Tony Cragg at Castle Howard Stage set for Bridgerton and Brideshead, and now for a full-dress Tony Cragg show

The Liverpool-born sculptor's 50-year engagement with organic, layered, forms works in natural harmony with the Yorkshire treasure house and its Arcadian grounds

By Louis Jebb

Tony Cragg at Castle Howard is the first big contemporary art exhibition at Britain’s best-known, and most-filmed, country house. The show is made up of 10 exterior works by the celebrated Liverpool-born sculptor—set in Castle Howard's matchless gardens and grounds, with views across the Howardian Hills and towards the North York Moors—and 18 indoor pieces (along with 14 works on paper), spaced out across four separate spaces in the vaulting Baroque interiors of the most theatrically composed and positioned of Britain’s great 18th-century treasure palaces.

The Cragg show has been put on by Nicholas Howard—six times great grandson of Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, the creator, with the architects John Vanburgh and Nicholas Hawksmoor of this showplace for paintings, antiquities and sculpture—and his wife, Victoria Barnsley, the publishing pioneer (founder of Fourth Estate and former chief executive of HarperCollins) and sometime trustee of both the Tate Gallery and the National Gallery.

The Howards, stars of the 2022 documentary series Castle Howard: through the seasons, were already familiar with Tony Cragg’s work—in particular his large bronze piece Caldera (2008) in the Markatplatz in Salzburg, Austria—and arranged to work with him after a visit, with the curator Greville Worthington, to the sculptor's base in Wuppertal, north Germany. Cragg took them to see the 30-acre sculpture park he has created over the past three decades at the once-abandoned Villa Waldfrieden, outside Wuppertal, where he shows his own work and that of other artists. There, Nicholas Howard recounted at the show’s opening, “we found an historic house, a wonderful Deco building, … which Tony has lovingly restored. It was surrounded by glades, by lawns, by trees, by sculptures. I thought, ‘This is looking quite familiar.’ So it seemed … Tony Cragg's work should be the work that opened up our new era of contemporary work at Castle Howard.”

The Cragg exhibition—where a leading sculptor's work is on show both in a 300-year-old landscape and in classically proportioned rooms built for the display of paintings and sculpture—puts Castle Howard in company with some of the 21st-century country house pioneers in the field. These include Stoker and Amanda Cavendish, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire (noted collectors of contemporary art), at Chatsworth, in Derbyshire—the Howards and the Cavendishes intermarried in the mid 19th-century—the late Lord Rothschild at Waddesdon, in Buckinghamshire, and the Marquess of Cholmondeley at Houghton, in Norfolk.

This indoor-outdoor approach, at stately home scale, is one that allows for the vagaries of British summer weather; and lends itself to curation that makes connections between the interiors of historic houses and their gardens—to encourage both looking out from a house, and back towards it from the surrounding grounds. It also allows for the showing of a broad scale of work, from chamber pieces to large-scale compositions. Cragg has been shown at Waddesdon in 2012, for House of cards: an exhibition of contemporary sculpture in response to Chardin; at a 2013 selling show mounted by Sotheby’s at Chatsworth, and at Houghton in a full-dress one-man 2021 exhibition, supported by Thaddaeus Ropac, and curated by Jon Wood (who has curated Tony Cragg at Castle Howard jointly with Greville Worthington).

Delicacy of intervention

At Castle Howard it is striking how well Cragg, curators and clients have managed the scale, the frequency and placing of the exterior works, so that sightlines and visual connections are enhanced rather than challenged. In achieving this, the site and its history have necessarily been both an enticement—to show work in an exceptional mature setting—and a challenge: to beware of making overly dramatic gestures in an existing masterpiece of landscape art.

An organic, sensitive, approach is particularly important in the gardens and park at Castle Howard, which was spared the mid 18th-century intervention of Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton, those champions of unrestrained and all-consuming landscape redesigns. The result is that the consciously picturesque landscape envisioned by the third earl of Carlisle and his architects—where Hawksmoor’s astounding colonnaded mausoleum and Vanburgh’s elegant Temple of the Four Winds draw the eye over great sheets of water and along wooded grassy banks—has matured over 300 years into something that clearly evokes its ancestral inspiration: the French master Claude Lorrain’s hauntingly atmospheric landscapes based on Classical stories from Ovid or Vergil, or on the painterly magic of the gardens of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli.

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Layered works

Cragg, who made land art early in his career, had a break-out moment in 1988, when he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and won the Turner Prize in the same year. His classic works are built in layers, organised like geological strata of sedimentary rocks, using stacked layers of plywood before being sanded into final form and cast in bronze or fibreglass. It is a decidedly elemental approach, one rooted in nature: “All of the work and the things I make,” Cragg said at the show’s opening, “ is somehow... caught between what human beings make anyway, the stuff we build around us and use, and the nature that surrounds us”.

On the north side of the house, two tall, layered, pieces, placed on the sloping lawn below the entrance courtyard, offer a frame to the far-reaching view to the north across the Great Lake, the village of Coneysthorpe, and towards the moors beyond. Points of View (2018) is in gleaming stainless steel, and catches the eye of the visitor descending the steep slope from Ray Wood to the east of the house. The 6.5-metre tall Senders (2018) is in white fibreglass, a subtle nod to the original appearance of the 17th and 18th-century lead statues of gods and goddesses that are to be found around the gardens and grounds—pieces that were formerly painted white to resemble marble. (In 2021, English Heritage started restoring this white paint treatment to the lead statues by John Cheere at Wrest Park, in Bedfordshire.)

At the heart of the entrance courtyard stands Cragg's monumental new bronze piece Masks (2024), whose solidity, compressing, in Jon Wood's words, "two forms [head and body-like] into each other to create an image of inseparability", matches its four-square position and the stony strength of the entrance façade, populated with an array of classical statuary of urns, gods and goddesses, massed in niches and along the house's parapet.

On the south side of the house, a new painted aluminium piece, Industrial Nature (2024), is most artfully placed at the end of the parterre nearest to the house. Its position in relation to the statuary and to the massive mid 19th-century Atlas fountain is apparent when approaching the work from the house, but only on reaching and examining the piece does the viewer understand its role as a link to the next large exterior work: Runner (2015). This tall stacked piece in bronze stands to the east on ground that slopes down to the south lake and acts as a sighter in turn to the Mausoleum, a mile distant, beyond the lake, where members of the Howard family have been buried since 1744. This alignment reveals the role of Industrial Nature and Runner in marking and drawing out the historic landscape.

Close-up, Runner offers another moment of serendipity: it has openings in its intertwined, stacked, threads through which the visitor may chance on a most picturesque pair of coups d’oeil: in one direction towards the ineffable mausoleum, a slice of its base nicely obscured by the trees that hang over the lakeside; in another, back to the 300ft-long south front of the house, adorned with pilasters, the colour of its well-weathered stone enhanced by the sculpture’s rich dark bronze.

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