An English classic

The recent auction of John Evetts’s Wormington Grange collection is the perfect excuse to revisit the unostentatiously beautiful furniture of Georgian great Gillows, says Rufus Bird

- Rufus Bird

UNTIL only a few weeks ago, passing through the crisply detailed elegant portico on the south-east front of Wormington Grange in Gloucestershire, one entered a series of beautifully arranged and meticulously revived rooms. The house and its collection has been the life work of John Evetts, furnishing expert for The Landmark Trust.

After taking on the house from his parents in the 1980s, he began with an almost blank canvas, with a handful of objects from his great-grandparents’ tenure—notably, a spectacular painting of a Dorset coastal landscape by Algernon Newton (1880–1968), two chandeliers and a large giltwood mirror.

To these prominent pieces, Mr Evetts added elegant Regency mahogany and rosewood furniture of the best kind, selected for its proportion, design, colour, usefulness and, above all, appropriateness. Perhaps unsurprisingly for such an exacting—and experienced—collector and owner of a Regency country house, he was drawn to English furniture of the late 18th and early 19th centuries; in particular, pieces by Gillows of Lancaster.

The collection, sold recently by Duke’s Auctioneers (Art Market, June 2), was a