Blossom at Waddesdon: Alice and the Autochromes

The Manor’s gardens have always been a highlight, but may well have reached their peak under the watchful eye of Waddesdon’s second owner, Alice de Rothschild (1847-1922). By the time Alice inherited the Manor from her brother Ferdinand in 1898 she was 51. Over the next 24 years – until her death – she ran Waddesdon, Eythrope, her London house, and the Villa Victoria in France with the discriminating eye of an absolute perfectionist. This perfectionism permeated every aspect of her life, whether it was in the formation of her collections, the way in which she cared for her various estates and houses or her expectation of her employees and guests – one of whom remembered being told not to smoke in his bathroom in the Manor. At her Villa in Grasse, a visitor quipped that every twenty metres a gardener stood waiting for a leaf to fall to clean it up.

Alice was a keen horticulturist with clear expertise – her correspondence with Frederick Johnson, the head gardener at Waddesdon, for example, includes warnings about new diseases that could affect plants and detailed discussion of soil types. This expertise was put to work both outside and inside the house: in the garden she oversaw the pioneering use of three-dimensional carpet bedding, a relatively new technique at the time, which you can still see today in the three-dimensional sculptures of birds in the grounds. Inside the house, we can build an idea of her horticultural tastes from a notebook written in 1906 that prescribes flower arrangements for most of the rooms throughout the Manor. The instructions are highly specific, giving seasonal variations, alternative arrangements, and even instructions for the dimensions and relative positions of individual plants and vases. The range of plants used speaks to an increasingly international horticulture: Alice’s arrangements in the Conservatory alone included plants native to every continent bar Antarctica. The handwriting in the notebook does not seem to be Alice’s, and she is occasionally referred to in the third person – I like to imagine her striding throughout the Manor, dictating detailed arrangements as she went.

You might think, given the notebook was written over 100 years ago, that images which capture Alice’s arrangements in all their colourful glory don’t exist. Indeed, the early 20^th century is probably made to feel much more distant than it really was because it is captured, at least visually, primarily through monochrome photography: we see images of people and places in some distant past, devoid of modern colour. But methods of colour photography were already being innovated by Alice’s time, and at Waddesdon we are lucky enough to have a set of photographs taken with one of these exciting new techniques – the autochrome.

Autochrome was a form of colour glass-plate photography innovated in 1903 and marketed from 1907 – roughly the same time as Alice’s arrangement notebook. Colour was produced by covering the plate in microscopic coloured grains of potato starch in red, green, and blue. When light passed through these grains to the photographic emulsion a full colour image of the original subject would be produced. Grouping of the randomly spread starch grains could sometimes produce clumps of colour in the final photograph, and a long exposure time was usually needed – two factors that contribute to the autochromes’ often fuzzy, dream-like appearance. A complex manufacturing process meant that autochromes were expensive to make and even more expensive to buy, limiting their popularity with consumers. This, however, was not a problem for the Rothschilds, and while we don’t know who took the autochrome photographs of Waddesdon Manor, we do know that other members of the family like Lionel de Rothschild (1882-1942) – whose own horticultural interests lead him to establish Exbury Gardens – were keen amateur photographers with a real interest in autochrome photography.

Using these autochrome photographs we can effectively travel back in time and find out what Waddesdon Manor looked like in the years leading up to the First World War: for our purposes however, perhaps the most interesting feature of Waddesdon’s autochromes is that they have captured some of the flower arrangements described in Alice’s notebook, allowing us to see how her instructions were carried out in the house in full colour. The colour, as well, is glorious – pale or vibrant flowers bursting out from beautifully vivid Sèvres porcelain, combining the artistic element of Waddesdon with its beautiful horticulture. A selection of these photographs, with corresponding excerpts from Alice’s notebook, are reproduced below.

The Manor is surrounded by blossom, from the daffodils in the grounds to the beautiful carpets of blue scilla under some of the trees. A little later in Spring, the blossoms of the horse chestnut will burst into heavy cones of pale pink and cream flowers. First planted by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild when the gardens of the Manor were originally laid out, they were just one part of a wider project to transform the then-bare Lodge Hill into the luscious grounds you see today. The horse chestnuts’ spectacular springtime blossom has punctuated the year here at Waddesdon for well over a century – as have the conkers they drop each Autumn. In March and early April, however, other blossoms populate the grounds, including a beautiful little Cherry tree down the Baron’s walk.

To learn more about flowers around Waddesdon Manor, visit this Spring and follow the Blossom Trail through the ground floor, which explores how flowers are used as decoration almost everywhere in the collection.

Written By Will Evans, Collections Intern