Welcome to Wightwick Manor and Gardens.
Built in 1887 for the Mander family.
It's the most beautiful house full of the most amazing William Morris interiors
and Pre-Raphaelite art. And I'm going to show you some of the wonderful treasures that we have here.
This is one of my favourite paintings here at Wightwick Manor. This beautiful portrait of Jane Hughes,
Mrs Nassau Senior, by G. F. Watts. And it's absolutely stunning as you can see.
It's full of colour and vigour and Jane wasn't just a beautiful face, she was actually a real pioneer.
She was a pioneer of women in the civil service. She was the first female civil servant in Whitehall.
She was an inspector of workhouses and pauper schools and she wrote quite a scathing report
saying children didn't belong in workhouses, that they should be in orphanages.
Within 20 years most of her recommendations had been taken up. She was also a great friend of Octavia Hill,
one of the founders of the National Trust. And she did her accounts for her, for her housing scheme.
So we've got a fascinating project for you to look at today. So we're lucky enough to have Mela,
our Regional Conservator here with us and she's working on a really interesting project.
I'm here today to help put the finishing touches to this conservation project which has been going
on at Wightwick for quite a while now. Really interesting and unusual rush-work panels that
run all the way up the staircase here had been here for over 100 years, and had got into quite a poor state.
Very soiled, light damaged and very brittle. So a lot of areas of loss as well.
So they were taken off the wall and they've been worked on by two specialist conservators down in Exeter.
And they were just brought back a couple of weeks ago for reinstatement, and I'm
here today with our heritage joiner. He's going to be putting the final touches on which is
these original batons which go over the top of the joins between the panels. So we're looking at the replacements
of those and doing the final pieces to get it ready for the visitors again.
Welcome to the Morning Room. So this stunning little room is full of William Morris wallpapers and fabrics,
and stunning Pre-Raphaelite paintings on the wall. But the painting we're going to be looking at now
actually is normally in the Lower Hall, but we've brought her in here so we can get a
real close-up of her. It's a little portrait study of Effie Gray who was at the time of the portrait
Mrs John Ruskin. And it's painted by John Everett Millais. Millais was, at the time, painting a portrait.
A very famous portrait of her husband John Ruskin. And while they were together all up in Scotland
Millais did a number of little portrait studies of Effie, and this is one of these.
During the trip to Scotland Effie and Millais fell in love and Effie confided into Millais about the state of her marriage.
Her marriage at this point had not been consummated and they'd been married for six years.
Millais said you must tell your family, so she wrote and told her father. Her father took legal advice
and realised she could get her marriage annulled which she did. The following year she married Millais and
they went on to get eight children together. And I think this is a really romantic little painting.
You've got the beautiful foxgloves in Effie's hair and there she sits sewing quite peacefully.
She's a very popular little portrait because of the links with Ruskin and Millais and we're always
being asked for her to go away to exhibition, and she has lots of stamps in her passport.
We've got lots of interesting things going on today. Here in the servery we've got something quite unusual.
John would you like to tell us what's happening.
I've always been a photographer from school days and I use those skills now to photograph the
collection we've got. And the reason for that is to keep a record of it to record any damages and any
markings that there are on the item. Doing this has taught me a lot about the collection.
Photographing it I get to learn what the items are, where they've come from, who's produced them,
and to learn how to handle the items properly because some of them are very delicate and liable to break.
And I've also learned some of the background of the whole house, and the Arts and Crafts movement.
I hope you enjoyed your behind-the-scenes tour of Wightwick Manor and Gardens.
Wightwick is one of the National Trust treasure houses and we really couldn't
look after it without your wonderful support. Thank you.