DINING ROOM
The Dining Room is the principal room on the ground floor of the house. In this magnificent interior, royalty and presidents have been elegantly entertained.
If Lord Fairfax and his daughter Anne came back to Fairfax House today they would feel completely at home in this room. From his portrait above the fireplace their kinsman Rear Admiral Robert Fairfax (1666-1725) presides over the proceedings, and the maritime theme is continued by a number of other nautical paintings elsewhere in the room.
Set below Cortese's superb stucco ceiling, with the very appropriate symbolic figure of 'Abundance' at its centre, is a recreated meal based on the Fairfax family's housekeeping records and invoices for Georgian silver.
If musical entertainment is required it can be provided by the cleverly-designed spinet. For private dining, an exquisite two-tier Dumb Waiter waits in the wings, ready for use.
The handsome polychrome fireplace, one of only two original eighteenth-century fireplaces surviving in the house, has at its centre a carved tablet illustrating Aesop's fable of the Wolf and the Crane. The story tells of a wolf with a bone stuck in its throat who is eventually rescued from his plight by a crane. An eighteenth-century translation explains the moral behind the story:
In vain the torture'd Wolf to all Complain;
Till meeting with the Crane, in hopes of gain;
She gives him ease, when asking to be paid;
Fond fool (cry'd he) go thank me for thy head.
MORAL
Well meaning Love is often paid with Hate;
And a good nature's Lost on an Ingrate.
MORE ABOUT THE DINING ROOM
Dumb Waiter
An important two-tier waiter with revolving octagonal tiers.
Category: Furniture
Maritime Paintings
Shipping Offshore in a Stormy Sea by John Wilson Carmichael (1800-1868), dated 1845. Carmichael was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, living and working there painting shipping scenes until 1845, when he left to travel in Italy. From 1847 he lived in London.
Category: Paintings
Silver Epergne
The name for this type of centrepiece is an English eighteenth-century invention, and although the word epergne sounds French, it is not a term that has ever been used in this way in France.
Category: Silver work
Spinet
A shaped spinet, probably designed for a dining room, by Manchester maker John Kirsham, dated July 17th 1769.
Category: Furniture
Stuccowork - 'Abundance'
The design in the Dining Room ceiling, a female figure representing 'Abundance', is taken from the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa (c.1555-c.1622). The Iconologia, first published in Rome in 1593, was a collection of emblematic imagery which went through many editions and was a widely used and highly influential sourcebook among stuccoists and other artists throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Category: Architectural feature
Table Setting
Lord Fairfax spent large sums on silver, porcelain and napery for the dining room table and the housekeeping accounts show that he and his daughter, Anne, entertained lavishly.
Category: Silver work
Wine Glass
Category: Miscellaneous
