A view of Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham

Strawberry Hill, created in its present form by Horace Walpole (1717-1797), remains an iconic feat of architectural design. As this rediscovered painting shows, with its pinnacles, castellated walls, vaulted ceilings and turrets it is as unique as it is magical.


Walpole, son of the first British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, is known variously as a Whig politician, a writer, an art historian and an antiquarian. His political philosophy mirrored that of his direct contemporary Edmund Burke, a classical liberal, opposed to the slave trade and the oppression of the American colonies early in his career and saddened by the French Revolution in his twilight years. His commentary on art was equally thoughtful, in 1747 he wrote the catalogue of the paintings in his family seat Houghton Hall, which included his Sermon on Painting. This essay considered the merits of different schools and styles, and concluded with the charmingly subjective comment ‘in my opinion, all the qualities of a perfect painter, never met but in Raphael, Guido and Annibale Carraci’ (H. Walpole, Aedes Walpolianae: or A Description of the Collection of Pictures at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, London, 1747, p. XXXV).
In the same year as he penned these words, Walpole leased a property at Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, which he purchased two years later. Depicted here in its completed glory by Johann Müntz, Walpole entirely redesigned the residence in a proto-neogothic style that was to become known as Strawberry Hill Gothic. The designs took inspiration from a variety of sources, including Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral. This was the first house without any original medieval elements to be re-built in the Gothic style, and as such is arguably the starting point for the Gothic Revival that was to reach its peak in the 19th Century.


Müntz was introduced to Walpole by their mutual friend, the writer and illustrator Richard Bentley, whom Müntz had met whilst on Jersey in 1754. The Alsatian-Swiss artist was employed at Strawberry Hill for four years from 1755, until he fell out with Walpole and Bentley and moved away. In this time he produced a number of paintings of the iconic house. When Walpole’s famous collection was dispersed in 1842 a pair of views from the house were sold, described as ‘a pair of pleasing pictures, highly finished and very minute in labour’; these and a further view almost identical in conception to the present painting are now in the Yale Centre for British Art.