A drawing room was not just for drawing. During the late Georgian period and beyond, when socializing was made easier with more efficient transportation, great houses utilized their spaces in new and creative ways to enhance the party experience.
- Lansdowne House Rear Drawing Room – Philadelphia Museum of Art
And you thought your living room was just wasted space.
In Notorious Match, the Lansdowne Ball featured dancing and gaming. After arriving, Diana found herself at a game of faro that was set up in the famous Adam drawing room. Her luck at the game was indifferent at best. The last time she played she lost her mother’s pearls. To her disappointment, the banker refused to accept her voucher to play. So she staked something else that Lord Harcourt would be unable to resist. Irresponsible? Perhaps. Did she do it to provoke Griffin? For once, no.
Unknown to anyone, she was desperate to extinguish a little girl’s anguish, enough to pledge something very dear.
Diana unclasped the heirloom about her neck and tossed them on the table toward Harcourt. “For my mother’s pearls.”
Harcourt’s eyes fastened on the jewels. “Those are the Northam emeralds, are they not? You must be very certain of your luck to stake them.” He lifted the necklace to the light. “They’re worth ten times your mama’s baubles.”
“A sentimental whim,” she responded. “Indulge me, my lord.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Diana saw Griffin fold his arms. She suspected he was trying very hard to look unconcerned. Serves him right for playing governess. Griffin knew she did not like any hand on her bridle—whether her uncle’s or Vivien’s. But least of all his.
“Be advised, my lady, that I shall not be lenient,” Harcourt warned. “Not even your lord uncle will be able to redeem these from me.”
The emeralds were so fine they made the diamond setting holding them look insipid. They were the dowry of some long ago heiress who brought them to Northam when she married its earl, one of many sets of jewels Diana had in her strongbox at herLondontown house. Harcourt laid them beside bank notes, property titles and a variety of coins wagered by other players. Seeing them in that light gave Diana pause.
They, like anything else belonging to Northam, were her responsibility.
“Deal the cards,” she commanded nevertheless, determined not to reveal her fear of losing them.
- Robert Adam ceiling
The drawing room used for faro and baccarat games that evening was the famous Back Drawing Room, designed by Robert Adam in about 1763 along with the original plan commissioned by the 3rd Earl of Bute. It is considered the most elaborately decorated of the entire suite of reception rooms in Lansdowne House before its mutilation in 1930. Its primary feature is a great bay that was originally designed to contain Lord Bute’s elaborate mechanical organ.
The ceiling is Adam’s design but he used artists with special gifts to enrich the design, such as the great Italian painters Cipriani and Zucchi, the latter the husband of the famous bluestocking painter, Angelica Kauffman. From the 1903 edition of Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, volume 31, we have a description of the room filled with an incredible array of treasures, all long since dispersed:
“…some lovely old Sevres, in yet another a very beautiful pair of rose-coloured marble vases mounted in ormolu of the finest workmanship, while around all in serene beauty hang the works of Reynolds, Romney, Van der Helst and others of the greatest.”
“crowns the series, coming as it does from the moment when England, fresh from her greatest conquests, seized for a moment also the artistic mastery of the world.”
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