THE BRITISH countryside has inspired some of the finest landscape paintings, as anyone will know who has been watching David Dimbleby tramp across Northumberland and puff his way up Helvellyn in A Picture of Britain on Sundays. And landscape artists love to live among their subject matter, to draw inspiration from the hedges and trees that surround them, which explains why so few great artists come from places such as Croydon. Drift 20 miles south from tram-torn London suburbia, however, and you are in the Surrey Hills, the rolling greenery of the South Downs and the perfect place for artists to set up their easels.
The Victorian landscape painter John Clayton Adams certainly thought so. In the early 1870s he left London and moved to a house that he had designed himself near the Surrey village of Ewhurst. Adams was a Royal Academy member for 30 years who painted in oil and watercolour; his landscapes were colourful, light and usually depicted men at work in the countryside, particularly harvesting. He built his house, Brackenhurst, on the south-facing slope of Pitch Hill to allow superb views and created a large studio, 25ft by 18ft, in which to work, with windows that run almost from the top of the high ceiling to the floor. The studio was also used by his son, Henry, who was a succesful animal portrait painter.
“The area was a haven for Victorian artists who would come here from London on painting weekends and then decide to move here,” Keith Shinfield, the present owner of Brackenhurst, says. Adams married the daughter of John Tupper, a Pre-Raphaelite artist and critic, and he chose the site for his house because he had seen a painting of the view from it by Viscount Cole.
The five-bedroom house is set back in the plot and the dining room and morning room look out across the three-acre landscaped grounds, which include a lake and a swimming pool. Shinfield has created a broad Italianate balustrade atop a steep stone wall, made from Somerset stone and material rescued from a ruined drystone wall on the estate. With a row of half a dozen cypress trees, it divides the lawn nearest the house from the rest of the grounds and gives a Mediterranean feel that has only been helped by the weather there this week.
About a century after the house was built, it was bought by the musician Patrick Moraz, who replaced Rick Wakeman on the keyboards for the group Yes and went on to play with the Moody Blues in the 1980s. He used Adams’s painting room as a different type of studio and songs from the Moody Blues’ No 1 album Long Distance Voyager were recorded there. The area seems to attract artists: the estate belonging to Eric Clapton, the legendary guitarist, backs on to the bottom of the garden at Brackenhurst and other musicians are neighbours.
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The problem with Moraz using the painting studio for recording was that it had to be soundproofed. When Shinfield and his wife, Anne, bought the property in the mid-1980s they found that the studio had been transformed from Adams’s original. Ultra-thick artificial floors and ceilings had been installed and the windows were covered up. Shinfield set about restoring the light, airy appearance and although it is now used as a drawing room rather than for anything artistic (Shinfield works in oil, but of the petroleum sort rather than paints) he still calls it “the studio”. Shinfield also extended the kitchen slightly so that the door to the studio, which had been from the outside of the house, was incorporated within it.
Now that the soundproofing has been taken out, the house looks largely unchanged from the way it was when Adams built it. Of historical note is the panelling in the hall, morning room and dining room, which once adorned the village church in Ewhurst and was acquired by Adams for his house when the church was being renovated. Adams also got his hands on a couple of the pews, which are now in the morning room. In addition, the limewood fireplace surround in the dining room contains carvings attributed to the Dutch sculptor Grinling Gibbons, who arrived in Britain in the 1670s and was commissioned by Charles II, William III, George I and Christopher Wren.
One of the few original features that has now disappeared — Shinfield does not know when — is a wooden observatory that Adams built on top of the house. When Shinfield bought it, he found the attic contained a spiral staircase that went nowhere, and on consulting the original plans he found out why. A few years ago he was contacted by the great-granddaughter of Adams, who told him that she owned the telescope that her relative had used 130 years earlier. “Adams liked to do stargazing from the top of the house; there was less pollution then,” Shinfield says. These days the only stars you will spot are the musical neighbours.