BY CHARLES EVANS
Built by Noel Hill, First Lord Berwick, in 1784, from designs by a little-known Scottish architect, George Stewart, with an important picture gallery inserted by Nash in 1807. The park and lake are excellent typical productions of the landscape-architect Humphrey Repton. Attingham Park lies near the village of Atcham, Shropshire.
Stewart’s building, with its tall, slender columns and colonnades, well illustrates the elegance of the late 18th Century, and its internal decoration is particularly attractive in the style of Wyatt.
The furniture, and many of the pictures, were collected by the 3rd Lord Berwick when Minister at Naples – notably the Louis XVI and Empire furnishings of the drawing-room, much of it signed pieces.
The paintings, mostly contained in the picture gallery, comprise works by Caravaggio, Salvator Rosa, the Venetian, Veronese and Spanish Schools, and a series of landscapes by Philip Hackaert (c. 1795), a friend of Goethe.
