When it comes to snooping around a stately, you will be certain of a warm welcome at Burton Agnes Hall! Located around an hour east of York, Burton Agnes was built in 1603 for the Cunliffe-Lister family, and they have been in residence ever since. I caught up with fellow art lover Olivia Cunliffe-Lister recently to talk about the power of portraits, how she balances the demands of an historic house with raising five children, and what Yorkshire means to her. Read on to find out more…
Burton Agnes Hall, Yorkshire.
Where is home and what does home mean to you? Home is Burton Agnes Hall, an Elizabethan house in a village in the Yorkshire Wolds five miles from the east coast. I have lived here since 2005, when my husband Simon and I moved here from London after a year-long honeymoon travelling in Asia and South America. We hoped to start a family and take responsibility for looking after the house, which was built in 1598 by my husband’s many-greats-grandfather, and its gardens and the estate here. I grew up in London and lived there until my late-twenties; I still love and need the pace and diversity of city life as part of the mix.
For Simon and me, Burton Agnes has become the place through which all our energy and capacity is channelled to nurture this intriguing and characterful house. It’s the centre of our family’s world: at once a base for us and our five children (plus dog, cats, chickens and hamster) and a home shared with extended family, friends and all who visit the house and its gardens to find joy in our shared history.
What is your earliest memory of Yorkshire and of Burton Agnes? Having met Simon at university in Durham, I first visited Yorkshire in 1997. He grew up in Masham, North Yorkshire; we would spend weekends there and at Burton Agnes, which his mother Susan was looking after. When I first visited Burton Agnes Hall as a guest, as a scruffy student together with mates, we were welcomed in incongruous style. The house had a live in butler, cook and a chauffeur. There was a cleaning team who would turn your bed down each morning, with meals served formally in the dining room at set times, tea (Indian and Chinese) taken at 5 o’clock in drawing room with home made biscuits and cake. This was a far more formal era, which feels very distant now. Our early days at Burton Agnes overlapped with the latter days of those who’d lived and worked at the hall since the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s. We had a sense that this was the time to witness the remnants of a bygone way of life, and to excavate the memories - such treasures - of the people there to absorb the living history.
The Orchid Festival at Burton Agnes which is held every February/March.
It is clear that Burton Agnes is lived in and loved (and that you want to share that experience with other families). What activities and events have you added during your tenure? I’m so glad that this shared element comes across strongly - Burton Agnes Hall is definitely a home for us all to share and a repository of four centuries’ worth of craft, artistry and Yorkshire community. The event I’m most proud of is our Christmas opening. Each year we craft original schemes for every room in the house. We use flowers and foliage grown in the walled garden and foraged on the farmland, and rally skills found in our community to make by hand thousands of decorations in paper, card, wood, wire, wool and other natural and sustainable materials. It’s a challenge each year to imagine the house in a fresh Christmas incarnation, and hugely satisfying when it comes together and sparks joy for visitors.
I’m also full of enthusiasm for the Burton Agnes Jazz & Blues Festival, which we began in 2007 and is now in its 16th year. It’s a small, perfect weekend of sublime music and civilised camping with a hugely evocative backdrop and has a very devoted following. It gives us and many others a dose of sheer, unalloyed joy each July.
What are some of the challenges of running a 400 year old home? As custodian, my role as the house’s advocate gives a voice to a mostly silent and potentially vulnerable ecosystem. I am unapologetically a control freak with any works in the house, believing that minute details are crucial to the overall tone. To me, seemingly insignificant touches of ugliness or thoughtlessness, if allowed to accumulate over time, can spoil the resonant atmosphere of places such as ours. So I am constantly on guard against the erosion of an intangible loveliness that feels irreplaceable, precious and perhaps a touch magical. Sustaining this detailed focus while attending to the frequent, complex and often urgent needs of a geriatric home involves a dynamic balancing act.
The scope of projects, which takes into account many stakeholders’ priorities, is circumscribed by our cashflow, our ability to bring together expertise, and keenness not to disrupt or undermine visitors’ access. It is a joy to share the house and gardens by welcoming a supportive community of visitors. It’s also vital. It costs approximately a quarter of a million pounds a year to keep the place going: warm, clean, well-maintained and insured - before the costs associated with opening to visitors, which are roughly the same again. The need to be accessible and available yet careful and protective is held in balance, too.
Simon and I are part of a team that includes Peter, a cabinetmaker and all-round wood genius; Mark, an excellent conservation decorator; and Lynne, our wonderful housekeeper. Together we nurture the Hall to the extent of our capacity and I feel huge pride in all we achieve here. I am a link in a chain: our repair and restoration endeavours and general vigilance feel simultaneously like gestures of respect towards those who have gone before us and acts of kindness to those who will follow us.
Burton Agnes Jazz Festival (this years dates are 7-9th July 2023)
Landlocked in the pandemic, what were your escapes and diversions? In common with so many others, Simon and I felt hugely challenged trying to keep our work and family lives going and among other altered roles, our family temporarily became the gardening team. We planted the potager with sweet peas, beans and other spring vegetables and I became fixated on pulling weeds. Simon and I mixed whisky sours and margaritas in the evenings, parked our 60-year old caravan in the garden and spent weekends camping there.
There is an impressive art collection at Burton Agnes. What are some of your favourite works, and as the house evolves have you added any contemporary works to reflect your own family’s taste? My favourite painting here is the Plage de Siec (1960), a beach scene in oils, by French landscape and figure painter François Desnoyer. His style combined the structural qualities of Cubism with a Fauvist approach to colour, which I relish. Our predecessor here, Simon’s cousin Marcus Wickham-Boynton, was an adventurous and canny collector who delighted in mixing pieces from the Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Realist schools with the Old Masters already here. He brought together a broad set of 19th and 20th century French paintings by Corot, Courbet, Derain, Pissarro, Utrillo, Boudin, Matisse, Renoir, Gauguin and Manet.
The collection is not static and the tradition of collecting goes on. We have commissioned a cast glass sculpture by Colin Reid that has an impression of Mother Earth from the Elizabethan gatehouse’s stonework and a water sculpture by Giles Rayner in our priapic pond after a theft of 18th century lead statuary there. We bought a pair of prints by David Hockney, who painted at Burton Agnes when he lived nearby in Bridlington and mortifyingly was once chased off the snowdrops he was painting by a visitor. Now I’m lusting after the paintings of Sir Frank Bowling RA and love the joyful exuberance of Charlie French’s abstract works.
A selection of Impressionist works at Burton Agnes.
Do you have a favourite period in art and who are some of your favourite artists? Perhaps predictably, I adore the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism periods. I am thrilled by the collection of French art here: the colours, light and the element of surprise engendered by the juxtaposition of these magical pieces alongside the Elizabethan architecture, Old Masters and sometimes slightly dour family portraits. I also enjoy the work of the Bloomsbury artists, who I see as a breath of fresh air in a rather stuffy early 20th century creative scene. I love the writing of Virginia Woolf and the paintings of Duncan Grant. Several of his paintings hang here; the wild colours in his pointillist Sunset at St. Tropez (1922) are fabulous.
Do portraits appeal to you? Yes, hugely! I am fascinated by people: their motivations, machinations and choices - portraits capture all this. I adore Augustus John’s portraits, including the brilliant, spontaneous works of his children. Of his portraits here, I enjoy The Archer (1907); the sitter was his eldest son, David. The subject of an early portrait here attributed to the school of Lely is a very young child, Peregrine. The only son of our 16th century predecessor, Peregrine died at the age of five, so this one surviving likeness is hugely poignant. We have a charming Renoir portrait of a young boy and an exuberant portrait of a pastry chef by Andre Minaux. These are part of a collection of paintings Marcus bought when he restored the Long Gallery and had extra hanging space!
Who are some of the notable (painted) personalities that we can expect to meet when we visit? Alongside many portraits of my husband Simon’s ancestors (he can trace one ancestral strand back to his thirty-seven-times-great-grandparents, born in 840 and 850, which makes the numerous portraits of Boynton predecessors from the early 17th century and since seem modern!), there are portraits of Charles II and James II, a study of Oliver Cromwell by Robert Walker and a portrait of Willie Whitelaw, Simon’s grandfather. Film-lovers may enjoy Roger Montané’s study of Ingrid Bergman. I wonder if the plasterwork Elizabethan gentleman who is portrayed repeatedly in the huge Elizabethan screen is Sir Henry Griffith, the builder of the house. Eerily there is an early-Jacobean portrait by Marc Geerhardts (1620) of Anne Griffith, who was murdered and haunts the Hall; she was posthumously over-painted in black.
What do you think gives Yorkshire its unique identity and what are some of your favourite spots in East Yorkshire? Yorkshire is a huge region at the heart of the UK with massive geographical diversity and I wonder if there is anywhere that people have a stronger sense of regional identity. To generalise vastly, I feel that people from Yorkshire are straightforward, down to earth and very friendly. My neighbours in East Yorkshire champion their local dialect, which is as arresting as it is welcoming. I’m impressed by the tranquil and spacious beauty of the Yorkshire Wolds, as was David Hockney: just behind the Hall is the Woldgate country lane, where he often painted.
I love trundling through the stunning Moors scenery aboard a heritage steam locomotive on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. We took the train from Moscow to Beijing some years ago yet to me, this historic railway between Pickering and Grosmont is up there with the world’s best train experiences. York’s National Railway Museum is unmissable, too - the awe-inspiring Great Hall has the only high-speed Japanese bullet train outside of Japan and there’s a 7.25" miniature railway line in the South Yard. Still on a transportation theme, I’m looking forward to taking the Yorkshire Belle, Bridlington’s pleasure cruiser, from Bridlington to Bempton Cliff later this month to see puffins and gannets. Slightly further afield, Yorkshire Sculpture Park has incredible exhibitions and a phenomenal permanent collection across its 500-acre parkland near Wakefield. We would never miss the Masham Sheep Fair - a vibrant and eccentric celebration of all things ovine each September, and we love staying in the yurts near the Druids’ Temple at Swinton Park.
‘The Road to York from Sledmere’ - David Hockney.
You have five children (Islay (16), Joss (14), Otis (12), Inigo (10) and Sholto (7)). Which are their favourite places in the house and on the estate? They like the long corridors for games of hide and seek tig, and the disability access ramp between the back door and the Great Hall for wheeling down on or in the service trolley. They adore the maze and the woodland adventure playground, which we researched with them for a decade before building, and Sholto likes feeding the super-friendly carp in the pond. They look forward each summer to cadging a lift in the combine harvester collecting the wheat, following the tractor and trailer back to the grain store to romp in the grain pile.
How do you relax? With five children and a demanding work life, relaxation feels pretty elusive at the moment. It feels more realistic to notice and savour moments when there is relative calm, and to allow oneself some satisfaction when an effortful project bears fruit. Perhaps my time for self-indulgence will come if one of our children takes on our responsibilities; in the meantime I love cooking, having old friends to stay and the japes that ensue… and being in bed!
Olivia Cunliffe-Listerr
Nick Cox / Period Portraits June 2023.
Burton Agnes Hall, Burton Agnes, Driffield, East Yorkshire YO25 4NB