Arts and Crafts Photograph Album of the Architect's Home, 'Weir's Barn'

Hartley Wintney: Unpublished, 1935. Family photo-album recording the Arts and Crafts Hampshire home and garden built for himself by the Scottish-born architect Robert Weir Schultz who lived there for 50 years. 116 photographs mounted in a commercially produced oblong photo album, 33x25cm, 'The Beaumont Album', Johnson London. Bound in deep reddish/black shiny cloth with silk ties through the spine. Bookseller's ticket of 'W E Baxter Lewes' on the front paste-down. The silver gelatin photographs are in a mixture of formats, early images 9x13cm with later snapshots a little smaller. 116 photographs appear through the album, a few loose, beginning with a portrait photograph of Schultz before the front door of the house now known as Weirs Barn, aged around 75, dating the album to the middle 1930s. The early pages of the album picture the arts and crafts garden at Hartley Wintney, a long semi-covered walk, statuary, before moving on to a sequence of images of the garden peopled by extended family including small children clustered around the hedges and borders of the Sunk Garden to the rear of the property. As the album continues there are images of local sites of architectural interest, notably Wilton, a Punch and Judy show and Stonehenge. Half a dozen pages are given over to images of a trip to Scotland - a few of these photographs are commercial shots, however the album returns to Weir's barn in its final leaves with a particularly charming image of Schultz seen crouched over a group of visiting children, presumed grandchildren, together with fine shots of the garden's topiary. Robert Weir Schultz (1860-1951) or Robert W. S. Weir, as he was known after changing his German-sounding name in 1915 — was a Scottish Arts and Crafts architect, artist, landscape designer and furniture designer who assisted Norman Shaw as a young man, became a member of the Arts Workers' Guild and rose to be its Master. He probably first came to Hampshire in 1898 to lay out a formal garden at West Green House, subsequently bought 26 acres of land at nearby Phoenix Green, kept 10 acres for himself, creating an early barn conversion. 'For those who believed in the Arts-and-Crafts Movement,' David Ottewill observes in The Edwardian Garden, 'it was almost a religious duty to design the whole environment in which they lived, and The Barn, Hartley Wintney, Schultz's home for 50 years, was a prime example of this'. This album is a fascinating record of Schultz's tenure at Weir's Barn and a landmark in Arts and Crafts architecture and garden design. Earlier this year the garden was featured in Country Life. Please contact Christian White Rare Books Ltd for more information or images of this item 1935