In 1901 Sir George suffered a complete collapse in his health, almost certainly because of the tensions within his marriage. There may have been other factors, such as failing to regain the Scarborough seat, but Ida was the catalyst. All that we know about it comes from Osbert’s account (in The Scarlet Tree) of what he witnessed as a small boy, written four decades later and – as usual – designed to make his father look a fool.
Bewildered by his mysterious and frightening malady, Sir George decided he must give up politics. The doctors could not tell him what was wrong, as it was beyond the period’s medical science; each diagnosis disagreed with the next. Hoping a holiday might work a cure, he went to Germany, staying at Nuremberg and then Rothenburg, but he took the cause with him – Lady Ida. For a short time, however, he thought the change of scenery was doing him good.
In May 1901, according to Osbert, his father fell alarmingly ill with what was clearly a nervous breakdown; but in those days doctors scarcely knew the term, let alone what it implied. It prostrated him, and he could not deal with business matters. He became convinced he was a dying man – after all, his father had died at just the same age. Unable to sleep, he tried going to bed in a different house or hotel every night of the week.
Cure after cure was tried, often contradictory: wine or no wine, exercise or no exercise, etc. The illness dragged on for several years, with the patient (the ‘dear invalid’, as Louisa Lucy called him) showing no improvement. In the end, the local GP ousted the specialists and convincingly advised change. Sir George must travel.
Chapter 12
SIR GEORGE’S ITALIAN CURE
ir George was cured by reinventing himself as an antiquarian in Italy, where meticulous research into the history and science of designing gardens gave purpose to his travels. He never forgot Archbishop Tait’s advice – ‘without distinct occupation, no man can be happy’. In finding a new and satisfying one, he became the creator of today’s Renishaw. He also acquired another great house, in Tuscany, that gave further scope for his special talents – which had originally stemmed from his fascination with Renishaw.
He had always possessed antiquarian interests, working on medieval family pedigrees with the famous genealogist J. H. Round. His first book, which he printed himself, was The Barons of Pulford (1889), a selection of assize rolls and charters. He produced two admirably edited volumes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sitwell letters in 1900–1, with an introduction that shows how much Renishaw meant to him.
‘My father died when I was two years old, and at the time I first went to school we used to spend but a few months in the summer at our old house in Derbyshire,’ he wrote. ‘The library, a gradual growth of three hundred years, and the collection of civil war pamphlets, had been scattered abroad, and little of the original furniture remained except the tapestries, pictures and china, and a few old cabinets of tortoiseshell, rosewood or ebony,’ is how he describes the effect on Renishaw of the wreck of his grandfather’s affairs.
Of family history absolutely nothing had come down to us but the tradition that our ancestors had lived there since the reign of Elizabeth, and a story concerning the portrait of the ‘Boy in red’ [sic] (his name was forgotten), who had died by drowning and whose ghost was supposed to haunt the house.
I remember finding, on one of my holiday visits, amongst the old books in the hall, a Greek grammar of the days when Shakespeare was at school, and in it my own name, written by an earlier George Sitwell just three hundred years before.
The lumber room, with its Georgian panelling and arched window looking out upon the staircase, had always excited my curiosity, and being allowed to poke about in it on rainy days, I came upon many strange and dusty relics of the past, the flotsam and jetsam that had stranded there during several generations – old portraits and brocaded dresses, portfolios of eighteenth century prints, the wreck of a machine for perpetual motion upon which someone was supposed to have wasted twenty years of his life, a collection of minerals (two compartments were labelled ‘Rubies’ and ‘Emeralds’, but the specimens were not so large as one could have wished), flint lock guns, rapiers and swords, and a spring gun which must have been a real terror to poachers, writing desks with letters and little treasures still stowed in them, and, most precious of all, a few old chests heaped up with manuscripts, parchments and books . . .
Curiosity, and the rather wild hope of hitting upon autographs of Shakespeare or Cromwell, led me to examine these documents, and by the end of my second year at Eton I had unconsciously learned to read them.1
This taste for history and antiquities was to be George’s salvation.
The first companion of his travels was the doctor who recommended travelling as a cure; but as a general practitioner, he did not have time to accompany George on a regular basis. The doctor’s place was taken by the former butler at Wood End, Henry Moat, transformed into a valet and general factotum. Moat and Sir George developed a relationship based on mutual, if far from uncritical, respect.
A huge, purple-faced Yorkshireman from the Scarborough fishing community – who, according to Edith, resembled a benevolent hippopotamus with a voice like a foghorn – the semi-literate Moat was highly intelligent. Amused by his employer’s eccentricities, he enjoyed travel abroad, especially in Italy, even learning to speak Italian. Sir George came to depend on Henry, whom he referred to sardonically as ‘The Great Man’.
Italy was where Sir George went annually from 1903–15, and again from 1919 until the Second World War – generally in spring, exploring the peninsula from north to south, making notes in his small, neat handwriting. In later years he would take one of his children with him. To some extent, he was inspired by the Italophile writer Vernon Lee, then much in vogue, who was an expert on – among other attractive subjects – the gardens of Renaissance and Baroque Italy. He read her books avidly.
His object was to see as many gardens as possible. Besides albums of photographs, he has left a marvellous record of how he responded to them in his essay ‘On the Making of Gardens’. ‘These old Italian gardens, with their air of neglect, desolation and solitude, in spite of the melancholy of the weed-grown alleys, the weary drooping of the fern-ringed fountains, the fluteless Pans and headless nymphs and armless Apollos, have a beauty which is indescribable,’ he writes. ‘In all the world there is no place so full of poetry as that Villa d’Este which formalist and naturalist united to decry . . . Sleep and forgetfulness brood over the garden, and everywhere from sombre alley and moss-grown stair there rises a sweet fragrance of decay.’2
Two other great Italian gardens, Villa Lante near Viterbo and Palazzo Giusti at Verona, induced equal rapture. ‘The Duke of Lante’s garden is of another character, a place not of grandeur or tragedy but of enchanting loveliness, a paradise of gleaming water, gay flowers and golden light.’ At Verona, ‘when the heavy entrance doors are swung back, an enchanted vista holds the traveller spellbound – the deep, refreshing green of an avenue of cypresses half a millennium old, leading to a precipice crowned by the foliage of a higher garden. For pure sensation there is nothing in Italy equal to this first glimpse through the Giusti gateway.’3
He did not place the garden at Caprarola in the first rank, apart from ‘the giant guard of sylvan deities, playing, quarrelling, laughing the long centuries away, which rise from the wall of the topmost terrace’. He responded passionately to Villa Torlonia at Frascati, ‘a place of mysterious silence, of low-weeping fountains and muffled footfalls; a garden of sleep . . . It is death to sleep in the garden.’
But these were just a handful of the hundreds he inspected. Among others he mentions are the Cicogna garden at Varese, Castello and Villa Gamberaia near Florence, Villa Bernardini in the neighbourhood of Lucca, Bogliaco on Lake Garda, Castello d’Urio and Villa Pliniana on Lake Como, Villa Borghese and Villa Mondragone at Frascati. He speaks warmly of gardens in Italian cities – of the old terrace garden at the castello in Ferrara, the hanging garden at Mantua, the garden at
tached to the Palazzo Bonin at Vicenza, the gardens raised above street level at Palazzo Durazzo Pallavicini in Genoa, the vistas offered beyond the cortile of Palazzo Raimondi at Cremona.
Writing of the men who created them, he says their first thought was the aesthetic impression made on the individual. ‘To them, the garden seemed to be only half the problem, the other half was that blundering, ghost haunted miracle, the human mind . . . It is strange what a sense of power and freedom these mighty outlooks give, lifting the mind high above all the pettiness of life, like a night spent under the stars.’
In garden-making, ‘we should abandon the struggle to make Nature beautiful round the house and should rather move the house to where Nature is beautiful. It is only a part of the garden which lies within the boundary walls.’ Over and again, he makes the point, ‘we must subordinate the house to the landscape, not the landscape to the house’. He would put this into practice at Renishaw. The last, strange words of his book sum up what he hoped to achieve. ‘Softly the Triton mourns, as if sobbing below his breath, alone in the moon-enchanted fairyland of a deserted garden.’4
In the course of his research Sir George visited all the great cities – Rome, Milan, Venice, Naples and Florence – and countless lesser ones as well. In April 1909, with the sixteen-year-old Osbert, he went up by train from Venice to Conegliano, near Treviso in the north-eastern Veneto, to see some particularly beautiful gardens, which had been so thrillingly described by Miss Lee in one of her books.
In March of the following year Sir George was by himself down at Squillace in Calabria, where the inhabitants’ carefree attitude amused him. ‘The population is healthy, good looking, as poor as it can possibly be, almost as dirty, and absolutely happy,’ he wrote in his notebook. ‘Their smiles and happy, merry faces prove that no doubt they prefer freedom to luxury. A Calabrian, I am told, only works till he has gathered together four sous. And then lives like a prince till the money is all spent and he must work again.’5
He was unusually adventurous in exploring Puglia, which at that date saw few English visitors. He may have read Augustus Hare’s Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily, which warned of filthy inns, uncouth natives, savage mosquitoes, danger from brigands and ‘the far more serious risk of malaria or typhoid’. Hare did not exaggerate. Vast areas of Puglia were infested by the anopheles mosquito, which killed thousands annually, while most of the scanty water supply was infected – rain sank immediately into the tufa, leaving what was in the cisterns for drinking and washing. But George certainly owned a copy of Janet Ross’s Land of Manfred (a copy is in the library at Renishaw), whose description of the perils faced by visitors to Puglia did not deter him in the slightest.
His travels there have been turned into a ludicrous promenade by Osbert, who in The Scarlet Tree claims that Moat recounted how in 1903 his master changed into a white tie and tails before dining at the humblest trattoria, besides insisting on being wrapped in a mosquito net every night and having his bed dusted with Keatings flea-powder.
But every valet since Figaro has mocked his master. There was no water to launder white ties, so he cannot have worn one, while mosquito nets and Keatings were indispensable – George records being bitten by fleas eighty times between wrist and elbow during a single night in a Manfredonian hotel. However, there was plenty of clean and comfortable accommodation at Lecce and Bari, both of which he generally used as a base, reaching the interior by train.
As it was, his notebooks show Sir George thoroughly enjoying himself in Puglia, fascinated by its landscape and buildings. He ignored the waterless province’s lack of gardens. At Lecce, the beautiful capital of the Salento which he visited in 1903 and again in 1908 – noting how Gregorovius had recently called the city the ‘Florence of Rococo Art’ – he commented on the ‘good Renaissance work in the streets, and later work shading imperceptibly into Rococo’. He was also struck by a ‘flower like a water lily’ carved on the capitals in several of Lecce’s churches.6
In April 1909 – accompanied by Professor Bernichi from Naples, the Inspector of Public Monuments for Southern Italy, and by his Pugliese guide Riccio – George went to see Castel del Monte, the mysterious thirteenth-century hilltop castle of Emperor Frederick II.
‘The little steam trainway runs through a flat country [of] olive trees, fruit trees or vineyards,’ he notes. ‘Andria, a white washed town with iron balconies laden with strangely shaped pots of terra cotta and green or orange earthenware, overflowing with stocks, gilly flowers and snapdragons. The streets and market place full of cloaked figures with their cloaks flung round them like a Roman toga and soft, wide-brimmed felt hats. Some of the balconies had in the corner spikes of iron holding nice little green jars, like ginger jars. As we drove towards the castle, the earthen tops [of] walls were covered with flowering weeds, little chrome buttons of the marigold, and now and again a group of the dark blue flowers (like hyacinths). Near the castle, tall yellow flowers like asphodel.’ Castel del Monte delighted him, especially a pavement of verde antiqua and bianca e nero.7
The next day he went on to Ruvo, where Bernichi had secured an invitation to stay overnight with the bishop. Here he admired the cathedral, one of the finest examples of Puglian Romanesque. A day later he went to Molfetta and Trani by train, exploring both before finally returning to Bari.
Not only was Sir George an avid sightseer, fascinated by architecture as well as gardens, but besides seeking a cure for his mysterious malady, he had two specific purposes. The first was to acquire furniture and pictures that would replace all that had been lost in the great Renishaw sale of half a century before. The other was to make use of his study of Italian gardens for the restoration of those at home. At this date he did not speak Italian, but he found good guides who spoke English.
‘For more than two centuries the gardens of the Italian Renaissance lay under a cloud, exciting, it would seem, little but contempt and disgust in all who viewed them,’ George writes, rejoicing in their rediscovery.8
He was no less of a pioneer in his taste for the furniture and paintings of the Italian Baroque, although in those days everyone agreed with Benedetto Croce that Baroque was the abomination of painting. ‘Old Italian furniture and Italian art objects look exceedingly well – nothing in the world looks better – in company with each other, in spite of a good deal of variety in style and date, with brocade and tapestry on the walls and doorways taken from churches,’ he observes in his notebook.9 Renishaw was to be the beneficiary.
Possessing a good eye and a talent for haggling, George acquired some superb furniture. For example, he records: ‘3 Jan 1905. Bought of Riccardo Tedeschi, antiquario, S. Eufemia, 25 Verona, two great chairs with the arms of the Doge Morosini, bought at the Morosini Palace at Venice, for the sum of 500 lire [£20], including packing in strong wooden case. He originally asked 1800 lire. But query was there a doge of that name?’10
The arms were in fact those of Doge Marcantonio Giustinian (1684–88), for whom these throne-like chairs had been made by a renowned Venetian wood carver, Andrea Brustolon. Other important items were two huge candlesticks that apparently came from Lucca cathedral. (George had visited Lucca in 1903.) Further pieces included Florentine and Neapolitan cabinets of the late seventeenth century, with inlays in ivory and silver. All of these acquisitions went back to England to refurnish Renishaw.
Decades before Anthony Blunt and Denis Mahon became interested, he collected Baroque paintings, noting on 28 February 1909, ‘bought an Annunciation guaranteed to be a genuine Francesco Solimena, born in Naples 1657, died 1747, painter and poet’.11 He particularly admired the fantastic works of Alessandro Magnasco, a Genoese artist from the late Baroque, eventually acquiring three pictures by this artist.
His preference for everything Italian shows in the note he made after visiting what some consider France’s greatest garden, at Vaux-le-Vicomte, in May 1909. Not everyone will agree with him: ‘A long shadowless garden of Le Nôtre’, he comments, unadmiringly. In his opin
ion, it was a sad example of
vast resources laid out to little purpose, of disproportionate upkeep, of incongruity, the garden being too large for the château and unsuited save for a great fête, forcing you to walk a great distance in the heat to see nothing except an expensive canal. Everywhere marble statues, fountains, bronze figurines, bronze and marble boxes by the score, but never a trace of fancy or invention.
Staying at the Hotel Bedford in Paris, he also visited the house of René Lalique, whom he refers to sardonically as ‘the sculptor-gentleman’.12
Sir George had toyed with the idea of building a small palazzo in Sicily, a project he discussed with Sir Edwin Lutyens. However, in November 1909 he joyfully records in his notebook that he has bought half the Tuscan castle of Acciaiuoli or Montegufoni (‘hill of the screech owls’). He adds a potted history, with a neat little sketch showing how much it is dominated by its tall campanile. He wrote an excited letter to Osbert, which tells us as much about George Sitwell as it does about Montegufoni.
You will be interested to hear that I am buying in your name the Castle of Acciaiuoli (pronounced Accheeyawly) between Florence and Siena.13 The Acciaiuoli were a reigning family in Greece in the thirteenth century, and afterwards great Italian nobles. The castle is split up between many poor families, and has an air of forlorn grandeur. It would probably cost £100,000 to build today.
There is a great tower, a picture-gallery with frescoed portraits of the owners, from a very early period, and a chapel full of relics of the Saints. There are the remains of a charming old terraced garden, not very large, with two or three statues, a pebblework grotto and rows of flowerpots. The great saloon, now divided into several rooms, opens into an interior court where one can take one’s meals in hot weather, and here, over two doorways, are inscriptions giving the history of the house, most of which was rebuilt late in the seventeenth century as a ‘house of pleasure’. The owners brought together there some kind of literary academy of writers and artists.
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