IN August 1778, Mrs Philip Lybbe Powys, née Caroline Girle (1738–1817), visited Ditchley Park and wrote in her journal that: ‘A bed-chamber with hangings, bed, and furniture of crimson and yellow velvet is shown as a great curiosity, but I think ugly. The pattern is all pagoda.’ Echoing the words of the housekeeper who had conducted the tour, she added: ‘It [the velvet] was a present of Admiral Lee, my Lord’s brother, who had taken it taken out of the loom in China, and the loom broke that no one else might have the same.’
Lybbe Powys’s critical comment on the design was hardly surprising in an age when the delicate patterns of neo-Classicism had superseded the bold colours and curvaceous lines of the Rococo. She was viewing a room furnished in about 1740 that was still—as we know from an inventory of 1772 —complete with wall hangings,
