In this documentary, we explore Mentmore Towers, the Buckinghamshire mansion Joseph Paxton built for Baron Mayer de Rothschild in 1854 to house one of the greatest private art collections in Europe. In 1977, the British government refused to buy the entire house and its contents for two million pounds, then watched Sotheby’s disperse the collection for six million in nine days and sell the empty shell to a meditation charity for £240,000.
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The fortune that built Mentmore was barely two generations old when the first stone was laid. Mayer Amschel Rothschild had begun in Frankfurt’s Judengasse with a pawnbroking shop. His third son Nathan arrived in Manchester in 1799 with £20,000 and turned it into £500,000 inside five years. By 1815 he was the dominant financier in London.
Nathan’s youngest son, Baron Mayer Amschel de Rothschild, bought the Manor of Mentmore in 1850 for £12,400 and commissioned Sir Joseph Paxton, the gardener who had just designed the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Paxton applied the same ridge-and-furrow glass roof system to Mentmore’s central Grand Hall, flooding the space with the quality of light he had achieved at the Crystal Palace. Nothing of this ambition had been attempted in an English private house before.
The exterior was modelled on Robert Smythson’s Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire, built between 1580 and 1588. Construction was completed around 1854. Mayer moved in at the age of thirty-six.
Within a decade, his brother Anthony had taken Aston Clinton House, his brother Lionel had Tring Park, his nephew Ferdinand was building Waddesdon Manor, his cousin Alfred was building Halton, and the local press began calling the whole district “Rothschildshire.”
The Mentmore collection was assembled with the same systematic ambition. The Grand Hall measured 48 by 40 feet, lit by three copper-gilt lanterns from the Doge’s barge of 1470. Twelve Flemish tapestries depicting the months of the year hung on the walls. The marble chimneypiece had been designed by Peter Paul Rubens and had stood for two centuries in his own house in Antwerp. The dining room was lined with eighteenth-century gilded boiseries from the Hôtel de Villars in Paris, the first use of original French panelling in any English house. Pieces by Jean-Henri Riesener, cabinet-maker to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, stood in rooms named for their contents: the Amber Room, the Limoges Room, the Blarenberghe Room.
Roy Strong, director of the V&A, called it one of the finest collections ever assembled in private hands.
During the Blitz, Mentmore sheltered the Gold State Coach from the Royal Collection, the holdings of the National Portrait Gallery, and Grinling Gibbons carvings from Hampton Court Palace. Thirty-three years later, when Harry Primrose, 6th Earl of Rosebery died in 1974 and his executors offered the entire house and contents to the nation for two million pounds in lieu of a seven million pound tax bill, the Callaghan government refused.
Sotheby’s took the consignment. Peter Wilson, the chairman, recognised he was selling a statement, not a collection. He printed a five-volume catalogue in 100,000 copies and erected a tent on the front lawn for several hundred bidders. The auction ran from May 18 to May 27, 1977. The total was £6,032,543. The opening day alone set the world record for a single day’s auction of French furniture. The Rubens chimneypiece was sold in a single lot. The Riesener commodes went to anonymous buyers. Paintings by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Boucher, Drouais and Moroni left for
