Corsham Court

Summary

A 16th-century Grade I listed country house in the Wiltshire town of Corsham, seat of the Methuen family, with Capability Brown and a triple-cube Picture Gallery containing Old Masters. Filming credits include Barry Lyndon (1975) and The Remains of the Day (1993).

About this location

Corsham Court stands in the town of Corsham, three miles west of Chippenham in Wiltshire. The present house was built in 1582 by Thomas Smythe, a customs officer under Elizabeth I, on a site that had been a royal manor since the Saxon period and, later, dower property of medieval queens of England. The house was bought in 1745 by Sir Paul Methuen and remains the seat of the Methuen family — now in its eighth generation at Corsham.

The most significant phase of work was carried out between 1761 and 1764 by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, who was commissioned to redesign the house and landscape the park. Brown retained the Elizabethan gabled south front and stables block while adding a Picture Gallery in the east wing — a triple cube (72 feet long, 24 feet wide, 24 feet high) with a coffered plasterwork ceiling over a high cove, designed to display the Methuen collection of Italian Old Masters and Flemish paintings assembled in the 17th and early 18th centuries. The Long Gallery contains further Italian Old Masters alongside marquetry furniture by John Cobb and pier glasses attributed to Robert Adam. John Nash redesigned the north facade in Gothic style around 1796, though most of his work was replaced after unseasoned timber caused structural problems; his library survives.

The reflect Brown’s commission as landscape architect: he formed a great walk running a mile through tree clumps, planted perimeter screens, and planned a lake that was eventually completed by Humphry Repton after Brown’s death. The park is listed Grade II* on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.

Corsham Court’s Picture Gallery and Elizabethan south front were used during Stanley Kubrick’s production of Barry Lyndon (1975), which drew on multiple English country houses for its 18th-century period settings. The house served as a filming location for The Remains of the Day (1993, director James Ivory, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson), with Corsham providing period interior and exterior scenes for the story of a butler at a great English house in the 1930s.