After the disaster of the war with Prussia, the Emperor Napoleon III went into exile in 1870 in England, accompanied by his Spanish wife Eugénie and his son the Prince Impérial. They settled at Camden Place in Kent and when Napoleon died in 1873, his wife added a chapel (with memorial) to St Mary’s Roman Catholic church at Chislehurst, designed by Henry Clutton. In 1879 the Prince died fighting with the British army in the “Zulu War” and the following year Eugénie bought the Farnborough Hill estate in Hampshire. It was close to Aldershot, where the Prince had been stationed, and to Windsor, convenient for Eugénie’s friendship with Queen Victoria.
This book describes Farnborough Hill house and its contents. Built in 1860 for the publisher Thomas Longman, to the design of H.E. Kendall Junior, Farnborough Hill is a strikingly showy building of brick and half-timber,
with fancy gables and tourelles. Eugénie had it enlarged and the interiors remodelled in a French taste between 1880 and 1884. She also commissioned a church-mausoleum. The architect was the Paris-born Hippolyte Destailleur (1822-93), the scholar and collector, best known for Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire and for his Recueil d’estampes relatives à l’ornamentation des appartements au XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (most of which is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris).
The architectural historian Anthony Geraghty, a professor at the University of York, gives a detailed account of the house and of the remarkable collections it contained. Some of these items had been allocated to the Empress by the French state, and some had been bought from the Paris Salon by her and her husband. Collections formerly adorning the imperial residences at Marly, Saint Cloud and the Tuileries Palace included portraits by François Gérard, Henri-François Riesener, Franz Xaver Winterhalter (including the large painting, Empress Surrounded by her Ladies in Waiting), two huge copies of the side panels from Rubens’s Descent from the Cross, formerly in the chapel of the Tuileries but relocated to the transepts of the mausoleum, a series of Gobelins tapestries illustrating scenes from Don Quixote, now in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond and furniture which had belonged to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Among the sculptures was the celebrated group of the young Prince Impérial with his dog Nero, by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux.
Eugénie’s desire to have the house and its contents preserved after her death, which took place in 1920, was frustrated by the lack of endowment, and the family sold off most of the contents. Geraghty does his best to account for their present whereabouts: many are in French public collections. The generous illustrations record the rooms as they were and as they are, including many showing the objects formerly in them.
He also gives an authoritative analysis of the architecture of the church, which has a dome and an apse, detailing its French models. Eugénie wanted it to be staffed by a religious community, like a medieval chantry, and the Benedictines are still there. The crypt houses the tombs of herself, her husband and son. Attempts by the French government to get the bodies returned to France have been rebuffed by the monks. The church suffered a brutal reordering, with the original altars and pulpit being destroyed. However, the closure of St Joseph’s College at Mill Hill led to four of its altars being installed at Farnborough in 2008, notably the high altar by Leonardi of Rome, of marble with inlaid work. As this is shown in illustrations, it might have been mentioned in the book. Overall, the book is accurately proofread, which makes it surprising that the architect Mansart appears as Mansard.
Fortunately, the house was bought in 1927 by the Religious of Christian Education, an order of nuns, for use as a girls’ school, which survives. They have treated it well and made additions that include a chapel by Adrian Gilbert Scott. The book brings back to life a forgotten “palace” and its treasures.
• Anthony Geraghty, The Empress Eugénie in England: Art, Architecture, Collecting, the Burlington Press/Paul Holberton, 271pp, £40, published 23 September 2022
• Peter Howell was the chairman of the Victorian Society from 1987 to 1993. His latest book is The Triumphal Arch (Unicorn Publishing 2021)