Waddesdon Manor Buckinghamshire + Pablo Bronstein + The Temple of Solomon

Because Your Love Is Better Than Life

There are two principal Biblical temples: Solomon’s in the past; Ezekiel’s to come. God provides descriptions of both in the Old Testament. For example, Ezekiel 40:24 to 27, “Then he led me to the south side and I saw the south gate. He measured its jambs and its portico, and they had the same measurements as the others. The gateway and its portico had narrow openings all around, like the openings of the others. It was 50 cubits long and 25 cubits wide. Seven steps led up to it, with its portico opposite them; it had palm tree decorations on the faces of the projecting walls on each side. The inner court also had a gate facing south, and he measured from this gate to the outer gate on the south side; it was 100 cubits.”

King David was a man of war; his son, a man of peace, would be chosen to build the Temple. II Samuel 7:5 to 12, “Go and tell my servant David, ‘This is what the Lord says: You are not the one to build me a house to dwell in. When your days are over and you go to be with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring to succeed you, one of your own sons, and I will establish his kingdom. He is the one who will build a house for Me, and I will establish his throne forever.’” I Kings 6:1 states that in the month of Zif in the 480th year after the Israelites came out of Egypt, Solomon began to build the Temple. It was the fourth year of his reign, which likely spanned from around 1,015 to 975 BC.

The Bible provides dimensions and details and decorations. I Chronicles 28:11, “Then David gave his son Solomon the plans for the portico of the temple, its buildings, its storerooms, its upper parts, its inner rooms and the place of atonement.” The foundations were 60 cubits by 20 cubits (II Chronicles 3:1). The interior was covered with pure gold according to I Kings 6:21, and pots, shovels and sprinkling bowls were of burnished bronze (I Kings 7:40). Upon completion of the Temple, Solomon summoned the leaders of Israel to bring the Ark of the Covenant from Zion, the City of David, to its final resting place in the Temple on Mount Moriah.

Artist Pablo Bronstein (who was born in Argentina and lives in London) believes, “The reconstruction of ancient and Biblical structures says more about the societies that reconstructed them than it does about any long gone originals. My reconstructions of the Temple explore idealising tendencies in architecture across porous boundaries of styles relevant during a defining era of archaeology – roughly the 18th to 20th centuries. That’s precisely the time when nationalisms sought to tie themselves to particular architectural traditions and during which nascent professional archaeology informed our understanding of the past. I’ve tried to inhabit the ambitious contestants entering the Prix de Rome as they set about reconstructing the Temple entirely in their own image.” And where better to host such an exhibition rooted in the Tanakh than that most Jewish of English country houses, Waddesdon Manor?

Mark Girouard was a prominent country house architectural historian of the 20th century. His grandfather Henry Beresford, 6th Marquess of Waterford, owned one of the top estates in Ireland: Curraghmore. He records in Historic Houses of Britain (1979), “Baron Ferdinand, like other Rothschilds of the later generations, had largely detached himself from the Rothschild banks, except as places through which to invest his money. He was able to devote himself to sport, politics, philanthropy and pleasure. Like all Rothschilds he entertained lavishly. Waddesdon was meant for use, not just as a repository for treasures. Edward VII, who had a fondness for Rothschilds, came there frequently, and once fell down the staircase. Victoria was there for the day in 1890; her visit was something of a triumph for she was much less partial to Rothschilds than her son, and Waddesdon was the only Rothschild house she ever visited.”

He continues, “It is easy to envisage house parties at Waddesdon. It is harder to think of children playing there, or in general, to envisage a Rothschild nursery. Indeed there never was a nursery at Waddesdon. When Baron Ferdinand died childless in 1898 (he caught a chill on one of his regular visits to the grave of his wife), he left Waddesdon to his sister Alice, who never married. When she died in 1922 she left it to a French Rothschild, her great nephew James. James de Rothschild was married but had no children. It was he, on his death in 1957, who left the house, all its contents and an endowment to the National Trust – a legacy of almost unequalled munificence.”

Soon after they inherited the house, James de Rothschild and his wife Dorothy installed an electric servants’ bell system to replace the traditional manual bells. The indicator panel includes connections to Baron’s Room, Blue Dressing Room, East Hall, Low White Room, Portico Bathroom, Smoking Room, State Entrance, Tower Drawing Room, Turret Bedroom and many more. They also installed hot and cold water plumbing. The tradition of entertaining continues at Waddesdon with the Manor Restaurant on the ground floor of the Bachelors’ Wing. The wine list includes Waddesdon Rothschild Collection Viognier 2024 with hints of peach and apricot, sourced from the hills of Languedoc in the south of France.

In 1870, Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild had bought 2,500 hectares near Aylesbury (favoured family territory) from George Spencer-Churchill, 6th Duke of Marlborough, to build a country house designed by a French architect (the gloriously named Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur) filled with French furnishings (coordinated by interior design company Decour) and surrounded by gardens planned with the assistance of a French landscape designer (Elie Lainé). More Loire Valley than Aylesbury Vale. His wife had died in childbirth after a year and a half of wedded bliss: they had met at their mutual relatives’ London residence of Gunnersbury Park House. Cartoonist Osbert Lancaster even included Le Style Rothschild in Homes Sweet Homes (1939), referring to “heavy golden cornices” and “damask hung walls” and “fringed and tasselled curtains of Genoese velvet”. The tradition of supporting the arts continues with the Rothschild Foundation. CEO Roger White states, “There are still remarkable philanthropic initiatives happening at Waddesdon.”

Senior Curator Janet Carey introduces The Temple of Solomon and Its Contents exhibition: “In this room are Pablo’s two different versions of the Temple of Solomon. In order to create them he has imagined himself in the personae of prize seeking students of 19th century architecture. We have extraordinarily detailed instructions from God written down in the Bible but of course nobody actually knows what the Temple looked like. So what Pablo has done is read those instructions and make these incredible works of art conjured up from the hands of imagined individuals.” Divine design.

Erudite quotations range from the portico of Palais Garnier in Paris to William Blake’s painting The Great Architect. Styles include Adamesque, Indo Egyptian and Persian. “Pablo uses the famous spiralling Solomonic columns,” Janet notes. Or is he inspired by the spiralling copper pipes of Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur’s architecture? “His Veil of the Temple is quite provocative: here it is interpreted as a very froufrou Waddesdon style curtain with glorious red tassels. The Veil separated the world from the Divine and was torn in two at the moment Christ died.” And what about the Greek key tile pattern around the courtyard? A nod to Sir William Chambers, perhaps? She smiles, “The pattern comes from the band around those ubiquitous New York takeaway coffee cups! It’s this blend of high and low references that is really fun.”

There are also acrylic on paper paintings of specific Biblical objects. Janet states, “You can read in the Bible how God gives very precise instructions to Moses about how the candelabra should be designed and Pablo follows to incredible detail how many branches and so on should be on this. It is an oil lamp, not a candle lamp, so God specifies that each of the cups for the oil at the tops of the seven branches must be almond shaped. Pablo interprets that very literally as a cast for an almond. He’s really obeyed the Divine instructions in the Bible while deriving some detailing from the objets d’art of Waddesdon.”

“In the space adjacent is this extraordinary selection of drawings and books from Waddesdon’s permanent collection,” she adds. “They’re mostly 18th century French works of art which Pablo chose himself from about 1,000 design and architectural works. The moment you see those works you will understand why he has chosen them. Each one has some very clear visual relationship with Pablo’s own work. Some of the drawings have never been displayed before.”

Another attraction feature of the exhibition space is a model of the Supreme Court in Jerusalem made by James Burke. Completed in 1992, the building was designed by Ada Karmi-Melamede and her brother Ram Karmi. The Supreme Court was proposed and funded by the Yad Hanadiv Foundation established by Dorothy de Rothschild in 1960 and chaired by Jacob 4th Lord Rothschild until his death in 2024. In the gallery on the floor above, 18th century Jewish Italian embroidered hangings from the Rothschild Collection depicting the Temple of Solomon and the Second Temple (built after the First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 BC) are on display. Waddesdon Manor continues to evolve and expand.