A rare portrait collection of domestic staff at a Welsh country house that has been around for more than 100 years has been given a contemporary feel with the addition of a striking photo of a recently retired head gardener.
The Erdich collection at Wrexham highlights a new appreciation for the painstaking work carried out by servants and staff in the upper and lower worlds of country houses and stately mansions. Kensington Palace recently held an exhibition of portraits of the royal family’s overlooked and often overworked backroom staff.
A new addition to the Erdich Collection is a portrait by Glyn Smith, who retired last month after 38 years caring for the estate’s Grade I listed gardens. Mr. Smith said he felt honored to join the long line of employees he was commemorating.
Earl Philip Yorke I, who inherited the house in 1767, began what became a family tradition by commissioning a set of six portraits depicting his servants in the 1790s. The seventh painting commemorates York’s two black coachmen who worked for Erdich before he was born.
In total, more than 40 members of Erddig’s household staff have been recorded in paintings, photographs, and poems from the 1790s to 1920. Poems written by York and his successors were displayed next to portraits in the servants’ hall, giving details of the workers. ” is alive.
“We know [Yorke] “He was interested in social history, but I don’t know why he chose to record his staff in this way,” said Erdich curator Suzanne Gronnow. “It was very unusual. I wonder how the artist judged Philip’s request and what the staff thought.”
Although one-off portraits of country house staff had been painted elsewhere, this collection was notable as a record of successive domestic staff, she said.
One of the first to be depicted was Jane Ebrell, who began her career as a housekeeper and spider-buster during the reign of George I. By the time she was 87 years old she was immortalized in her oil paintings by a local Welsh artist. Doyenne downstairs.
Ebrel, the wife and mother of two Erdich coachmen and a demanding role of her own in the household, is depicted sitting outside her cottage, with her dog at her feet and a mop and broom. She was leaning against the wall, a scroll in her lap, a grim expression on her face. Her accompanying poem describes her as “the mother of us all” who “thwarts all impurity with the virtue of a mop.”
The last person to ever join the servants’ gallery was gamekeeper Alfred Thomas, whose photograph was displayed alongside a poem by Philip Yorke II in 1920. Social changes after World War I led to the decline of country houses serviced by large teams of workers. Erdich has been protected by the National Trust since his 1970s.
A new portrait of Smith shows him smiling, wearing a tweed jacket and hat, holding a gardening fork in one hand and a watering can in the other. An accompanying poem written by his colleagues celebrates his “legacy in every plant and every tree.”
Smith said: [Erddig] However, this garden was my garden, even though I was its caretaker for only a few years. I am grateful to have been part of that fascinating history, just as the servants pictured with me now did for the House of York, and to preserve it for future generations. I am honored to have played my part in preserving it. ”
After almost 40 years, she said she was ready to take over as the National Trust’s first female head gardener, who would join 20 volunteers working in the gardens along with three staff gardeners.
The garden is “an extremely rare survival of early formal garden design and one of our most important historic landscapes”, said Patrick Swan, the trust’s garden and park consultant. “It takes expertise and a keen eye to handle it, but for the past 38 years Glyn Smith has led the way with incredible precision and attention to detail.”
Smith’s portrait and poem will be on display at Erdich until the end of May.
