‘Saltram: Portraits of the past’
Welcome to ‘Saltram: portraits of the past’! This first trail on the HistoryScapes app is set in 1775. It explores landscape, architecture and art at Saltram, near Plymouth, during a time of change and growth. It also aims to reveal the everyday relationships that made this country estate tick.
Saltram’s owners were the wealthy Parker family. However, the figure who guides, and inspired, our trail is an artisan called Henry Stockman, a skilled carpenter who undertook ever more ambitious projects at Saltram in the eighteenth century. Despite mentions in Parker family letters and in account books, we sadly have nothing of Henry’s own voice in the archives. But we do know something of what he looked like. Around 1776 Stockman was the subject of an oil painting by Italian artist Antonio Poggi, and the painting remains in Saltram today. While it is fairly typical to possess only a few documentary traces about eighteenth-century workers, it’s highly unusual to find a portrait of a named servant in an English country house.
The earliest evidence for Henry Stockman dates him to 1756, when he is named on the lease of a property called ‘Greens’ in Colebrook, Plympton St Mary, which he leased from John Parker I. A baptism of a Henry Stockman is recorded in the Parish Register of 1716 at Buckland Monachorum, and if this is Saltram’s Henry, he is turning 60 in the year of our trail. We can’t be sure when or why he began work at Saltram, but we’ve assumed that his employment began around 1750, in the time of John Parker I.
In 1769, following the marriage of Theresa and John Parker II, Henry appears in the family letters more and more often. He is increasingly given responsibility for prominent buildings in the garden. Unusually his jobs edge into the design and not just the construction, with Henry picking up the initial work of amateur and professional designers, developing them, and making them real.
The investments in the garden for which Henry was responsible also make him a frequent character in John Parker II’s account books, which contain extra wages to ‘Stockman’, along with payments to additional carpenters and sawyers like John Beer. Henry’s work was greatly valued by Theresa Parker. She writes about him (see Stop 7, the Orangery), and her brother teases her in their letters about her patronage of Henry’s work. While the circumstances behind the commission of Henry’s portrait are unclear, in the app trail we speculate that it was instigated by Theresa as a way of recognising his contribution to the garden at Saltram which she so enjoyed.
In 1778, a Parker family letter refers to Henry ‘recovering’. The same year there was a fire in the outhouses where Henry’s workshop was located, which led to the creation of the Great Kitchen. There are no further references to him after the end of 1778, and so we presume he died at the end of that year.
You can download the free HistoryScapes app on the ‘Home’ page, or through your phone store. The brief articles here in ‘Stories’ expand on the app’s audio content and invite you to dive deeper into each of the eight sites on the ‘Saltram: Portraits of the past’ trail.
Emma Philip