House and Garden 
THE CEILING OVER THE GREAT STAIR 
CLAYDON HOUSE 
a further step forward in the peerage, and 
had become Earl Verney. His son, the sec¬ 
ond Earl, a man of large ideas and extrava¬ 
gant life, had entered into possession. Then 
followed a series of dramatic transformations. 
The home of his fathers was no longer meet 
for the high estate of this childless man. 
About 1760 he called in the Brothers Adam 
to design and build for him a new house on 
a princely scale. The rural peace of Middle 
Claydon was invaded by an army of work¬ 
men, English and foreign. They set up 
their masons’ sheds, and laid stone to stone, 
rearing a vast mansion of Anglo-Italian char¬ 
acter, with the cold but stately frontages of 
the period. Therein was a great central hall 
with marble columns, and a ball-room, one 
hundred and twenty feet in length, with a 
succession of rooms of size on a like scale. 
Of these, saloon, library, and dining-hall still 
remain, each a sumptuous apartment fifty feet 
long by twenty-five feet broad, and twenty- 
five feet high. When the roof was in place 
there came troops of skilful joiners with great 
store of cedar, rich old Spanish mahogany, 
and ebony, satin-wood and ivory for inlays. 
Under the musical ring of the smith’s ham¬ 
mer was evolved a wrought-iron balus¬ 
trade for the chief staircase, with involute 
scrolls of foliage and wheat sheaves, linked 
all into one by floral bosses and festoons. 
On high scaffolds Italian modelers shaped 
wondrous things in plaster on ceilings and 
walls ; now in richly moulded ranges of deep 
panels, now in bold devices of high relief, and 
now in dainty medallions, after the manner 
of Wedgewood and Flaxman, united by loop¬ 
ed and hanging draperies with pendent urns. 
Then came the stair-hands and marquetry- 
layers, who spread over the floors and landings 
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