The late eighteenth-century ceiling paintings came from the now-demolished Badger Hall, in Shropshire, remodelled in 1779–83 by James Wyatt. The owner, Isaac Hawkins Browne, MP, wanted the novel ‘mechanical paintings’ developed by Matthew Boulton, but by 1781 he had already given up the process and referred Browne to his best toucher-up, Joseph Barney of Wolverhampton.

The latter was, however, used to working from originals by Antonio Zucchi, Angelica Kauffmann, G B Cipriani and Biagio Rebecca, and it is probably this last, who was Wyatt’s favourite decorative painter, or Barney’s mentor, Angelica, who supplied the compositions here.

Pictures
The pictures are, for the most part, Italian, though the copy of Raphael’s La Belle Jardinière (66) is likely to be by a Northern artist, such as Joos van Cleeve. On the half-landing the St Jerome (41) is a good example of the work of Palma Giovane. But the outstanding picture is the Murillo, The Triumph of the Eucharist (70), originally from a set of four canvases commissioned for the Church of Santa María la Blanca in Seville and removed during the Peninsular War (1808–14); two of the other pictures in the series now hang in the Prado, in Madrid, and the third is in the Louvre.
  
The small collection of Old Master drawings displayed at the far end of the staircase wall includes some sensitive studies of hands attributed to Lely (314–317), and a Pilgrim (312) and a Kneeling Youth (304), perhaps by the Bolognese brothers Agostino or Annibale Carracci and their cousin Lodovico respectively. Other drawings are attributed to Maratta (306, 307) and Il Guercino (303, 311). The group in the single frame includes three studies (318) by Rembrandt: The Angel seated on the Tomb; The Good Samaritan tending the Wounded Man (the more elaborate of the two drawings of this composition); and The Good Samaritan coming upon the Wounded Man. The large profile Head of a Woman (320) is a fragment of a cartoon for the ceiling of the Barberini Palace in Rome by Pietro da Cortona.


The Staircase, showing the eighteenth-century mechanical
paintings used to decorate the ceilings.

Furniture and Sculpture
The furniture here includes an Empire side-table (a larger version of the pair in the Entrance Hall); four early nineteenth-century hall chairs with fan-shaped backs in the Biedemeier taste (probably Viennese and similar to furniture by Johann Nepomuk Geyr of c.1825–30); a walnut long-case clock decorated with floral marquetry, of early eighteenth-century date, by Nicolaes Nieuwenhoff of Amsterdam; and a mahogany card-table of about 1760. Standing on the early nineteenth-century bookcases nearby are several bronzes; they include Onslow Ford’s Linus (see the Lady Lever Gallery in Port Sunlight), the Borghese Warrior (after the antique marble at the Louvre) and a seated Mercury (after the original in the Museo Nazionale in Naples). The bronze horse is almost certainly the work of the Giambologna-Susini workshop in Florence.
  
The intriguing Gothic-panelled doors in cuban mahogany (on either side of the window overlooking the swimming-pool at the end of the passage) were brought by the 2nd Lord Faringdon from 18 Arlington Street, London, then the family’s London residence, which was demolished to make way for the Arlington House apartment block. The doors may originally have been among those made for Pomfret Castle, the Countess of Pomfret’s remarkable Perpendicular-Gothic-revival house, built under the direction of Sanderson Miller in 1757–9, now also demolished.
 
On the half-landing, the two giltwood satyrs torchères, on tripod bases, date from the second quarter of the nineteenth century, no doubt inspired by seventeenth-century prototypes. The Spanish seventeenth-century walnut folding table at the top of the stairs supports a bronze of three male figures, entitled Au But, by A Boucher, exhibited at the Salon des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1886–7.

Ceramics
On the Empire side-table are five plates of Chamberlain Worcester. Beneath the table is a large late nineteenth-century Dresden covered vase with Chinoiserie decoration in the Augustus Rex style. A Qianlong bottle, with mottled glaze, stands under the mahogany card-table.