There's something very Upstairs, Downstairs about the leaflet advertising Sudley House, which reopened in May after a two-year renovation and redisplay by National Museums Liverpool (NML).
Like a TV adaptation, there are photographs of its owner, George Holt, who made his money in shipping, his high-minded daughter Emma, and Mary their maid, shown in oval frames with the house in the background.
Strictly speaking, they are images of actors playing master, mistress and maidservant, which you meet holding forth on video screens in the corner of the downstairs rooms. The style of acting is classic costume drama: as stiff at times as Mary's pinafore and George's high collar.
It's a nice idea, though, and you can't blame the actors for a script long on historical context and short on human drama. Mary tells us she's 'forever dusting' the Holts' many objets d'art, but does not dish out any below-stairs gossip.
George Holt bought Sudley House, a limestone villa set in large grounds in the leafy suburb of Mossley Hill, in 1884. The shipping business was so good he and his contemporaries could splash out on bigger homes and fill them with fine art. And how well they bought, thanks to canny dealers connected to the London art market such as Thomas Agnew.
No dodgy 'old' master from Italy, the oil still wet, but bona fide works by contemporary artists you could trust. Paintings by Holman Hunt, Alma Tadema, Burne-Jones and Millais, the A-list of Victorian art, plus a couple of good Turners make Sudley worth visiting.
There is Vanessa by Millais hanging in the hallway, for example, a Victorian lovely in 18th-century fancy dress. We learn that Holt paid £1,575 for her in 1885. That must have equalled the annual wage of 50 Marys, leaving enough spare for the haughtiest butler.
You are reminded in the hallway that while Liverpool's rich got richer, 'the poor lived in terrible conditions with bad housing, overcrowding and little sanitation'.
So three cheers for Holt, a model Victorian philanthropist. We first encounter the proud owner in his library, lined with shipping registers, family portraits and a big ship's model as a centrepiece. Holt introduces us to his home and reveals the pleasure of owning such art.
We meet Holt again in the dining room elegantly attired in evening dress, a glass of brandy in hand. If he was a capitalist with a heart, his daughter was even more so. Emma continued to live at Sudley energetically doing good until her death in the 1940s.
We meet her in what was the morning room, which she turned into an office. In 1909 she was elected to the council of Liverpool University, which the Holts helped found, a remarkable achievement for a woman in the Edwardian age.
While the audiovisual interpretation can be intrusive, and the characters do go on a bit, the written interpretation is concise and kept off the walls.
Instead of labels downstairs, captions are presented on hand-held leaflets that have been attractively designed. Matching picture to captions can be tricky when they are not illustrated. But the descriptive titles the Victorians loved come to the rescue. Holman Hunt's The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, hanging in the dining room, is unmistakably Pre-Raphaelite, intense colours and painstaking details.
There was always a grand staircase in Sudely, now there is a flashy lift taking up a whole room. So proud of their purchase, NML has decided to spotlight the steel-and-glass lift. It seems rather over-engineered for its modest task: taking visitors to the first floor only, with the rest of the house locked off.
NML is careful to say that Sudely is not a recreation of a Victorian home, rather an evocation with period wallpaper and furniture, only some of which is original to the house. A corner of the drawing room is arranged in full-on Victoriana, based on an archive photograph. Another nice touch is a chaise longue in the opposite corner for visitors to recline while listening to Mary on the video nearby.
Some might find Sudley's mix of period piece downstairs and conventional museum upstairs neither fish nor fowl. It is a tricky combination to get right, but worth the attempt. If the museum half was beefed up it would help. The Victorian bedrooms upstairs are long gone, replaced by a new toy zone which turns out to be a rather sparse display of dolls' houses.
A second room is devoted to childhood, bringing together contemporary playthings and cased objects which once belonged to middle-class children like the Holts. A Noah's ark of 1860 was one of the few toys permitted on a Sunday because it was suitably Biblical.
The 'costume parade' next door proves a bit of an anticlimax. There are a dozen dresses in a row giving little sense of the women who wore them. They belonged to the Hollands, another shipping family. The Holland girls were enthusiastic members of the Wellington Club, the place to be seen if you were a merchant princess looking for a prince and vice versa.
Visitors learn that the WAGs of the 1890s were able to buy the latest frocks from Paris for the next fashionable ball. But their dresses are shown with conventional costume labels describing fabric and style. Here a video could have been used to real advantage to convey a party in full swing.
A room for temporary exhibitions completes upstairs. The rest forms a 'learning suite' behind locked doors when I visited on a Saturday.
With a fine view of the Mersey through the trees in the distance, the house is a perfect setting for a temporary exhibition - first shown at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight - titled Merchant Palaces. Hello! style, we are able to gawp at the homes of Liverpool's Victorian nouveaux riches thanks to the camera of Bedford Lemere whose archive is part of English Heritage's collection.
Take the ship owner, William Imrie's house, the last word in conspicuous consumption. His music room was the size of concert hall, with a harp, piano, huge fireplace, and Dante's Dream by Rossetti hanging on William Morris wallpaper. Sudely House seems a humble abode compared with such extravagance.
There is a saying that museums need three Cs: chairs, something for children and character. Sudley has the first two. More swash and buckle and it will be well on the way to the third.
Caroline Worthington is the curator of art at York Museums Trust
Project data:
Cost: £1.1m
Main funders: DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund, Friends of NML, Rex Makin
Curators: Robin Emmerson, Alex Kidson, Pauline Rushton
Exhibition design: in-house
Building renovation: in-house
Like a TV adaptation, there are photographs of its owner, George Holt, who made his money in shipping, his high-minded daughter Emma, and Mary their maid, shown in oval frames with the house in the background.
Strictly speaking, they are images of actors playing master, mistress and maidservant, which you meet holding forth on video screens in the corner of the downstairs rooms. The style of acting is classic costume drama: as stiff at times as Mary's pinafore and George's high collar.
It's a nice idea, though, and you can't blame the actors for a script long on historical context and short on human drama. Mary tells us she's 'forever dusting' the Holts' many objets d'art, but does not dish out any below-stairs gossip.
George Holt bought Sudley House, a limestone villa set in large grounds in the leafy suburb of Mossley Hill, in 1884. The shipping business was so good he and his contemporaries could splash out on bigger homes and fill them with fine art. And how well they bought, thanks to canny dealers connected to the London art market such as Thomas Agnew.
No dodgy 'old' master from Italy, the oil still wet, but bona fide works by contemporary artists you could trust. Paintings by Holman Hunt, Alma Tadema, Burne-Jones and Millais, the A-list of Victorian art, plus a couple of good Turners make Sudley worth visiting.
There is Vanessa by Millais hanging in the hallway, for example, a Victorian lovely in 18th-century fancy dress. We learn that Holt paid £1,575 for her in 1885. That must have equalled the annual wage of 50 Marys, leaving enough spare for the haughtiest butler.
You are reminded in the hallway that while Liverpool's rich got richer, 'the poor lived in terrible conditions with bad housing, overcrowding and little sanitation'.
So three cheers for Holt, a model Victorian philanthropist. We first encounter the proud owner in his library, lined with shipping registers, family portraits and a big ship's model as a centrepiece. Holt introduces us to his home and reveals the pleasure of owning such art.
We meet Holt again in the dining room elegantly attired in evening dress, a glass of brandy in hand. If he was a capitalist with a heart, his daughter was even more so. Emma continued to live at Sudley energetically doing good until her death in the 1940s.
We meet her in what was the morning room, which she turned into an office. In 1909 she was elected to the council of Liverpool University, which the Holts helped found, a remarkable achievement for a woman in the Edwardian age.
While the audiovisual interpretation can be intrusive, and the characters do go on a bit, the written interpretation is concise and kept off the walls.
Instead of labels downstairs, captions are presented on hand-held leaflets that have been attractively designed. Matching picture to captions can be tricky when they are not illustrated. But the descriptive titles the Victorians loved come to the rescue. Holman Hunt's The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple, hanging in the dining room, is unmistakably Pre-Raphaelite, intense colours and painstaking details.
There was always a grand staircase in Sudely, now there is a flashy lift taking up a whole room. So proud of their purchase, NML has decided to spotlight the steel-and-glass lift. It seems rather over-engineered for its modest task: taking visitors to the first floor only, with the rest of the house locked off.
NML is careful to say that Sudely is not a recreation of a Victorian home, rather an evocation with period wallpaper and furniture, only some of which is original to the house. A corner of the drawing room is arranged in full-on Victoriana, based on an archive photograph. Another nice touch is a chaise longue in the opposite corner for visitors to recline while listening to Mary on the video nearby.
Some might find Sudley's mix of period piece downstairs and conventional museum upstairs neither fish nor fowl. It is a tricky combination to get right, but worth the attempt. If the museum half was beefed up it would help. The Victorian bedrooms upstairs are long gone, replaced by a new toy zone which turns out to be a rather sparse display of dolls' houses.
A second room is devoted to childhood, bringing together contemporary playthings and cased objects which once belonged to middle-class children like the Holts. A Noah's ark of 1860 was one of the few toys permitted on a Sunday because it was suitably Biblical.
The 'costume parade' next door proves a bit of an anticlimax. There are a dozen dresses in a row giving little sense of the women who wore them. They belonged to the Hollands, another shipping family. The Holland girls were enthusiastic members of the Wellington Club, the place to be seen if you were a merchant princess looking for a prince and vice versa.
Visitors learn that the WAGs of the 1890s were able to buy the latest frocks from Paris for the next fashionable ball. But their dresses are shown with conventional costume labels describing fabric and style. Here a video could have been used to real advantage to convey a party in full swing.
A room for temporary exhibitions completes upstairs. The rest forms a 'learning suite' behind locked doors when I visited on a Saturday.
With a fine view of the Mersey through the trees in the distance, the house is a perfect setting for a temporary exhibition - first shown at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight - titled Merchant Palaces. Hello! style, we are able to gawp at the homes of Liverpool's Victorian nouveaux riches thanks to the camera of Bedford Lemere whose archive is part of English Heritage's collection.
Take the ship owner, William Imrie's house, the last word in conspicuous consumption. His music room was the size of concert hall, with a harp, piano, huge fireplace, and Dante's Dream by Rossetti hanging on William Morris wallpaper. Sudely House seems a humble abode compared with such extravagance.
There is a saying that museums need three Cs: chairs, something for children and character. Sudley has the first two. More swash and buckle and it will be well on the way to the third.
Caroline Worthington is the curator of art at York Museums Trust
Project data:
Cost: £1.1m
Main funders: DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund, Friends of NML, Rex Makin
Curators: Robin Emmerson, Alex Kidson, Pauline Rushton
Exhibition design: in-house
Building renovation: in-house
