In 1675 Lady Bedingfield wrote to Robert Paston, first Earl of Yarmouth. Never, she exclaimed, had she seen anything so fine as the latter’s mansion, Oxnead Hall. It was ‘a terrestriall paradise’, the ‘gardens so sweet — so full of flowers’, the house so clean. ‘Nor,’ she concluded, ‘did I ever in my life find anything in poetry or painting half so fine.’ Almost all this splendour vanished long ago. But its essence survives, compressed into a single painting, ‘The Paston Treasure’, currently the centrepiece of an exhibition at Norwich Castle Museum.
It is a cornucopia of baroque bric-à-brac, crammed with a jumbled abundance in which curvilinear tropical shells, ornate cups, jewellery and a globe are interspersed with musical instruments, flowers, fruit, a lobster, living bird and monkey. Behind and above are an extinguished candle and various timepieces that suggest this was a memento mori — a reminder of passing time and approaching death. But, as the exhibition makes clear, this is also a careful catalogue of real possessions — the treasure of the title.
Indeed, the artist has done this so meticulously that the result looks like a 19th-century photographic collage in which each item is depicted with precision, but has just been stuck down next to its neighbour so they don’t seem to belong in the same space. The young girl who pops up in the middle of this confusion of collectables is beautifully individualised — apparently a true portrait — but looks as flat as a shop-sign.
In the accompanying book it is suggested that the artist, who was probably Flemish, worked in a temporary studio at Oxnead, while the patron brought out one valued oddment after another for him to depict. Personally, I also suspect the use of the fashionable 17th-century gadget, a camera obscura (the probable date, 1663, is exactly contemporary with Vermeer).
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