ABSTRACT
Waddesdon Manor is a Victorian country house on a hill in Buckinghamshire, created by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild (1839–1898) for entertaining and as a setting for his art collection (Hall, 2012). A member of the Viennese branch of the Rothschild banking dynasty, Baron Ferdinand was born in Paris, raised in Frankfurt and Vienna and settled in England. The house he built is eclectic, erudite and ostentatious. It is full of things and patterns, trophies of old régimes, works of art with illustrious provenances and tabletop forests of jewelled mementoes. The exterior of the house is an hommage to French Renaissance châteaux and its interior is furnished with elements from historic buildings reconfigured and adapted for their new setting. The collection is particularly rich in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French works of art, British and Dutch paintings and German Renaissance princely treasures. Through inheritance, it has become a collection of collections, containing many items from other Rothschild houses and bearing witness to the homogeneity of the so-called goût Rothschild of which it is the only example that survives intact.
