The story
On the night of 9 November 1940, fire broke out in the south-east wing of Castle Howard, then home to a girls' school evacuated there for the war. It brought down the great dome, gutted some 20 rooms and destroyed about 20 paintings, two Tintorettos among them. The dome you see today, with a copy of Antonio Pellegrini's painted Fall of Phaeton inside, was rebuilt between 1960 and 1962.
The house was a gamble from the start. In 1699 Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, gave the commission to John Vanbrugh, a soldier and playwright with no training as an architect, who worked alongside the experienced Nicholas Hawksmoor. Building went on for more than a century, and the Howard family still lives here.
Most of the pictures were gathered by the 3rd, 4th and 5th Earls on their travels in Italy. Frederick, the 5th Earl, was the keenest buyer of them all, and Joshua Reynolds, the leading English portraitist of the day, painted him in 1769, when he was about 21. Elsewhere in the house hang a portrait of Henry VIII attributed to Holbein, views of Venice by Canaletto, and works by Gainsborough and Stubbs. In 2025 the Long Gallery and the Grand Staircase were rehung, and the Tapestry Drawing Room, one of the rooms burnt in 1940, reopened with its four Vanderbank tapestries of the Seasons, woven in 1706, back on the walls.
