorways in between.

FURNITURE AND METALWORK

Along the Gallery and vestibule are several of Hopper's neo-Norman carved oak tables and desks made by the estate carpenters; early eighteenth-century Flemish armchairs with carved cherub heads to the arms; some `ancient' hall chairs probably made to Hopper's order and based on a late-sixteenth-century German pattern book; and two oak hall chairs with double-headed eagles carved in the oval backs and dated 1729 (probably made up in the 1830s by Hopper).
The most bizarre piece is a high-backed carved oak armchair whose eclectic composition epitomises early nineteenth-century antiquarian taste. The central panel of the back, surrounded by late Seventeenth-century-style decoration, is carved with a standing figure of a crusader. The `wings' seem indebted to a 'Renaissance' source, the seat and arms are covered in late seventeenth-century embossed leather, and the cabriole legs are of a basically Georgian kind.
The set of four bronzed iron colza-oil lamps on pedestals lost their oil reservoirs with the coming of electricity. Their wolf-heads may have been derived from the antique Capitoline Wolf bronze in Rome.

PHOTOGRAPH

Hanging behind the desk is a photograph taken outside the front door during the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales in July 1894. The Princess is seated in the centre, with the Prince standing to her left. Lady Penrhyn is seated to the right of the Princess; her husband, the 2nd Lord Penrhyn, is the bearded figure standing behind.

THE GRAND HALL

At a point just beyond the door from the vestibule to the Hall the two main axes of the plan cross, and all three 'compartments' of the castle are within view. To the left, up a flight of steps, lie the family sitting-rooms in the Keep. Probably in the time of the 1st Lord Penrhyn an outside door was let into the west of this passage to enable him to slip out without notice, often to the Ogwen River with his rod. To the right, the door at the far end of the corridor marks the boundary between the principal rooms and the domestic offices. Straight ahead is the vast empty volume of the Grand Hall, the atrium as it were, of the castle, as much a covered courtyard as a room, and, as one writer has put it, 'about as homely as a great railway terminus admirably suited to house an exhibition of locomotives, or outsize dinosaurs' . Though it may resemble the nave or transept of a cathedral, no direct source exists, and the compound arches of the 'clerestory' are particularly unusual.The floor here (and in the adjacent passages and stairs) is of York stone, specified by Hopper on the strength of its recent use at Westminster Hall and York Minster.

PICTURES

Listed numerically within each room, the numbers deriving from Alice Douglas-Pennant's 1902 catalogue.

133 Attributed to ISAAC SEEMAN(fl.1720-51) ?John Pennant (d.1781)
The Pendant to No.134, Grand Hall (aisles), and can therefore be dated to 1749. (See No.49 for biography.)

IN THE PASSAGE TO THE KEEP:

47 ENGLISH (eighteenth century)Sir Samuel Pennant (1709—so)Son of Edward Pennant of Jamaica; younger brother of No.49. Apparently by the same hand as No.49; and possibly Nos.133 and 134. For another portrait see No.134.
49 ENGLISH (eighteenth century)

?John Pennant (d. 7 8r)Son of Edward Pennant of Jamaica; elder brother of No.47; father of No.58, Dining Room. He became a successful Liverpool merchant and also acquired his younger brother Henry's Jamaican property as a lifetime gift in 1761, having previously succeeded to his share of Samuel's. For related pictures see No.47.

97 ENGLISH (seventeenth century)
Sir Robert Williams, 2nd Bt (c.1629-80)
Married a daughter of Sir John Glynne (No.48, Dining Room).

149 JOHN ROGERS HERBERT, RA (1810-90)
John the Baptist Preaching to Herod
Signed and dated 1848Exhibited at the Royal Academy, 1848. Bought by Edward ist Lord Penrhyn who 'afterwards disliked it very much'. Although seemingly Pre-Raphaelite, and indeed exhibited in the year that the Brotherhood was founded, this picture actually belongs to an earlier strain of retrospective, religious painting influenced by the German Nazarenes. Herbert had begun by painting colourful scenes of Italian life and history, but after his conversion to Roman Catholicism by Pugin around 1841, turned to religious subjects such as this.
On a table to one side is the first of the series of lithographs of Penrhyn by G. Hawkins, published in 1846. The massive frontispiece to the fireplace seems to have been dismantled early this century, as it prevented the fire from drawing properly, but the luminaires shown in the print remain. Their sculptural bases are made from an unidentified ceramic successor of Coade stone and the lamps themselves have unusually large oil reservoirs. Their maker is not known.

STAINED GLASS

The stained glass was all supplied in 1835-6 by Thomas Willement, who travelled from London in July 1834 `to see the situation of the Hall windows'. The two largest, at the northern end, are signed by him and dated 1835. They are among his best work, incorporating the signs of the zodiac alternating with roundels illustrating the months of the year, in a convincing thirteenth-century style reminiscent of windows at Canterbury Cathedral.In the vault above the main space of the Hall, his four skylights are actually set some 15 feet below the roof, and the light 'borrowed' by means of lath and plaster `funnels' rising through the roof space.

CLOCK

The clock above the fireplace is by William Johnson, `5o Strand, London, 1835' and the accompanying wind direction dial is linked to a vane an the roof.

FURNITURE

The large octagonal carved oak tilt-top table was designed by Hopper and incorporates fragments from earlier furniture in the pedestal base. His startlingly original design for the oak chairs, with backs carved like the vanes of some marine organism, was never imitated. They are surprisingly comfortable and give excellent support to the back. The settees in the window embrasures came more recently from a London Club. The piano is an iron-framed Broadwood concert grand in a rosewood case, No.47778, 1903.

TEXTILES

The machine-woven Axminster `Turkey' runner was made in 1987, reproducing the hand-knotted carpet in the Keep passage, which is probably late nineteenthcentury. The spectacular stamped woollen velvet curtains date from the early 1830s.


THE LIBRARY

This extraordinary room partly incorporates the area of the medieval house, of which the solar or 'withdrawing' wing occupied the space to the right of the dividing arcade, and this may have suggested the historical emphasis of the decoration. The flattened form of the three main arches resembles that of the Norman chancel arch at Tickencote church, Leicestershire, which had been rebuilt in the 1790s and included in Carter's Ancient Architecture of 1798. The ornament, however, differed.
The decoration and furnishing are almost unchanged since 1846, when this room was depicted in a Hawkins lithograph, which can be seen on a table by the door from the Hall. The decoration of the four arches dividing the room, which included some of the most gruesome animal masks in the castle, had become intolerable by the 193os and was removed. The ceiling appears originally to have been wood-grained; Hopper delighted in the sort of trickery achieved by making different materials appear the same in juxtaposition.

CEILING BOSSES

Dawkins-Pennant's heraldic programme for the castle seems to have sprung from a desire to express ancient title to his property. The principal ceiling bosses in line from the Grand Hall doorway bear the components of his coat-of-arms:

1 Sir Gruffydd Llwyd, Bart; 2 Dawkins and Pennant;

3 Yonas ap Goronwy.

Those on the other side of the dividing arcade denote:

4 Yswitan Wyddel; 5 Dawkins and Pennant.

At the lesser intersections are devices of the Dawkins, Pennant and Bouverie families.

STAINED GLASS

Probably the work of David Evans of Shrewsbury, who was paid £7 6s for stained glass in 1836, it shows the arms of the five 'royal' and fifteen 'noble' tribes of Wales, groupings first made at the end of the fifteenth century by the bards — with little reference to historical fact — and taken up by the eighteenth-century antiquaries.

CHIMNEY-PIECES

The four chimney-pieces are of polished Penmon limestone (Tenmon marble') laid down on Anglesey 345 million years ago. The capitals of one of them are carved with two friezes of mummers, taken from the marginalia of a fourteenth-century Bruges manuscript, as illustrated in Joseph Strutt's Sports and Pastimes (18oi). This choice of subject suggests that the Library was intended not only as the evening resort of gentlemen but as a setting for family entertainments. High Victorian Penrhyn obviously witnessed such productions; for an inventory of 1928 lists `Theatrical Equipment' among the croquet sets languishing in an upper passage. But the Library must chiefly be thought of as the gentleman's domain, resembling as it does a London club.

BOOKCASES

Examples of bookcases in the form of classical temples can be found in other houses, and Hopper, freed from the constraint of actual Norman precedent, seems here to have translated this idea into the `Norman' language. The gilt brass grilles were made by a Mr Harris of Wardour St in London, who began them in July 1834 and was paid in February the following year. For making the 2,917 `square ornaments' at the intersections he received £48 12s 4d.
Most of the books date from the time of Richard Pennant and his two successors, although there are earlier volumes that may have been acquired by previous generations. As it survives today, the collection has a good representation of topography, history, architecture and antiquities.

OTHER FURNITURE

The room contains a mixture of contemporary, `ancient' and composite furniture. Contemporary are the circular table on a tripod stand, veneered in coromandel wood and inlaid with brass, the polescreens with embroideries by Charlotte Douglas, sister of the ist Lord Penrhyn, and the seat furniture upholstered in stamped wool velvets. These velvets were produced in the 1820s—'50s in Britain and the Netherlands, on embossed rollers, the designs taken from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian models. The Arie-dieu chair is covered in a cut velvet directly reproducing a seventeenth-century Italian design.
Those pieces which may have been bought as `ancient' include the eighteenth-century 'Burgomaster' chair from the Dutch East Indies, of a type illustrated in Henry Shaw's Specimens ofAncient Furniture of 1836 as 'of the time of William the Third', the triangular armchair with an inlaid ivory coronet in the back, of the same origin and date, and the two seventeenthcentury Italian high-backed armchairs.
There are several pieces designed by Thomas Hopper and made by the estate carpenters. These are the `Norman' style square tables with four clustercolumn legs, and the octagonal table near the Grand Hall doorway, which incorporates ancient carvings applied to the frieze and column support. In the 1820s and '30s there were many sales of such carvings, some removed from churches, and several London dealers specialised in them. The decoration of the great table at the far end of the Library is also made up from a combination of old carvings with modern work in the same style.
The billiard table may originally have been in the Ebony Room. By 1943 it was at the southern end of the Grand Hall, and was moved to its present position in order to make room for the typing Pool of the Daimler Co. Ltd. Unusually, not only the bed, but the entire frame and legs and even the pockets are composed of enamelled slate, and its construction is also thought to be unique. It was made for Col. Douglas-Pennant by George Eugene Magnus, who owned a quarry in North Wales and established the Pimlico Slate Works in London in 1840. Magnus owed his success particularly to developing an enamelling process which produced the high finish visible on this table. The opportunity to demonstrate the versatility of his principal product must have beenirresistible to 'Colonel Slate'.

CLOCK

The Boulle-work mantel clock is by Henry Balthazar, Paris, C.1740. The base is a nineteenth-century addition.

CARPETS

The carpets at Penrhyn are either luxurious Axminsters based on continental examples or splendid inventions (either by Hopper or Willement) in the Norman style (that is, decorated with `Norman' patterns, the fitted carpet having been unknown to William the Conqueror). The Library carpets must surely be in their original positions, although their detail differs from that in the lithograph. They are hand-knotted and most probably made at the Axminster factory. The colours, now muck faded, were originally yellow ochre, terracotta and brown.

STUFFED BIRDS

The group of exotic birds displayed under a glass dome includes two Indian Rollers(Coracias bengalensis; the large birds shown as in flight), some African shrikes (Lanarius) and an African mangrove kingfisher (Halcyon senegaloides).

SPADE

Leaning against one of the cluster columns is the spade used by the Queen of Romania to plant a tree in the grounds in 1890.




THE DRAWING ROOM

The design of the new castle respected the plan of the medieval house, and this room incorporates the original great hall. From the Library one enters at what was the Mais' end of the hall, facing the screens passage at the opposite end. The remodelling of this side of the castle is best appreciated by reference to the drawings an the table in the central window bay.The earlier drawing by Moses Griffithshows, at the top, the western elevation of the medieval house, in which the gable end of the solar wing, now incorporated

in the Library, is shown on the right. Between this wing and the turreted tower (the subject of a licence of 1433 to build 'a little turret with a little battlement') is the hall now displaced by the Drawing Room.
The lower drawing shows the buildings that stood almost opposite this west front, flanking an entrance to the stables. To the right of the arch is the east window of the fifteenth-century chapel, re-erected further to the north west in the 1780s. To the left of the arch were the steward's office and muniment room.
The other coloured drawing is a crude copy, made in 1821, of Moses Griffith's 1806 view of the Wyatt house from the south west (National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth). The protruding square block to the right was a later modification to the design, and seems to foreshadow the present Keep. Also on the table is another of G. Hawkins's lithographs, showing this room in 1846.

DECORATION

The Drawing Room was the domain of the ladies. Its dazzling silk hangings, Curtains and upholstery may have been supplied by one Shales who is mentioned in a letter from Hopper to his client in 1830. By the 19305 the fabrics had probably perished to an extent that they had to be removed, and for much of this century the walls have been covered by a dull brown paint. Probably also in the 193os, the ceiling was painted over in white and the carved woodwork was stripped of its polish.
In 1985 the silk lampas (often called brocade) was rewoven especially for the room by Prelle et Cie. of Lyon, copying a fragment of the old fabric found on the massive settee beneath later coverings. At the same time the silk tape for binding the curtains and wall hangings, the silk rope and gimp for the upholstery, and the glazed woollen `tammy' lining for the curtains were reproduced in England from original fragments. Since it was not possible to remove the paint to uncover the 2,000 gilt crosses that appear in the lithograph, these had to be reapplied on top of the original ones. At the same time, the carved woodwork was revived and repolished; the unusual pelmets in the form of outsize curtain poles, and the pulleys and rails themselves, were all made by the castle's own craftsmen. The castle carpenter also made a replacement panel for the back of one of the doors, where china shelves had been set up in the early part of this century.

STAINED GLASS

The medieval hall had been the work of Gwilym ap Gruffydd IIand his wife Joan, and Thomas Pennant tells us that their arms could be seen in the windows
until 1764. As an echo of this arrangement, Dawkins Pennant set up his own arms (impaling those of Elizabeth Bouverie, his second wife) over the central window. This glass and the heraldic windows to either side are attributed to David Evans of Shrewsbury.

CHIMNEY-PIECE

The chimney-piece is of serpentinite, an igneous rock properly called Mona Marble, and this colour occurs in Llanfechell and Llandyfriog on Anglesey.

FURNITURE

Catherine Sinclair noticed 'the largest mirror ever made in this country', and also an organ 'fit for a cathedral here in 1833. The organ was probably identical to the one in Llandygai church, whose dimensions exactly fit the spaces now occupied by the mirrors. (One local tradition asserts that the Drawing Room organ was later plundered for parts to repair the church instrument.) That Miss Sinclair refers to only

one outsize mirror seems to confirm that the organ was at one end; it had been removed and replaced with a matching mirror by 1846, when it was not shown in the lithograph of the room.
Below the mirrors at either end is a pair of highly individual tables*. The one against the Library wall is made entirely of slate, carved exceptionally deeply for this material, and the top slab incorporates `sample' squares of colourful stones, probably all from Anglesey: m the three larger panels are the two varieties of Mona Marble, the red one as used in the chimneypiece, and the green from Holy Island. At the far end of the room the stand of the other table has the same design of entwined fishes and serpents, but in carved and gilt wood. The top is inlaid with brass stringing. These tables were presumably designed by Hopper, but their makers are not known. If the organ was originally placed at one end, one of the tables must be slightly later than the other.
The massive oak settee, in what might be called the `Tudor style', the carved oak chairs and the smaller settee (with ancient carving applied to the back and apron) were all designed by Hopper.
The octagonal table with marquetry in the frieze and tripod stand is by Edward Holmes Baldock. Baldock may also have `made up' the oval table with an `oyster' marquetry top on a seventeenth-century marquetry stand, and the sixteen-sided marquetrytopped table.
The set of oak `occasionar chairs of Blender Gothic design bears the label of 'James Hughes, Upholsterer, Carnarvon, Late of S. J. Waring and Sons Ltd'. The prie-dieu chair is stamped by Miles and Edwards, London furniture makers and dealers in fabrics. Its serial number indicates that it was supplied after 1833. The table with the drawings and lithographs on it is another `made-up' piece, incorporating eighteenthcentury Dutch inlays and cruder 183os ones.

CLOCK

The I4-day striking bracket clock in a Boulle-work case is by Jean le Dieux, Paris, 1700

CARPET

The carpet is of English manufacture, c.183o, from an earlier Savonnerie design.

METALWORK

The tall gilt-bronze candelabra at either end of the room are traditionally said to be based on an original by the sixteenth-century Italian goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, but there is no precedent for them in his work. The figures of the seated satyr and the young man with a syrinx (or pipe) are after the antique marble group of Pan and Daphnis, and the striding figures of satyrs in the upper reaches are also after the Antique. The structure and decorative motifs show a strong Venetian influence, and it is possible that they are the work of a Venetian art foundry of the 1840s.
The two Empire bronze lamps on the mantelpiece, in the form of seated classical female figures, with ormolu mounts and polished granite bases, have been adapted for electricity. Their original form as oil lamps can be seen in Hawkins's print.

CERAMICS

The biscuit porcelain figures and table ornaments are, from parts of two Minton dessert services, c.185o, one of them copied from the celebrated eighteenthcentury `Cameo' service made at Sevres for Catherine the Great.

THE EBONY ROOMI

In the doorway between the Drawing Room and the Ebony Room is a door to the spiral stair contained within the medieval tower built by Gwilym ap Gruffydd II, which was retained in Wyatt and Hopper's structures. This part of the present castle, the Oak Tower, is the most complex, probably because much of the two earlier houses was preserved within it.The unusual ceiling height (a `mezzanine' room was added above) and the form of the window suggest that this may have been intended as an entrance to the present castle. A much copied engraving, the original of which seems to be that published around 186o by Catherall, shows this arrangement, with Samuel Wyatt's carriage drive retained to form the approach to an entrance in this position. Since the present eastern Entrance Gallery, barbican and forecourt were all on the undated ground plan (presumed to be by Hopper) and are shown in Hawkins's lithograph of 1846, it remains unclear whether Catherall's print and its progeny were accurate views. The curious alcove in the right-hand wall of the Ebony Room, fitted with a mirror glass, would have made an opening into the Drawing Room which, if this had originally been intended to continue as a great hall, would have resembled the `screens' opening of the original house, though displaced to the other side of the tower. The mirrored alcove in the opposite wall may mark the position of an earlier, external door to the northern service wing of the medieval house. Whether these additions represent a change of mind in the middle of building is not clear, but it is not impossible that Hopper intended by these devices to give the impression that the room had been remodelled, thus imparting an air of antiquity where none existed.
Here again different materials are used in disguise, and painted and varnished plaster and polished black limestone in the chimney-piece (from Dinorben near Abergele, or Moelfre on Anglesey) complement the furniture, some of which is in solid ebony, some veneered in ebony, and some of other woods, ebonised to give the same effect.
Marked as the 'Boudoir' on the earliest plan, the Ebony Room was presumably the morning room where Mrs Dawkins-Pennant and successive Ladies Penrhyn would work at correspondence and household business, and it was here that Alice DouglasPennant compiled her catalogue of the pictures, published in 1902.

PICTURE

92 ? Studio of DIERIC BOUTS(d.1475)
Virgin and Child with St Luke
Transferred from panel to canvas in 1899The composition is derived fromRogier van der Weyden's(1400-64) treatment of this subject, and ultimately from Jan van Eyck's(active 1422, died 1441) Virgin and Child with Chancellor Rolin in the Louvre.The 1902 catalogue reveals that `No.92 was bought about 185o by Edward, Lord Penrhyn, from Mr Scoltock (tutor of his sons), who had bought it whilst travelling abroad with the late Lord Ashburton. Lord Penrhyn gave about £100 or so for it, and never cared for it at all. In 1899, being in a bad state, it was found necessary to transfer it from panel to canvas, when it was discovered that the picture had been much repaired some time ago, several white patches appearing where the paint had been restored, but the heads and figures and all the important parts of the picture were intact.
Legend had it that St Luke painted the Virgin, and hence he is the patron saint of painters and of their guilds and academics. He is shown here making a preliminary drawing in silverpoint, as a contemporary artist would have done. His painted panel stands on an easel in his painting-room on the right of the picture.

FURNITURE

The fashion for ebony furniture of the kind found in this room had been started by Horace Walpoleand by 1825 it was becoming essential for any house built in an old English style. Chairs such as the two low examples (not children's chairs) and the taller single chairs (with legs altered in the 183os) are probably late-eighteenthcentury and may have come from Ceylon, but in Britain they were often supplied by dealers as `ancient', possibly Tudor. The armchairs are of a less exotic style and were probably made in Ceylon in the early nineteenth century specifically for export. The settee may have been made from a design published in Richard Brown's The Rudiments of Carving Cabinet Furniture and Upholstery in 1822.
The small cabinet with ivory-inlaid ebony veneer is an older piece, possibly seventeenth-century, from Sindh in India, and the large ebony-veneered armoire is Dutch, of the same period. The carved walnut polescreens were supplied to Col. Douglas-Pennant by C. Hindley and Sons around 1845-6.

TEXTILES

The magnificent green and crimson fabric (originally on a yellow ground) used for the curtains, upholstery and pole-screens is a silk voided cisele velvet in a restrained 'bizarre' design, which dates it between 1695 and 1712. Originally these rich velvets were produced in Genoa, although by this date both Lyon and Spitalfields could have woven such a fabric. How it came to be used here in the 1830s is not clear, but it could have been salvaged from the Warburtons' Cheshire house, Winnington, or bought from a dealer around 183o. (From a letter in the papers of the furniture makers and dealers Miles and Edwards, it appears that Dawkins-Pennant bought old textiles as well as furniture from them.) The provenance of the velvet is all the more intriguing in view of the fact that the much-faded c.183o Lyon silk brocade used for the wall hangings (possibly the silk supplied by one Fentham referred to by Hopper in a letter of November 1830) reproduces part of the same pattern. lt was originally ivory, brown and coral red. The wall brocade could well be a direct copy of the velvet made at Lyon, but the precise relationship between the two fabrics remains obscure.

CARPET

The carpet is Persian, c. 19oo.



THE GRAND STAIRCASE

The short curved passage from the Ebony Room seems to be another example of Hopper's penchant for suggesting the presence of earlier fabric, here perhaps a round tower, where none existed; it also provided his joiners with an opportunity for some impressive work in making the door to what was the Steward's office.The principal staircase must have presented Hopper with a dilemma: how to design a sufficiently impressive stair for such a vast house and yet keep within the Norman style, when he knew that Norman castles had only spiral stone stairs, which could hardly sustain the pitch of the state rooms. He was also very short of space, having only the courtyard of the medieval house (also the site of Wyatt's staircase) to work with. His solution was to make up for this by an orgy of fantastic carving and the use of two contrasting stones: for the walls an oolitic limestone (possibly the Painswick stone of which large blocks were delivered in the late 1820s); and for the carved pylons, balustrades and newels a grey sandstone, possibly from Lancashire. The treads are the same York sandstone used for paving the Grand Hall and corridors.

CARVING

Most of the abstract motifs can be found in Carter's Ancient Architecture, but many carved components must contain an element of individual invention, such as the corbel-masks at the door jambs and the extraordinary row of human hands around the arch from the Staircase Hall to the Drawing Room.
The newel `crowns' of the third flight are carved with panels of figures derived from Strutt's Sports and Pastimes. The activities depicted are hawking, archery, slinging and elements of the joust and the tournament, including 'the attack on the quintain', and a King of Arms carrying the banners of the two principal barons of the tournament. The crowns were removed by Sibyl, Lady Penrhyn, in the 193os but later reinstated, and these operations probably caused the damage visible on some of them.

LANTERN

The riot of plaster in the D-shaped panels seems to owe more to the Norse vocabulary of interlace and the Great Beast than to Norman sources. The influence of Celtic ornament may also be felt. Above these panels the round skylight with `column' spokes resembles windows at Helingham and Barfreston churches, near Canterbury, illustrated in Carter's Ancient Architecture.

STAINED GLASS

The stained-glass windows are by Thomas Willement and are listed in his Concise Account of the Principal Works in Stained Glass (1840) as having been supplied in 1832.

LAMP BRACKETS

The extraordinary cast-iron lamp brackets, where human arms apparently clasping bows emerge from monstrous mouths, were clearly Hopper's design, but it is not known who made them.



THE STATE BEDROOM

This and the adjoining dressing-room are hung with a late eighteenth-century hand-painted Chinese wallpaper, and share the same bizarre plaster cornice, probably derived from illustrations of Tickencote church in Leicestershire by John Carter. The chimneypiece is of the mottled Penmon limestone.

FURNITURE

The carved oak bed, the washstand and the tables de nuit flanking the bed are Hopper `Norman' pieces of the 1830s. The former is hung with silver and blue silk lampas, which is also used for the curtains. The fabric is identical in design, although different in colour, to that used in the Drawing Room. It was rewoven in 1992 by Prelle et Cie to replace the original textiles, which are now too fragile to be shown. Less obviously of the 183os is the large carved walnut armoire; the figure of Pluto is from Nuremberg, c.153o, but his consort Persephone was carved much later, presumably in the I83os when the piece was made. The late-seventeenthcentury Dutch walnut cabinet-on-stand was also altered in the nineteenth century. The small circular table with three spiral-twist legs and stretchers is by C. Hindley and Sons and was probably bought by the ist Lord Penrhyn.
Some of the other pieces are earlier: the unusual English rocaille looking-glass, c.1725-50, an the window wall is covered with shells and coral fragments, and the writing-table below it, with ebony veneer inlaid with floral marquetry, is Louis XIV, c.169o.
The painted mirror in a giltwood frame over the fireplace is a nineteenth-century rococo revival piece, inspired by eighteenth-century Chinese export mirror paintings. On the Louis XIV deck are a mid-nineteenth-century Indian ebony dressing-case and a pair of small seventeenth-century lacquer cabinets made in Japan.

CLOCK

The French 8-day striking mantel clock in a gilt brass and porcelain case is signed by Henry Marc, c.1880.

CARPET

The hand-knotted Turkish carpet is nineteenthcentury.

CERAMICS

On the shelves in the false doorway to the right of the fireplace is part of a Liverpool (impressed Herculaneum) dessert service decorated with thistles in the centre. The washstand set in `pheasane pattern is nineteenthcentury Copeland Spode, and the other bowl and ewer are from a Minton set decorated in 1894. The Cauldon china tea set was supplied by Mortlocks of Oxford St.



THE GRAND HALL GALLERY

PICTURES

150 ENGLISH, nineteenth-century Penrhyn Castle from Dologwen

111 FREDERICK RICHARD LEE, RA (1798-1879) The River Ogwen at Cochwillan Mill

Signed and dated 1849 Commissioned by the ist Lord Penrhyn. The picture shows the artist bringing a salmon to the net held by a keeper, Robert Buckland. The spectator is General Cartwright, a great friend of Lord Penrhyn.

302 J. OLIVER HARRIS
Penrhyn Castle from the south-west Signed and dated I890

5 NATHANIEL HONE(1718-84) David, Viscount Milsington

6 SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS(1723-92) Richard Pennant Esq
138 HENRY PICKERING (1752-90) Portrait of a Man

FURNITURE

The four Ceylonese ebony chairs are of the same date (c.I800) and design as two in the Ebony Room.

PASSAGE TO KEEP

At ground- and first-floor levels there are passager connecting the principal rooms with the family apartments and bedrooms in the Keep; the two further storeys of the Keep were accessible by spiral staircases
in two of the corner turrets, one for service use, and one for the family and guests. Visitors today can climb the 128 steps from the first floor to the roof, when there is a steward in attendance.

PICTURES

The three mezzotints after Sir Thomas Lawrence represent The 2nd Marquess of Londonderry (17691822), in Garter robes, scraped by Charles Turner, Viscount Lascelles (1767-1841, uncle of the ist Lord Penrhyn of Llandegai) and Thomas Graham, Baron Lynedoch (1748-1843). As well as being an outstanding general, Lynedoch is remembered for having played in the first Scottish cricket match, in 1785.
The other prints are of Lord Petre by A. Frische after Romney, CharlesJames Fox(1749-1806) by John Jones after Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Thomas Assheton Smith(1752-1828) of Vaynol, owner of the rival Dinorwic slate quarry, by S.W. Reynolds after Beechey.
The two colourful West Indian watercolours are valuable records of the appearance of two of the family's Jamaican plantations — Denbigh and Pennants — by a local artist in 1871. The sugar factory at Denbigh was built by Richard Pennant in 1802 and was still in use in the 192os, when new machinery was installed by the 3rd Lord Penrhyn.

FURNITURE

The four carved oak side-tables are from Hopper designs and have Mona Marble and Penmon limestone slab tops. The two Ceylonese settees with stamped velvet squabs are early-nineteenth-century in the style of the armchairs in the Ebony Room, but the two single chairs are Victorian.

PICTURES

IN THE PASSAGE TO THE BEDROOMS

151 R. C. (active late eighteenth century)

Six watercolour drawings of scenes in Jamaica. Nothing is known of the history of these drawings, but they are almost certainly connected with the Pennants' Jamaican estates. Alice Douglas-Pennant read the initials found an one of them as which she interpreted as those of the marine painter, John Clevely, but there is no evidente that he was ever in the West Indies. However, his twin brother Robert (1767-1806), then in the Navy, exhibited a West Indian landscape at the Royal Academy in 178o, and they are possibly by him.

A view of the bridge crossing the River Cobre near Spanish Town

A view of the bridge crossing the Cabaritta River in the parish of Westmoreland

Untitled — A bridge an box piers in a gorge
A prospect of Port Antonio in the parish of Portland
Untitled — A road by a waterfall
Dry Harbour


THE KEEP BEDROOMS

The suite of rooms shown was probably intended as one apartment, to which the passage hung with watercolours (with its baize door) was the stall access. It would have consisted of a sitting-room, a dressingroom, bedroom and a small ante-room. The arrangement is followed in the other storeys of the Keep, and it seems likely that one of these apartments was used by the Queen and Prince Consort during their visit an 15 October 1859. The view from the rooms also accords with George Fripp's drawing, made as a record.
For muck of the 2nd Lord Penrhyn's time these rooms were used as, respectively, 'Miss Alice Pennant's Room [now shown as a Nursery: her initials are scratched into one of the window panes], Lord Penrhyn's Bedroom, Gertrude Lady Penrhyn's Room, Young Ladies Sitting Room'.
Unlike the principal rooms, the family rooms in the Keep were redecorated in the Tate nineteenth century, with wallpapers and fabrics by the firm of Morris & Co. In the first room, probably originally a dressingroom, the paper is Morris, 'Double Bough' of 189o, and the hangings of the bed are made from a woven silk and linen fabric called 'Cross Twigs' designed (.1894, by J. H. Dearle for Morris & Co.

PICTURES

312 WILLIAM HAYESEleven studier of birds from 'Mr Child's Menagery' at Osterley Park, Middlesex

Some signed and dated 1785
William Hayes was an impecunious animal painter, who was employed by Robert Child's wife Sarah to portray the inhabitants of her aviary in a series of watercolours which he engraved for publication as Birds in the Collection of Osterley Park (1779-86), and Rare and Curious Birds from Osterley Park (1794)• Richard Pennant may have commissioned similar drawings, but it seems more likely that the Penrhyn series was purchased at the Osterley Park sale in 1885 by George Sholto, and Lord Penrhyn.

FURNITURE

The brass bed was ordered, at a cost of £600, for the use of the Prince of Wales when he stayed at Penrhyn in 1894, but it was probably first set up in a room off the Grand Staircase, and originally had different hangings. The cheval glass and washstand (with a Mona Marble top) are Hopper designs, as is the handknotted Axminster carpet, which preserves its original colours better than any of the other `Norman' examples in the castle.

CERAMICS

A pair of Dehan blanc-de-Chine dogs of Fo, Kangxi.A nineteenth-century Chinese famille rose trumpetnecked vase.
A Minton toilet set of `bamboo' design, c.186o-7o.


THE SLATE BED

The next bedroom has one of Penrhyn's most famous curiosities. The slate bed* was probably carved by someone who normally produced slate headstones-and chest tombs, a peculiarly Welsh tradition of which good examples are to be found in Llandygai churchyard. This bed, and another in the same material, were originally in what were called the Upper and Lower Slate Bedrooms in the north-east corner of the main block of the castle (not open). Iris hung with a printed cotton called Pomegranate', designed by William Morris in 1877.
The wallpaper is not by Morris and is probably Edwardian.
The chimney-piece, one of the most spectacular in the castle, is made of the red Mona Marble; the two candlesticks are of the same material, which was also used for the tops of the `Norman' tables de nuit.

PICTURES

109CLARKSON STANFIELD, RA (1793-1867)
Amal birthplace of the mariner's compassStanfield was one of the most successful early Victorian landscape painters. Ruskin called him 'the leader of the English Realists', chided him for being `somewhat over prosaic', but praised his `true, salt, serviceable, unsentimental sea'. However, this picture invoked Ruskin's wrath, when shown at the 1848 Royal Academy: 'The lost sentiment of Mr Stanfield's `Amalfi' — the chief landscape of the year — full of exalted [?] material, and mighty crags, and massy seas, grottos, precipices, and convents; fortress-towers, and cloud-capped mountains — and all in vain, merely because that same simple secret ha, been despised; because nothing there is painted — as it Is ...' (Modern Painters, Addenda to Part III, 1848). The picture has suffered badly from the artist's use of bitumen to produce rich, transparent darks. It was bought by the ist Lord Penrhyn in the 187os.
The photographs show members of the ist and 2nd Barons' families.

FURNITURE AND CERAMICS

The seat furniture is upholstered in what must have been a dazzling green silk fabric of the 1890s. Several Hopper-designed pieces include the dressing-table and dressing-mirror, the massive wardrobe with arcaded front, and the washstand. There are two washstand sets: the i2-piece set in blue with gold flower and bird decoration is by Spode, Copeland and Garret, and the part-set in white with pink roses is by Coalport, supplied by T. Goode of London.

BATHROOM

The wallpaper is Bough', designed by Morris
in 1887. The fittings are Shanks's Tin de Siecle' models.



THE ANTE-ROOM

The ante-room adjoining the Bedroom has another Morris wallpaper, 'Iris', designed by J. H. Dearle c.1887, and a Mona Marble chimney-piece.

PICTURES

227 GEORGE FENNEL ROBSON (1790-1833)
Eight Views of Caernarfonshire and one of Durham* These watercolours were probably painted for George Hay Dawkins-Pennant, since all but one show views of his Caernarfonshire estates. He probably commissioned the set of eight, and the artist may have added the view of his own birthplace, Durham, in gratitude for such a major commission. They illustrate one of
the aims of the Old Watercolour Society, of which • Robson was one of the most active members, to put watercolours on a par with oils as gallery pictures.

TO THE LEFT OF THE CHIMNEY-PIECE:

Penmaenmawr from thegrounds of Penrhyn Castle*

View from thegrounds of Penrhyn Castle looking towards Nant Ffrancon*

OVER THE CHIMNEY-PIECE:

Durham Cathedral and Town*

TO THE LEFT OF THE DOOR: (ABOVE)

Moel Tryfan from the south end of Llyn Ogwen*

(BELOW)

Llyn Idwal*

OVER THE DOOR:
Carnedd Llywelyn and Carnedd Dafydd*

TO THE RIGHT OF THE DOOR: (ABOVE)
Llyn Ogwen from the south*

(BELOW)
Snowdon from Capel Curig*

FURNITURE

Two Hopper dressing-tables and a table de nuit*.
An 1830s carved walnut armoire in the seventeenthcentury Swiss style.A Regency rosewood teapoy inlaid overall with brass. An American treadle sewing-machine by Wheeler and Wilson, 1867.
An armchair upholstered in William Morris's 'Windrush' block-printed cotton produced in 1883, now much faded.

PICTURE

GEORGE FENNEL ROBSON (1790-1833)
Penrhyn Castle from Lonisa



THE LOWER INDIA ROOM

Well into the nineteenth century the term 'India' was used to denote anything from the Orient. Here it refers to the Chinese hand-painted wallpaper, which probably dates from c. 800, and would have been set up here in the 183os. This room was used by the last Lord Penrhyn to live at the castle, Hugh Napier, 4th Baron (1894-1949).
Although their doors have been removed, the positions of the bath and the water-closet in the antelobby seem somewhat public. 'The principles of English delicacy are not easily satisfied', wrote Robert Kerr on this subject in his classic The Gentleman's House of 1865; `... if the access be wo direct, it is a serious error.'

CHIMNEY-PIECE

The chimney-piece is of mottled Penmon limestone, painted to match the ground colour of the wallpaper.

FURNITURE

The carved oak bed, dressing-table, dressing-glass, cheval glass and tables de nuit are all Hopper designs from the 183os. Other pieces share the Eastern exoticism of the wallpaper: two Japanese black and gilt lacquer cabinets*, the one eighteenth-century on an ebonised stand in the style of William Kent, and the other seventeenth-century on a much later plain ebonised stand*; a Chinese black and gilt lacquer tilttop table, To; and an unusually tall wardrobe, assembled c.i800 from earlier Chinese panels. The main cupboard doors of this wardrobe are Tate seventeenth-century, with figures of horsemen applied in mother-of-pearl and various hardstones; the drawer-fronts are also seventeenth-century, but the lower doors, decorated with European figures, are eighteenth-century.

CERAMICS

ON THE MANTELPIECE:
A pair of early nineteenth-century Chinese cloisonni' vases, and several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Chinese blue-and-white vessels.

IN THE CORNER:
A very large blue-and-white late-nineteenth-century Chinese vase.
The white and gold china washstand set is Minton, c.i8so.

PHOTOGRAPH

ON THE MANTELPIECE:
A portrait in a slate Frame of Sir Prescott Gardner Hewett, Bt (1812-91), a family friend who became Surgeon Extraordinary to Queen Victoria, and saved the artistic career of Carl Haag (see No.234 below).

THE CHAPEL CORRIDOR

PICTURES

131 FRENCH, early seventeenth century Portrait of a boy wearing the Saint Esprit

234 CARL HAAG (1820-1915)
Palmyra
Watercolour, signed and dated 1863 Haag regarded the Ist Lord Penrhyn as his first true patron in England. This picture and its two companions (Nos. 235 and 236) were commissioned by Lord Penrhyn after visiting the artist's studio in 1860 with his son George and being `swept away' by his Sketches of the Levant, which the latter knew at first hand. They had been introduced by Lord Penrhyn's great friend and adviser in the matter of watercolours, the distinguished surgeon Sir Prescott Hewett. Sir Prescott's surgical skill had saved Haag's thumb and his career, after an explosion caused by `carelessly smoking his pipe whilst cleaning his powder flask'. Queen Victoria so admired two of Haag's pictures during her visit to Penrhyn that she invited the young artist to Balmoral, `which greatly furthered his rising fame'.
The two ancient cities of Palmyra and Baalbec wererediscovered in 1751 by James Dawkins, uncle of the builder of Penrhyn, and his friend Robert Wood, who together published two influential volumes of engravings of the ruins. Haag had been sketching at Palmyra (with the romantic figure of Janet, Lady Digby) and Baalbec in October—November 1859.

235 CARL HAAG (1820-1915)

The Ruins of Baalbec

Watercolour, signed and dated 1862

236 CARL HAAG (1820-1915)

The Acropolis at Athens

Watercolour, signed [begun in December 1860]



THE CHAPEL

For about 400 years Penrhyn was served by the Chapel whose remains survive in the pleasure ground (Set up there as an eyecatcher in the Tate eighteenth century). The encaustic tiles in the floor of the present chapel are thought to have come from the earlier building, as are the three German fourteenth-century carved wooden panels (probably altar panels) now fitted beneath the stairs from the gallery.

The Chapel remains almost exactly as it appeared in the 1846 Lithograph by Hawkins, which can be seen in the family gallery. This space is distinguished from the body of the chapel, where the male and senior female staff would congregate, by a separate entrance and the comparative luxury of a cast-iron Islorman' stove. The junior female stall would take their places in the gallery on the north (left) side, where prayer-book ledges are built into the arches.

STAINED GLASS

The stained-glass windows are attributed to David Evans of Shrewsbury. In the gallery window, which closely resembles Evans's work at St Giles, Shrewsbury, there are two scenes: in the upper part, the Adoration of the Magi, and in the lower the Nunc dimittis episode, loosely copied from the right-hand panel of Rubens's Descent from the Cross triptych at Antwerp. Simeon is the central figure with an upturned face.



THE SECONDARY STAIRCASE

In many houses this monumental construction in grey sandstone, with its great lantern above, would be considered quite good enough as a principal staircase. At Penrhyn, it is relegated to second place. lt was built immediately next to the Grand Stairs, so that stall and members of the family or guests should not meet on the same stair. The upper walls were formerly hung with paintings but the light from the lantern was too strong, and in 1928 the Clarkson Stanfield (No. 69, Keep), which used to hang here, was recorded as `spoilt by the sun'.



THE GRAND HALL (AISLES)

STAINED GLASS

At dose quarters, Willement's ingenuity in suggesting antiquity in the round panels of his great windows can be appreciated more clearly. He used fragments of actual medieval glass (in the blue colours, for example), and 'clistressed' other areas by flicking specks of paint on to the surface to suggest the pitting caused by corrosion on the outside of old windows, a practice commonly used by the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury restorers of medieval stained glass [Please do not touch the glass].

FURNITURE

Beneath the windows are two massive stone tables, both designed by Hopper; the first is of slate, probably enamelled by G.E. Magnus to resemble black marble, with a zig-zag motif painted on the top slab to simulate inlaid granite. The other table is of the mottled Penmon limestone seen elsewhere in the castle.

PICTURES

134 Attributed to ISAAC SEEMAN (11.1720-5r) Sir Samuel Pennant (1709-50)Sir Samuel became Lord Mayor of London in 1749 and died in office. His Lord Mayor's robes and chain date this portrait and its pendant (No.133, Grand H all) .

301 HENRY TANWORTH WELLS, RA (1828-1900)Edward Gordon Douglas-Pennant, Ist Lord Penrhyn of Llandegai (1800-86)

Signed and dated 1869
Lord Penrhyn's youngest daughter Adela records: `The sittings were very tedious to my Father, in spite of his appreciation of the good will which had caused their infliction, and when my Mother could not accompany him he used often to take me with him, although I was only a child, to Mr Wells' studio to help to while away the time.' Presented by subscription to the Town Hall, Caernarfon, and subsequently given to the National Trust.



THE DINING ROOM

Apart from the corridors, the rooms so far described offer little flat wall space for the hanging of pictures, and the two dining-rooms were clearly designed to make up for this. lt is therefore puzzling that DawkinsPennant seems to have bought so few pictures himself , especially as a letter he received from Hopper in October 1834 hints at the possibility that the Dining Room was conceived in the knowledge of the Waterloo Gallery at Apsley House, set up in 1828-9 by Benjamin Dean Wyatt to display perhaps the most famous Old Master collection of the time. However, the Old Masters now shown here did not begin to arrive until the 18 sos.In the ceiling, the standard repertoire of Norman motifs may have been enriched by the study of West Indian botanical forms. The twenty principal leafbosses are encircled by bands of figurative mouldings derived from the south arch of the Norman church of Kilpeck, Herefordshire. The smaller bosses in rows dividing the larger compartments were originally much more numerous.

The use of stencilled decoration on walls and ceilings is not unusual at this date, but its extent here, covering the entire wall area above the dado, is apparently without parallel. It was an ingenious way of providing `Norman' decoration on a flat surface; indeed, with its subtle trompe l'oeil shading it looks almost as if scissors and paste would transform it into a three-dimensional object. On 10 July 1834 Francis Mitchell signed an agreement to paint the Dining Room decoration for £130 following a sketch possibly by Willement. At some point in the first quarter of this century, when presumably it had become unfashionable, the stencilling was painted over, and only revealed once again in 1974.
The massive statuary chimney-piece is carved from highly polished black Penmon limestone. The supporting figures are loosely derived from the famous antique Roman figures now in the Museo Nazionale at Naples and known as the Tarnese captives' or `Captive barbarians', a rare classical source for the decoration at Penrhyn.
The carved wooden decoration reaches new heights of elaboration in the dado of this room, which also has a useful purpose; even in a house as 'up-to-date' as Penrhyn, it was still a very long way from the Dining Room to the `necessary offices', and at one end of the dado on the window wall a `secref cupboard was fitted to accommodate Burleighware chamberpots, presumably for use only after the ladies and stall had withdrawn.


PICTURES

3 AERT VAN DER NEER (1603/4-77)

Moonlight Landscape

Bought by the ist Lord Penrhyn.

8 Salomhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_Koninck on Kolninck(1609-56) A Miser
Bought by the Ist Lord Penrhyn.

23 AERT VAN DER NEER (1603/4-77)
A River Scene
Bought by the ist Lord Penrhyn from General Phipps through the dealer Farrer for £210.

30 DAVID TENIERS THE YOUNGER (1610-90) La Hte du Hameau (The Village Eilte)

In the collection of the Empress Josephine at Malmaison by 1812. Bought by the ist Lord Penrhyn.

38 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, RA (1727-88)

Wooded LandscapePainted c.1775, just after Gainsborough's return to London. Bought from the Caulfield Collection, through Farrer, by the Ist Lord Penrhyn.

48 Studio Of SIR PETER LELY(1618-80)

Sir John Glynne (1603-66)

Sir John Glynne was MP for Westminster in the Short and Long Parliaments. A Puritan, he became in 1655 Sergeant to the Protector and Chief Justice of the Upper Bench. The desire for self-advancement, which appears to have been his most striking characteristic, left no room for scruples; he ended his life with a knighthood and the post of King's Ancient Sergeant. When he was trampled by his horse in Charles Il's Coronation parade in 1661, Pepys noted that `people do please themselves to see how just God is to punish the rogue'. His daughter, Frances, married Sir Robert Williams, end Bt of Penrhyn. The second wife of the 2nd Lord Penrhyn, Jessy Glynne of Hawarden, was also a descendant.

53 MELCHIOR DE HONDECOETER(1636-95) Fowls and Geese

Signed

Acquired by the ist Lord Penrhyn.

54 ANTONIO DE PEREDA (1608-78)

Two figures and a table with kitchen utensilsThe picture has been enlarged at the top by the addition of a strip of canvas, 10 in. high. In the collection of Spanish pictures given to King Louis-Philippe by Frank Hall Standish; bought by the Ist Lord Penrhyn soon after the sale of Louis-Philippe's collection in 1853.

56 ALLAN RAMSAY (1713-84)
William Colyear, Viscount Milsington, later 3rd Earl of Portmore(1745-1823)Lord Milsington's sister, Lady Juliana Colyear (see Nos. i 16, Passage from Breakfast Room, and 300), married Henry Dawkins in 1759. Lord Milsington succeeded his father to the earldom in 1785. Despite his benign expression in this portrait, he seems to have been of an irascible, even violent disposition. He quarrelled with his son, and left his property to his nephew James Dawkins (see No.3oo), whose younger brother George succeeded to Penrhyn.

58 HENRY THOMSON, RA (1773-1808)
Richard Pennant, Lord Penrhyn of Penrhyn, County Louth (1739-18o8), and his dog, 'Grab'Richard, son of John Pennant of Jamaica (No.133, Grand Hall) and of Bonella Hodges, married the Penrhyn heiress, Anne Susannah Warburton (No.59), in 1765. MP for Petersfield and subsequently for Liverpool, Richard Pennant was created Lord Penrhyn in the Irish peerage in 1783. See also No.23o, and Chapter Two.
No.58 was painted in the 179os, when Lord Penrhyn was building a road up the Nant Ffrancon to Capel Curig which established the ShrewsburyHolyhead route perfected by Telford. Lord Penrhyn points to a map of the road, which indicates the distance saved by the new, more direct route. In the background is the Royal Hotel (now Plas y Brenin) which he built at Capel Curig in 18or, shown against a somewhat exaggeratedly mountainous background.

59 HENRY THOMSON, RA (1773-1843)
Anne Susannah, Lady Penrhyn (1745-1816)
Daughter of General Hugh Warburton (1695-1771) of Winnington Hall, Cheshire, Anne Susannah was joint-heiress to the Penrhyn estate through her grandmother, the daughter of Sir Robert Williams. In 1765 she married Richard Pennant, later Lord Penrhyn (see Nos.58 and 230), who leased and in 1785 eventually purchased the other half of the Penrhyn estate. She was somewhat eccentric on the subject of animals, and according to Alice Douglas-Pennant, the author of the picture catalogue of 1902, `[she] used to dress up her pet dogs in little coats and bonnets and people used to say "Look at the Miss Pennants" when she had them in the carriage.'
Anne Susannah's costume reveals the influence of French foreign affairs on English women's fashions in the early ninetcenth century. Her turban a la Turque was inspired by the Turkish Embassy of 1802; the ubiquitous Cashmere shawl was popularised by the Egyptian Campaign of the 179os, and proved indispensable for its warmth over the flimsy fabrics of the 1800s.

68 EDEN EDDIS (1812-1901)
Edward Gordon Douglas-Pennant, ist Lord Penrhyn of Llandegai (1800-86)
Edward Gordon Douglas, son of the Hon. John Douglas and grandson of the 14th Earl of Morton, married first in 1833 Juliana Dawkins-Pennant, daughter of George Hay Dawkins-Pennant (Nos.73 and 300) and heiress of Penrhyn; he married second in 1846 Lady Maria Louisa Fitzroy (No.69). He took the name of Pcnnant by the will of his first wife's father, and was created Lord Penrhyn of Llandegai in 1866.
This portrait was painted during the winter of 1841-2, when the painter and sitter were staying at Harewood House in Yorkshire, the family home of Lord Penrhyn's mother Lady Frances Douglas. Lord Penrhyn is depicted in a doorway resembling the entrance to Penrhyn, but with the coastal landscape imaginatively rendered, presumably for compositional reasons. The portrait is described in the 1902 catalogue as `Considered a good likeness, but the expression does not indicate sufficient strength of character'. See also Nos.85 and 301, Grand Hall, aisles.

69 EDEN EDDIS (1812-1901)
Lady Mary Louisa, Lady Penrhyn (1818-1912) Paintcd in 1847
Lady Maria Louisa Fitzroy, daughter of the sth Duke of Grafton, and second wife of Edward, Ist Lord Penrhyn (Nos.68, 85 and 301, Grand Hall, aisles). Lady Penrhyn disliked the portrait and was caught by her husband: `... perched up on a table, busily engaged in painting out the bright coloured scarf with some dark paint from her own little water colour paint box, as she considered the effect too gaudy'.

73 JOHN JACKSON, RA (1778-1831)
George Hay Dawkins-Pennant (1764-1840)
The sitter assumed the name of Pennant in 1808, on succeeding his cousin, Lord Penrhyn (Nos.58 and 23o) to the Penrhyn estates. In c.1820, he commissioned Thomas Hopper to build the present castle. See also No.3oo.

85 SIR HUBERT VON HERKOMER, RA (1849-1914) Edward Gordon Douglas-Pennant, ist Lord Penrhyn of Llandegai (1800-86)
Painted in 1881, this portrait was thought to be a `most unpleasing likeness' by Lord Penrhyn's family, and Herkomer was also unhappy with it. The initial sittings were conducted at Penrhyn, in the Breakfast Room, and the portrait was completed in London. Lord Penrhyn used to say that it would come to be known as 'Portrait of a miserable old man'. See also No.68.

230 GEORGE ROMNEY (1734-1802)
Richard Pennant, ist Lord Penrhyn (1739-1808)
Lord Penrhyn had ten sittings for this portrait in 1789. lt was delivered to his house in Grosvenor Square and paid for in 1793. For another portrait and a biography, see No.58.

231 BARBARA LEIGHTON, MRS ALFRED SOTHEBY George Sholto Douglas-Pennant, znd Lord Penrhyn (1836-1907)
Lord Penrhyn succeeded to his father's title and estates in 1886, when difficulties in the Penrhyn quarrics were building up towards the strikes of 1896-7 and 1900-3. He married first Pamela, daughter of Sir Charles Rushout, Bt, in 1860; and second, in 1875, Jessy, daughter of the Rev. Henry Glynne of Hawarden.

300 RICHARD BROMPTON (1723-83)
Henry Dawkins (1728-1814) and his Family
Painted in 1773
George Hay Dawkins (later Dawkins-Pennant, see No.73), the boy with his hand on the greyhound's head, succeeded to Penrhyn in 1808, and built the present castle. His elder brother, James, here dressed in red, was equally fortunate, succeeding his uncle Lord Portmore (see No.56) to the Portmore estates. Their father, Henry Dawkins, commissioned this portrait for the Dining Room at Standlynch House, Wiltshire, whose portico is partly visible in the painting, with the spire of Salisbury Cathedral in the distance. After Henry Dawkins's death in 1814, Standlynch was bought by the nation as a gift to the descendants of Lord Nelson and renamed Trafalgar House. This painting used to hang opposite Gavin Hamilton's almost equally vast painting of the discovery of Palmyra by Robert Wood and Henry's elder brother, James Dawkins (on loan to the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow University).
On loan from the present head of the Dawkins family, Mr John Dawkins.

FURNITURE

Three of the carved buffets (or side-tables) are made of burr or pollard oak, and the five dining-tables are veneered in the same material. The design of the buffets is so outlandish and original that no stylistic influence can be suggested, but those on the fireplace wall differ considerably and much of their design may have been invented by individual carvers. The fourth sideboard table is of carved oak and, though contemporary with the castle, it is not a Hopper design. Around the table are twenty ebony chairs with stamped velvet seats, all of the 183os, and some of the earlier species of ebony and ebonised chairs are set around the walls.
are set around the walls.

CLOCK

The mid-eighteenth-century French 8-day striking clock in a Boulle-work case was given a new movement by Welch of Bangor in the nineteenth century.

TEXTILES

The carpet (an English `Savonnerie') dates from the early 183os. The plush curtains, introduced in 1997, are similar to those which would have hung here originally. The stamped pattern, called `Fronsac' and made in France by Claremont, is created as the fabric is passed between hot pattern rollers. Similar examples from the 184os can be seen on the dining-chairs.

SCULPTURE AND ORNAMENT

ON THE MANTELPIECE:
A pair of nineteenth-century tazze (shallow bowls on Feet) carved in a very fine-grained polished black limestone, possibly from Ireland or mainland Europe.
A smaller pair in the same material.A pair of polished black limestone candlesticks designed by Hopper.

ON THE BUFFETS FLANKING THE CHIMNEY-PIECE:
A pair of eighteenth-century Swedish porphyry ums.

ON SIDEBOARD AT THE SOUTH END OF THE ROOM:
A pair of Siena marble tazze with bronze `dolphin' stands, c.183o.
A Penmon marble obelisk.

ON THE BUFFET AT THE NORTH END:
A granite figure of Osiris, Egyptian, XXVI Dynasty [65o Bc], possibly acquired by the znd Lord Penrhyn.

METALWORK

ON THE BUFFETS ON THE FIREPLACE WALL:
The silver includes a pair of George III tureens* and covers* by Thomas Robins, 1809, and a set of Regency salt cellars by Paul Storr, 1816.

ON THE CENTRAL DINING-TABLE:
The flatware, bearing the arms of Richard Pennant, Ist Lord Penrhyn, is all by Thomas Heming, 1771-80. The racing trophies down the centre were all won by the znd and 3rd Barons' racehorses:

The Clifden C,up*, 1869, in the form of a partly gilt group of Elizabeth I on a royal progress, with a relief of Burghley House on the plinth, by Elkington & Co. Won by `Vagabond'.

The Newmarket July Cup*, 1890, a George III silvergilt vase, 18o8. Won by 'Queen of the Fairies'.
The Queen's Gold Vase*, Ascot, 1894, a silver-gilt wine cistern bearing the Royal Arms and with a relief of charioteers on one side, by Garrards. Won by `Quaesitum'.
The Goodwood Cup*, 1898, a William IV silver-gilt vase by Emes & Barnard, 1825. Won by `King's Messenger'.
Also on the dining-table is a pair of Louis XV style ormolu seven-branch candelabra and two from a set of large early nineteenth-century ormolu oil lamps with stands in the form of altar candlesticks.



THE BREAKFAST ROOM

When only the family was in residence and the full complement of footmen in black and gold striped waistcoats, tail-coats and gloves was not required in the large Dining Room, meals would be taken here.
This room was redecorated in 1984-5. The original oak-grained finish was restored to the `camber beam' ceiling, which had been painted white. The interplay of materials is again heightened by the fact that the beam on the window wall is actually made of oak. The walls, which had latterly been painted in arsenic green, were clad in silk fabric woven in Suffolk and copied from a damask hung in the great gallery at the Wallace Collection in London by Lord Duveen in 1926. The curtains were also made in 1985.

CHIMNEY-PIECE

The presence of a single bearded male head in the centre of the mantelpiece, carved in the mottled grey Penmon limestone, is a mystery. There are many other hirsute heads in plaster and stone around the castle, and these may all allude to the medieval wild men or `wodehouses', as the antiquarian Joseph Strutt called them. Hopper also deployed 'green men', with foliage issuing from the sides of their mouths, as corbels in some of the rooms at Gosford.
The asymmetry of the doorway cannot readily be explained by the building chronology, and it may be another instance of Hopper seeking to obfuscate it.

PICTURES

14 WILLEM VAN DE VELDE (1633-1707)
Shipping in a Calm
On panel. Signed and dated 166?3

Purchased Brussels, 8 April 1861, by the dealer Farrer, and subsequently sold to the Ist Lord Penrhyn.

17 PHILIPS WOUWERMANS(1619-68)
The Conversion of St Hubert
Signed and dated 1660Presented by the artist to the Catholic Church in Haarlem, from which it was bought by L.J.Nieuwenhuys for Willem, Prince of Orange. C.J.Nieuwenhuys sold it to the future ist Lord Penrhyn in 1855 for £600.
St Hubert (d.727) was converted to Christianity through encountering a stag with a crucifix between its antlers when he was out hunting, and became the first bishop of Liege.

18 PHILIPS WOUWERMANS
The Miseries of War

19 REMBRANDT VAN RIJN(1607-69)
Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet (1607-85)
Signed, dated, and inscribed: CATRINA HOOGH/ SAET/ OUT 5o/JAER/ Rembrandt f/ 1657
A powerful late portrait by Rembrandt, of a woman aged fifty. A misreading of her name has led to her being called the wife or the mother of the painter Pieter de Hooch, but she was actually the wife of the dyer Hendrick Jacobsz. Rooleeuw. He and his wife belonged to the Mennonites, a flourishing Protestant sect whose emphasis upon an individual approach to the message of the Bible seems most closely to have matched Rembrandt's own. Rembrandt never inscribed his portraits with the sitter's identity; the present inscription was put on subsequently.
Catrina Hooghsaet is dressed in the appropriate manner for the so-called 'Regent' and Merchant dass in the North Netherlands in the mid-seventeenth century. Her head-dress is, however, particularly handsome and expensive. Its most striking feature is the elaborate double hooftijsertgen (`head-iron'), designed to draw the head-dress tightly on to the head: Protestant custom dem anded that women, especially married women, covered their heads to the extent that their hair was hardly visible. Owen Feltham's Brief Character of the Low Countries (1652) noted an unfortunate side-effect of these head-irons: `Their EarWyers have so nipt in their Cheeks, that you would think some Faiery, to do them a mischief, had pincht them behind with Tongs
The painting was previously in the collection of the Ist Lord Le Despencer and in Edmund Higginson's Saltmarshe Gallery. It was bought by the Ist Lord Penrhyn c.186o.

32 BERNARDO BELLOTTO
View in Venice (Camp S. Stefanin)

34 SPANISH (mid-seventeenth century)
An Unknown Man
Bought as a poss ble Veläzquez by the ist Lord Penrhyn.

35 Attributed to ALONSO CANO(1601-67)
An Unknown man wearing the order of Santiago*Recent cleaning has revealed a painting of high quality which may well be an original by Cano painted not later than 1638-40, and displaying the influence of Veläzquez of the 162os and '3os. No.35 was one of the collection of Spanish pictures given to King Louis- Philippe of France by Frank Hall Standish, which was sold at Christie's in 1853 after the death of the exiled king. It was bought by the ist Lord Penrhyn as a selfportrait by Cano. When Louis-Philippe's widowed queen and children subsequently visited Penrhyn, Lord Penrhyn tried unsuccessfully to hurry them past this picture, thinking the recollections it would revive would not be pleasant'.

36 After ? BARTOLOWE ESTEBAN MURILLO (1617-82)
Don Diego Ortiz de Züriiga (1633-8o)
Copy of a lost painting probably by Murillo and once in the house of the sitter's descendants, the Marquises of Montefuerte. Ortiz de Züfriiga published a classic history of Seville in 1677. He wears the red cross of the order of Santiago, and this motif is repeated in the decorative painted frame. Bought by the ist Lord Penrhyn from Nieuwenhuys after 1858.

40 GIOVANNI ANTONIO CANAL, called CANALETTO (1697-1768)
The Thames at Westminster*
Canaletto was in England between 1746 and c.1755. The view shows the old York Water Gate, Pepys's
former house, and the York Buildings Waterworks Company's water-tower, in the foreground, looking upriver towards Westminster Bridge. Lambeth Palace can be seen to the left of the bridge, while on the right is Westminster Hall, the old Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. To the right of the Abbey, Inigo Jones's Whitehall Banqueting House can just be glimpsed between two houses on the river bank. The prominent tapering tower, which stood roughly at the bottom of the present Villiers St, housed a cistern from which the York Buildings Company supplied water to 2,500 houses.
In 1749 Sir Samuel Pennant (see No.134, Grand Hall, aisles) as Lord Mayor headed the annual waterborne cavalcade from the City to Westminster Hall, but'chose Samuel Scott to record the event with just such a view of Westminster Bridge. Acquired by the ist Lord Penrhyn from Nieuwenhuys in 1858.

42 PALMA VECCHIO(active 1510-28)
The Holy Family with SS. Jerome, Bernardino of Siena, Justina, and Ursula
St Jerome is seated to the left with his traditional attributes, the lion and a book. While preaching, St Bernardino held a tablet carved with the name ofJesus encircled by golden rays, as seen in this picture. St Justina of Padua was martyred by a soldier plunging a sword into her breast as soon as she was condemned to execution. St Ursula, the legendary daughter of a British king, is shown with the flag of St George, and a model of the ship in which she sailed to her death at Cologne with 11,000 virgins. Dated to the 1520s.
Probably from the collection of King Willem II of the Netherlands; bought by the ist Lord Penrhyn from Nieuwenhuys after 1855.

46 FRANCESCO (FACECCO) DE ROSA (1607-56)
Rebecca at the Well
Bought by the Ist Lord Penrhyn in the 185os from Nieuwenhuys, who had imported it from Madrid as a Veläzquez. Recent cleaning and restoration has fully vindicated its reattribution to this colourful Neapolitan pupil of Massimo Stanzione.
When Abraham wanted a wife for his son Isaac, to avoid his marrying one of the local Canaanite women, he sent his servant (usually called Eliezer) to find one in his original homeland, Mesopotamia. Eliezer decided to stand by a well outside Nahor and choose the first young girl to give his camels water as well as himself; this turned Out to be Abraham's great-niece, Rebecca.

51 ENGLISH ((.1640)
Charles 1(1600-49)
Pendant to No.55•

55 ? ENGLISH ((.1640)
Henrietta Maria (1609-69)
Queen of Charles I. Pendant to No.51, but here the image of the queen is strongly influenced by Van Dyck, whilst the fantasy architecture seems to reflect the influence of Steenwyck the Younger, who was in London from 1617 until after 1637.

66 After ? HANS HOLBEIN(1497/8-1543)
Henry VIII (1491-1547)
On panel
This is derived from the final type of the king's portrait painted (.1542.

67 ENGLISH (sixteenth century)

Elizabeth I(1533-1603)
A variant of the so-called `Ermine Portrait' of 1585 at Hatfield. It was bought by George Hay DawkinsPennant at Lord Charles Townshend's sale, 4 June 1819.

71 MARY BEALE (1633-99)
An Unknown Man
Signed
By family tradition, Nos.71 and 72 depict members of the Williams family of Penrhyn.

72 Manner Of JOHN RILEY (1646-91)
An Unknown Lady
See No.71.

77 FRANCESCO GUARDI(1712-93)
View at Venice*
To the left the island of San Giorgio, with Palladio's church of San Giorgio. In the distance to the right, the church of the Redentore, also by Palladio. Bought by Edward, Ist Lord Penrhyn.

79 Attributed tO PIETRO BUONACCORSI, called
PERINO DEL VAGA (1501-47)
Holy Family with St John the Baptist
On panel
Bought by the ist Lord Penrhyn. The picture was a great favourite of Lord Penrhyn's son, the 2nd Lord Penrhyn, because the Virgin reminded him of his first wife, Pamela Blanche Rushout (d.1869). Accordingly, when the pictures were rehung in 1.9o1, this painting was transferred from over the large Dining Room fireplace to Lord Penrhyn's sitting-room in the Keep.
Perino del Vaga was a member of Raphael's workshop in Rome where he worked until the Sack of Rome in 1527. If this picture is by del Vaga, it would have been painted prior to his departure for Genoa.

81 RICHARD WILSON, RA (1714-82)
Italian Landscape

90 Attributed to GIOVANNI Busi, called CARIANI (active 1509, still living 1547)
The Virgin and Child with SS.Joseph and Catherine*
On panel
The attribution to Cariani is derived from the catalogue of 1902, which states that No.90 was probably bought by George Hay Dawkins-Pennant, and that it was 'done up' in 1899.
St Catherine is denoted by one of the spiked wheels with which the Emperor Maxentius reputedly first attempted to have her martyred. They were destroyed by divine intervention, and she was ultimately beheaded.

FURNITURE AND ORNAMENTS

The oak buffet-table on the right-hand wall is another of Hopper's designs with a polished Penmon limestone top. The other, mahogany, sideboard table is similar to the one in the Dining Room, and not by Hopper. The small oak William IV dining-table is inlaid with burr walnut. It has two further leaves. Around the walls are several more of the ebony chairs seen elsewhere in the castle. The impressive armchairs with lion masks on the arms and stuffed backs either side of the chimneypiece are partly ebonised, partly ebony-veneered, and incorporate earlier (George II) legs. They were probably made up by Hopper.
The two small two-handled vases on the mantelpiece are of the same fine-grained black limestone as the tazze in the Dining Room, and are decorated with Egyptian hieroglyphs, possibly by the Derby Marble Works, c.185o. The font-shaped black marble bowl may have been designed by Hopper. The pole-screen banner is embroidered with the arms of Edward Gordon Douglas, Ist Baron Penrhyn of Llandegai, and his second wife Lady Maria Louisa Fitzroy.

CLOCK

The 14-day French bracket clock in a Boulle-work case is by Daniel Boucheret, Paris, c.171o.

METALWORK

The two Regency bronze Argand lamps have been converted to electricity. The base of the ormolu candelabrum on the table is probably an Italian altar candlestick, with later arms added. The pair of twohandled bronze ums after the Antique on the mantelpiece is nineteenth-century. Their design combines the form of the 'Medici Vase' with the decoration of the equally famous 'Borghese Vase'.

CERAMICS

The large punchbowl on the `Norman' table by the window is Chinese in the Imari style, eighteenthcentury.


PASSAGE FROM BREAKFAST ROOM

PICTURES
110 HENRY HAWKINS(exhibited 1822-81)
The Penrhyn Slate Quarry
Signed and dated 1832
This picture was probably painted for George Dawkins-Pennant in the year of Princess Victoria's visit to the quarry. The Princess wrote in her journal on 8 September 1832: lt was very curious to see the men split the slate, and others cut it while others hung suspended by ropes and cut the slate; others again drove wedges into a piece of rock and in that manner would split off a block. Then little carts about a dozen at a time rolled down a railway by themselves . . .' The picture depicts the quarry from the lower side,showing in the middle distance Talcen Mawr or `Gibraltar rock', blown up in 1895, and evidently contains a number of portraits.

116 ? After POMPEO BATONI(1708-87)
? LadyJuliana Dawkins (1726-70)
Daughter of the znd Earl of Portmore and sister of No.56, Dining Room; she married Henry Dawkins in 1759. George Hay Dawkins-Pennant (see Nos.73 and 300, Dining Room) was their second son. Previously anonymous, this was identified by Alice DouglasPennant by comparison with the likeness of Lady Juliana in the Dawkins Family Group (No.3oo). Although it looks like a copy of a Batoni, no original is known.