Plate 38, the Great Dining Room at Houghton Hall; The Designs of Inigo Jones and others

Object Type
This print by Paul Fourdrinier combines two printmaking techniques - etching and engraving. Both involved creating a pattern of grooves to hold ink in a metal printing plate. The image on the printing plate was the reverse of the final image. The etched lines were made using acid, while the engraved lines were scored by means of a sharp tool called a burin. The grooves were then filled with ink and the image was transferred onto a blank sheet of paper.

Place
Houghton Hall is a magnificent country house in Norfolk. It was built by Sir Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister, in the 1720s and early 1730s.

Subject Depicted
Another name for the Venetian window is the 'Serlian motif'. This derives from the fact that it was first illustrated by the Italian architect Sebastiano Serlio in his book Architettura of 1537. The spiral scrolls at the top of the columns are called volutes. They are characteristic of the Ionic order, one of the four orders (or sets of rules) of classical architecture.

William Kent has used a variety of decorative details elsewhere in the design, including female masks, hanging strings of fruits and flowers called festoons, scrolling leaves and formalised flower motifs called rosettes. The overmantel (the part of the chimney-piece above the mantelpiece) is topped with a broken pediment. This is a triangular feature that does not meet at the top.

Use
Isaac Ware's book on Houghton Hall was published only a few years after the house was finished. It was a forerunner of the magazines available today, featuring the homes of the rich and famous.