Window cornice (detail), kauri pine with Australian cedar backing, Sydney, 1860s-70s. Used in the drawing room at Drummoyne House, Drummoyne NSW. 85(h) x 535(w) x 55cm(d). Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection, Sydney Living Museums. L2011/12.
- CSL&RC
Drummoyne House window cornice
The carved window cornice from Drummoyne House is a rare example of Australian decorative arts.
This massive cornice - over five metres in length – is believed to have been carved in the 1860s as a representation and celebration of the rich and rare plantings in the spacious gardens of ‘Drummoyne’, a now demolished house which gave its name to the Sydney suburb of Drummoyne.
The house, a large stone mansion set in an extensive estate with frontages to the Parramatta River opposite Hunters Hill, was built in the late 1850s as a home for wealthy merchant and trader, William Wright (1807-1889) and his wife Bethia, nee Roberton (c1817-1891). Wright had retired from business in 1856 and in October of that year bought his first parcel of land on the Parramatta River, 61 acres, which he named ‘Drummoyne’. He consolidated his estate with further land purchases in the 1860s.
Wright created an ornamental estate planted with numerous exotic trees and shrubs including a number collected or imported from the South Pacific, as well as an orchard, kitchen garden, an extensive croquet lawn and a pleasure garden with walks edged in stonework. He had a statue of Flora, the classical goddess associated with flowers and spring, placed in the centre of the lawn in front of the house. The house itself was also richly furnished and decorated, and hung with pictures, including a series of paintings of Scottish castles and lochs. The mantlepieces were reputedly of of Sienna marble, the window shutters of polished mahogany and the floors of inlaid timbers from New Zealand.
The property was subdivided and sold following the death of William and Bethia Wright, with the estate distributed among relatives. The cornice remained in the house until 1907 when it was presented to the Art Gallery of New South Wales as an ‘example of wood carving in Kauri pine, executed in Australia about 1862’. The house itself was demolished in 1971 but the statue of Flora was saved and eventually found a home at the City of Canada Bay Civic Centre. In 2010, the cornice was transferred to the Historic Houses Trust of NSW (now Sydney Living Museums).
Window cornice
There is no contemporary description of the building of Drummoyne House nor of the carving of the cornice. But a decade after the sale and subdivision of the estate in 1894 a Sydney journalist named Mary Salmon wrote about the house in a story for the Sydney Evening News. According to Salmon, the house was ‘built in part by a band of Italian masons who for some time lived in Hunters Hill’. She also wrote that the ‘magnificent specimens of wood carvings’ in the various rooms were ‘said to have been done by the Italian artist who carved the eagle in the British House of Commons’. Wright reportedly ‘engaged this gentleman for three years to do his interior decoration’. (Evening News 2 July 1904)
When Salmon wrote her article in 1904 the house was owned by Charles Robert Blain (1850-1915), a former auctioneer and stock and station agent, with extensive pastoral interests in Queensland and New South Wales. Blain sold Drummoyne in 1907 and put up ‘the whole of the valuable furniture and effects contained in the residence’ for auction, including this ‘unique and rare carving, in the form of a cornice’. The auction notice described it as a ‘truly wonderful example of the carver’s art’ and ‘a grand trophy of carving of rare skill and remarkable beauty’. (Sydney Morning Herald 26 October 1904)
The cornice failed to sell, or was perhaps withdrawn from sale. Instead Blain donated the carving to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It was transferred to the Historic Houses Trust of NSW (Sydney Living Museums) in 2010.
Carving detail
When C R Blain put the contents of Drummoyne House up for auction in October 1907 the cornice was described as a work that had taken two years to complete and pone in which the subjects included in the design had been drawn from the ‘foliage, flowers and fruit surrounding Drummoyne House.’ In Mary Salmon’s description of Drummoyne House for the Evening News in 1904 she wrote that the man who carved the cornice had gathered the flowers and fruit, including the ‘trumpet lily and the night cactus’ from the gardens around the house and then copied them exactly in carved wood. Salmon’s ‘trumpet lily’ is probably the datura, or angel’s trumpet, a popular planting in 19th century gardens in New South Wales and clearly represented in the carved cornice. The magnolia grandiflora is another typically Sydney planting identifiable in the carving.
Wright may have commissioned the cornice to reflect his garden interests but hand carvings of fruit and flowers had long been favourites of the carver’s art. The noted 18th century furniture designer Thomas Sheraton (1751-1806) wrote in his book The Cabinet Directory in 1803 that ‘figures, foliage and fruit are the three great subjects of carving; which in the finishing, require a strength or delicacy suited to the height or distance of these objects from the eye’. He went on to say something that seems particularly pertinent to Drummoyne House: ‘In the proper effect of carving, much depends on the due degree of boldness, or tenderness, answering to local circumstances.’
Cherubs
The Drummoyne cornice has undergone some changes since it was first completed. The delicacy of many of the carved elements in the design, with some small pieces strung on wires, means that many sections of the structure are fragile, making the cornice vulnerable to loss over time, especially when moved. One of the furniture conservators who worked on the object has estimated that perhaps one quarter to one third of the total carving is missing.
A more subtle change over time relates to the colouring. The finish on the timber has become duller with age. The conservators examined the finish closely and did some laboratory testing. Their findings suggest that the original finishes were linseed and some other natural oils and elements like mastic. There is no evidence that shellac was ever used on the cornice.
The most dramatic change, at some time in the life of the cornice in situ, was the addition of a large carved pair of cherubs as a focal point. They were almost certainly carved some years after the rest of the cornice and probably by a different hand. When placed into the cornice they sit uncomfortably and slightly off-centre, seemingly at odds with their surrounding foliage.
Carving detail
The Drummoyne cornice, with fruit, flowers and foliage carved in a naturalistic fashion against a rococo backdrop, is unusual in mid-19th century Australian houses, and was perhaps old-fashioned for its time. Naturalistic carvings in the English tradition are most closely associated with the 17th and 18th centuries and the era of Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721) and his unvarnished limewood carvings on walls, doors and chimney pieces. He is celebrated as the genius who transformed wood into pure art at the end of the 17th century.
The tradition of carving continued after Gibbons and was especially associated with window cornices. In Thomas Chippendale’s The Gentleman & Cabinet Maker Director (3rd edition, 1762), carved designs for window cornices and four-poster beds were clearly influenced by the rococo-style. By the early 19th century, Thomas Sheraton (The Cabinet Dictionary, 1803) demonstrated the importance of carving window cornices when he divided carvers into four specialties: architectural work, chair work, ship work and ‘one for internal decorations in furniture, consisting of pier glasses, windows and bed cornices…’ Gibbons’ naturalistic style was revived to some extent in early 19th century by the likes of Edward Wyatt (1757-1833) and W G Rogers (1792-1872), but the majority of carved window cornices remained highly stylised, taking on Neo-classical, Gothic-revival or Baroque styles and lacking any evidence of the naturalistic fruit, flowers and foliage employed at Drummoyne House. Although some 19th century cornices were designed to have a natural timber finish, a number were made to be gilded and others japanned.
Drummoyne House, 1860s
Early 1860s photographs of Drummoyne House show the garden still raw and in its infancy. When visiting English nurseryman John Gould Veitch travelled up the Parramatta River in November 1864 he called at Drummoyne House. He reported that the scenery along the river was pretty, but lacking in luxuriant vegetation and that gardening along the river was ‘a very difficult and expensive hobby’ because ‘the ground is so rocky and poor that scarcely anything will grow’. He reported that Mr Wright had ‘spent a fortune in blasting the rock and making a garden, and even now with only partial success’. (The Gardener’s Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette, 3 February 1866)
A little more than a year later a detailed description of the garden was published in the Horticultural magazine and gardeners’ calendar of New South Wales April 1867) explaining that the grounds were formed into compartments comprising a kitchen garden, orchard, vineyards and pleasure grounds. Wright had collected many plants – Dracaenas, Crotons and Anectochilus - during a visit to the South Sea Islands. He had planted many large trees including Jacaranda, Bunya Bunya, Cupressus, and Paulonia imperialis and a variety of conifers. He had a collection of azaleas and camellias, gardenias, weigelas, Magnolia fuscata and Liriodendron tulipifera, the tulip tree. Everything was ‘laid out in a scale of magnificence’ which would take years to being to completeness.
Verandah of Drummoyne House, c1859
No photographs of the window cornice in situ in the drawing room are known to survive, but a number of early views of the grounds at Drummoyne House as well as the house and its interiors were taken in the late 1850s and early 1860s by John Smith, professor of chemistry at the University of Sydney. Smith was a keen amateur photographer, a foundation member of the Philosophical Society of New South Wales and a regular participant in the Society’s photographic conversaziones.
This photograph, taken in the early days of the development of the estate, shows a group of four women and one gentleman on the verandah of the house, with several examples of fashionable garden furniture evident in the picture. The gentleman relaxes on a decorative cast iron garden bench of the kind manufactured by the Coalbrookdale Company in the English Midlands. The older woman, who is perhaps Mrs Bethia Wright, is perched on a fancy Chinese ceramic stool of pierced baluster shape. Other ornamental cast iron chairs are visible beyond the seated party.
Subdivision plan of Drummoyne Estate, 1894
William Wright died at Drummoyne in October 1889. His wife Bethia died at the house in June 1891 and the estate was subdivided and offered for sale by auction in March 1894. The house itself (highlighted in red) was left intact but without a water frontage and shorn of most of its expansive grounds. The subdivision plan shows other remnant structures from the heyday of the estate: a 'summer house' and 'stone jetty' near Wright's Point; a 'bath house' near the wharf; and a 'weatherboard cottage' near the water. This cottage had been the gardener’s house.
The house had a series of owners into the 20th century, before its conversion into flats in the 1940s and its final demolition in 1971. One owner was Charles Robert Blain, the man who donated the cornice to the Art Gallery in 1907. In the late 1920 the house was owned by the McDonald sisters, Isabella, Phyllis and Paulette, notable early Australian filmmakers. Together the McDonaghs made three silent films using Drummoyne House and its antique and elaborate furnishings to give their films great style at little expense.
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