New BBC show on the Rococo brings out my inner Disney Princess

TV recommendation:  Rococo: Travel, Pleasure, Madness. Tuesdays, 9pm, BBC4

July, 1978.  A 14-year-old me leaves the USA for the first time to spend a summer with Italian friends.  I'm wandering through the Borromeo palace on Isola Bella; a fairy tale concoction that takes in most of this little island on Lake Maggiore.

I wander through one massive room after another dripping with gold leaf, sensuous paintings and stucco work that looks like it's been piped out of a baker's icing bag. Everything is drenched with light from the towering windows looking over sun-speckled water. Then I plunge into the stark contrast of a narrow, dark stair and come out into an even stranger place.  A lakeside grotto, open to the air and water, where sea gods and nymphs emerge from walls that are a riot of sea shells.  Mouth slack with amazement, I continue on to the gardens, which carry on the shellwork and cavorting deity theme.  But now it's all going up terraces, studded with obelisks. There are unicorns and white peacocks. 

I thought it was the most wonderful place ever.  As if you gave a teenaged Disney princess, unfettered by ideas of good taste or restraint, unlimited cash to build her dream home.  Of course I loved it.  I was 14.

The memories came flooding back this week as I watched the first episode of Waldemar Januszczak's BBC4 series on the Rococo.  It's a style that never got much traction in England, given this country's suspicion of excessive emotion and Roman Catholicism.  My own tastes in design, having matured and been shaped by 20 years amongst the English, now lean towards a cleaner Georgian line.  But I still like a bit of wacky over-the-top-ness in my life.  I couldn't live with the Rococo every day, but it's a lovely, occasional bit of spice.

Where to get that Rococo hit it in England?  In museums, sure.  But where to find it in situ?  It's not so easy, but I do have a few recommendations for English Rococo days out.  I wonder if I'll see any of them in the remaining two episodes…

Claydon House, Buckinghamshire - A smaller National Trust property that's tucked away down long country lanes, it's probably best known for its associations with Florence Nightingale.  But the real reason you should go here is because it's the masterpiece of Luke Lightfoot, reckoned to be the finest carver of the English Rococo.  Several rooms drip with his work but head upstairs for the jaw-dropping stuff in the Chinese room, encrusted with pagodas, fretwork, Oriental curlicues and what the Europeans imagined to be Chinese people.  It's completely ridiculous, so busy it makes your head hurt, but absolutely wonderful.

Waddesdon Manor - Just up the road, and also National Trust, making for the perfect Rococo double bill of a day.  This is a cheat, as it's not truly English Rococo, but continental.  Built from interiors and furniture collected and re-assembled in the 19th century by the Rothschilds, it's a lavish French Chateau magicked on to a Buckinghamshire hilltop.  The whole place is full of wonders but to pick one characteristically Rococo glory I'd head to the remarkable aviary in the gardens, where exotic birds and plants frolic inside even more exotic pagodas and trellises.

Ragley Hall - A bit further north in Warwickshire, you'd never guess the austere neo-classical facade of
the seat of the marquesses of Hertford hides a riot of Rococo plasterwork indoors.  The great hall is the thing to see here.  Pink and white, full of classical allegory, it's as close to continental Rococo as I've seen in England.  The remarkable murals in the staircase hall, completed in the early 1980s, are entirely in keeping with the style despite their modern production.  There's a nice bit of Rococo irony here, as well.  The best English museum at which to see this style is the Wallace Collection, assembled by the illegitimate son of the 4th marquess.  I wonder if the glories of the family seat he could never inherit sparked his love of the period?  His father ended up leaving him every bit of the family fortune that didn't go with the title, which Richard Wallace then used to build up his own collection.  I've already spotted it several times in Januszczak's first episode and suspect we'll be seeing more.

Painshill Gardens - Not to be confused with Painswick in the Cotswolds, which bills itself as a Rococo garden but I, being pedantic, would classify as Gothick.  Painswick doesn't have a grotto and, harkening back to that first experience on Isola Bella, I think that's a must for a Rococo garden.  Painshill in Surrey has what's thought to be the best garden grotto in England.  (Though the one at Stourhead gives it a run for its money.)  The garden has lots of other fantastical follies … a must for a landscapes of this style … and is nearing the end of a long restoration that's bringing it back from dereliction.

Weather Januszczak agrees with me, we shall see.  I will confess to having great difficulty spotting the line where the Baroque ends and the Rococo begins.  My interest in doing so is one of the reasons I'm lapping up this series.  If he visits any of the above, I'll have to reward myself for my accuracy.

Maybe by buying one of those sets of porcelain monkeys in 18th century costume playing instruments in a simian orchestra.  Very Rococo.  Very Disney princess.  But could I live with them?  We'll see...