Burghley House Series

I've been away from home for about a week.  And the week was so not about the kinds of images that follow.  They seem apropos to the time of year though, when colors are fading, some are ripening, all are becoming richer and mixing with many more grays.  And then, aren't there some of you who are still nostalgic for summer (as I would so be if I were in colder climes).....?   Here's a little nosegay to ease the passage.

A couple of years ago, I went to visit this house with my mother-in-law.  It is in Stamford, a graceful and gracious old town in Lincolnshire.  Parts of this house had just been used in one of those English costume dramas. Anybody recognize it?  It is one of the true treasure houses of Britain.

Burghley has been in the Cecil family for over 400 years.  The original Lord Cecil was a Treasurer of England.  And he made sure he got "some".  The house interiors are fairly distinctive in that they are quite dramatic, dark, baroque, and grandiose in an Italianate way.  It is all about scale. "Younger" "English""houses" tend to be a little more French in their style with paler, more delicate and feminine decoration.  This is pretty much a guy's house.  Don't remind my MIL that English style actually did originate "over there".  She will not hear of it.  Unless you mean to say that English style is a hodgepodge of everything and then she will agree that that is certainly true.

Go to: http://www.burghley.co.uk/ and you can find out more if you are planning to be in that part of the world. We went in late August and it was not too crowded.

Photo taking is not allowed inside but I seemed to find things to snap. Outside.  This series seems to be all about blues, textures, patterns.

I don't know about you, but I want to stick my hands right into these pictures and swish them around.  Just to see how the elements might rearrange themselves in artful combinations.  I love the mystery of the dark water and how the fish and the reflected colors slowly reveal themselves.

How the water takes on the color of the sky, and so an added dimension.

How beautiful black can be when it is swathed in blues and studded with orange and green.

How grey makes it more into a COLOR vs. it just being a space filler.

In nature, every color exists already in all the best combinations.  We humans try to be so clever and put it back together in original ways.  But the universe will always have gotten there first.

This could have been made into a William Morris fabric pattern.

And what could be more beautiful than hydrangea blue, forget-me-not-blue, robin's egg blue, cornflower blue?

Even the windows are blue.  See?  Nature got there first.