Forgotten Treasures: Property from the Aline Elwes McDonnell Trust from Copped Hall, Essex, UK

Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.”

 T.S. Eliot, East Coker

If T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock measured his life in coffee-spoons, then mine is surely measured in auctions: I’ve devoted twenty years of my life to bringing rich tapestries of collecting to sale and it still gives me a thrill to find the stories imbued in historic objects. And so it goes – a day in the life of an auctioneer: the 21^st century bombardment of emails and zoom calls is intercepted by an old fashioned phone call – the opportunity to visit a private collection in Greenwich, Connecticut of “English Furniture” from the estate of Aline Elwes McDonnell. I volunteered immediately for the chance to bathe in memories of my youth (far too well-spent, I might add, in the Country House Collections department of a prominent London auction firm). The visit did not disappoint! In an unassuming home (much loved – the pink-walled kitchen bore the hallmarks of any loving family’s growth with tattered and refreshed lines denoting who grew tallest first) the cottage continued through the adjacent dining room to the library and beyond, by means of a modest passageway, to the extension built in the 1950s to house the extant collections long since removed from Copped Hall, Essex, UK. What lay before me was a glorious recreation of an 18^th century English Country House drawing room: a finely woven Brussel’s tapestry circa 1680, a rare form of commode with the signature hallmark marquetry inlay and neoclassical style of circa 1775, Regency period cockpen faux-bamboo armchairs, Fahua vases from the Ming Dynasty, all bound together by an illustrious group of portraits on the walls led by the tantalizing and unfinished depiction of a young woman with a fashionable late 18^th century coiffure. With stories passed down through the Elwes family, Country Life articles from 1910 and 1959 respectively, a flashlight and an insatiable curiosity as my only guides, it has been a challenge and a thrill to explore the collection and present it here. 

Aline Elwes McDonnell’s lineage is traceable back as far as King George II of England (one branch of the family lays claim to having researched their ancestry yet further to the late 1400s and the reign of Edward IV!) and Copped Hall in Essex was a site near the town of Epping that dates to medieval times – originally home to the FitzAucher family who held the office of Foresters. The meaning of ‘Copped’ has its roots in the old English term for peak and denotes the vantage point of the site upon which the 18^th century version of the house was built. No fewer than three grand country houses graced the site until the demise of the Wyatt aggrandized version (now thankfully undergoing restoration by a local trust) in a devastating fire of 1917. 

The story goes that the few household staff and gardeners that remained during the war years, armed with only a small handpump to quell the flames, dragged furniture, paintings and objects out onto the lawn to save them from destruction. Much was sold off or dispersed thereafter to offset the huge losses incurred at the time but what remained was rehoused at The Wood House (an 1898 confection in the high Tudor revivalist style on the estate grounds) where the family moved following the catastrophic event. A number of the objects in this auction are featured in imagery from aforementioned Country Life article on The Wood House in 1959. This time capsule of 100 or so items made the transatlantic journey following Aline Mary Margaret Elwes marriage to the well-heeled New Yorker, Hubert McDonnell Jr. (1919-2004), in the Brompton Oratory in 1948. The pair settled in Connecticut and shipped the extant portion of the collection, bequeathed to Aline, by slow boat in the early 1950s, where they have been lovingly preserved ever since. The family hopes a new generation of custodians will care for these heirlooms and Freeman’s I Hindman is honored to be the auction house of choice for this beautiful group of forgotten treasures. Please join me this June in Philadelphia to be inspired and transported with what Disraeli described as that “soul-subduing sentiment, harshly called flirtation, which is the spell of a country house”. Property from the Aline Elwes McDonnell Trust will be offered in a live auction in Philadelphia at 2400 Market St, Philadelphia, this June 21, 2024 at 10 am ET.