It’s a little cheeky of Christopher Simon Sykes to have chosen a line from Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ as the title of a show of photographs of country houses, but A Richer Dust Concealed does happen to combine the three essential ingredients of his subject: riches, concealment from the outside world and dust.
Sykes has an unusual photographic pedigree. He made his reputation with informal pictures of rock aristocracy shot behind the scenes of the Rolling Stones’ 1975 Americas tour, but he grew up at Sledmere House among a different sort of aristocracy, whose houses he has documented in several books. The cream of those photographs has now been collected by Getty Images Gallery into an exhibition that steals behind the arras of ‘Heritage Britain’. Despite including some stunningly lit exteriors, it’s essentially an inside view of country house life — which is where the richer dust comes into play.
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