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At the time of his death last year (aged only 66), he had completed the text and chosen and arranged most of the illustrations. Only the acknowledgments were lacking (and most of us have Burke’s on our shelves to supply the want), so Yale has been admirably faithful to the author’s intentions. This book will ensure that John’s specialist knowledge and love of the Georgian interior will live on.
The strength of his approach was that he not just wrote, like other architectural historians, but did. He had an unrivalled practical knowledge. He was an éminence grise of architectural restoration in England. This was manifested through his work with the National Trust, the old Historic Buildings Council and Victoria & Albert Museum, as well as his more formal role as consultant to the Foreign Office on the interiors of historic British embassies, and informal adviser to the private owners of many great houses, notably Houghton in Norfolk where he helped the present Lord Cholmondley rearrange the rooms on historic lines. Houghton is one of the eight detailed case studies of pre-eminent houses which form the core of the book.
His practical knowledge and insight are manifested in his writing on upholstery, beds, curtains, wall hangings, soft furniture and case covers. He knew about such things not just from documentary research, but from having been closely involved in their restoration or replication; he had seen silk damask being woven on 18th-century Jacquard looms, or passementerie made by traditional painstaking methods in garret workshops, and this gave fresh and unusual insight to his writings on these subjects.
Cornforth’s architectural interests were in some ways old-fashioned and were akin to the earlier 20th-century Country Life approach, as manifested in the pre-war articles of Lawrence Weaver and Margaret Jourdain. His field was the Caroline and Georgian and he did not share the enthusiasm of his contemporaries, let alone younger historians, for the Victorian, Arts and Crafts or Modern Movement, all of which he disliked. He compensated, though, for turning the clock back and narrowing his field by the depth of research and practical knowledge he was able to bring to bear in his chosen subject. This extravagantly illustrated book devoted to the interiors of the greatest houses in the British dominions of George I and George II will long remain the definitive word on the subject.
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