About this record
This is an independent reference site about Gainsborough Old Hall, the English painting it has been used to illustrate, and the great houses of Britain and Ireland it sits among. It is written and maintained independently, and it points readers to the managing body for anything operational.
The kitchen range, photographed for the association's own papers. Pictures like this one are the reason the scanned set is worth indexing: they record fabric that no published description covers.
What is here
Three things.
- The building. Its plan, its fabric, its history and the people who used it.
- Two pages of art history. One on Georgian painting, one on the Pre-Raphaelites.
- An index of scanned papers. Produced by the association that supported the hall, which was formed in 1949; the scanned set runs from 2007 to 2016.
What is not here
No opening hours, no ticket prices, no events calendar. All three change, a static page cannot keep up with them, and the body that manages the building publishes them accurately. Reproducing them here would only create a second, slowly rotting copy.
No personal telephone numbers or e-mail addresses appear anywhere on the site. Enquiries about the building go to the body that manages it.
Sources and their limits
The account of the building follows the standard published descriptions and the surviving papers. Where a claim is contested or rests on local tradition and not on a document, the text says so, particularly around royal visits, which attract more confident assertion than the evidence supports.
The paintings reproduced here are out of copyright and are shown at plate size with their artist, date and, where it is certain, the collection holding them. An attribution or a collection that could not be established with confidence is left out; it is never guessed at.
How dates and attributions are handled
Two rules govern almost everything on the site. A date is given as the document gives it, and where two documents disagree the disagreement is stated, not resolved by preference. A painting's attribution follows the holding collection unless the object itself contradicts the catalogue, in which case the object wins and the conflict is recorded.
That second rule is not theoretical. One plate here is dated from the publication line engraved on the sheet, which reads July 1789, against a catalogue entry that says 1780. The engraved line is primary evidence and the catalogue entry is a later reading of it, so the print is dated 1789 and the catalogue's date is noted alongside it.
The scanned papers, and what they are not
The indexed documents are newsletters, event lists, lecture programmes and photographs produced by a volunteer society between 2007 and 2016. They are a record of what that society did, not a history of the building, and they were never written to be read as one. Prices, opening arrangements and the officers named in them were accurate when printed and are not current.
Personal contact details have been removed from the scans. Where an individual appears in a private rather than a public capacity, their photograph has been removed as well; the names remain, because a record with the names stripped out stops being a record.
Questions about this site
Is this the official site for the building?
No. It is an independent reference site. Anything operational — opening times, admission, events, access — comes from the body that manages the building, and this site does not reproduce it.
Where do the photographs of the interior come from?
From the papers of the association that supported the hall, and from the material that was published at this address before. They are reproduced at plate size with what is known about each one; several are undated, and are labelled as undated instead of estimated.
Why is there art history on a site about a building?
Because the two subjects were published together at this address for years, and the painting pages carry their own readership. The English eighteenth century and the Pre-Raphaelite reaction against it are treated on their own pages rather than folded into the account of the hall.
How are disputed claims about the building treated?
They are marked as disputed. Royal visits attract the most confident assertion and the least documentary support, so where the evidence is a local tradition rather than an itinerary or a household account, the text says which it is.
Corrections
This is a record about a building, and records acquire errors. A wrong date, a wrong attribution or a wrong description of the fabric should be corrected, not defended.