In a back street in Cambridge, a hitherto unknown domestic interior, now over a hundred years old, has been discovered and purchased
in order to preserve and share it.
The [very]
small terraced house was until recently the home first of David Parr and then of
his granddaughter and her family. In his day job, David Parr was employed as an
artist-painter by the firm F R Leach & Sons, responsible for carrying out
many church and college decorative schemes in Cambridge and beyond – typically patterned
mural painting on walls and ceilings with elaborate late-Victorian designs and
colourways, inspired by Gothick architects and William Morris in the early days of the Firm
.
From the 1890s through to his death in 1927 David Parr brought
his work home, with his paints, to cover the surfaces of his home with similar
high quality ornamentation – foliage, flowers, motifs, scrolls, quotations –
executed with perfect craftsmanship. He
kept a notebook too, detailing paints and tools and dates and costs, so the sequence
of work is recorded.
Having purchased the house from the family following the death
of Parr’s granddaughter, who moved in aged 12 to look after her grandmother in 1927, the
David Parr House charitable trust aims to preserve, conserve and open this modest
yet remarkable building to the public.
The painting is exceptional in itself and in terms of its virtually
intact survival, as it were out of sight for so many decades; of equal if not greater historical interest
is that it is all the work of a journeyman house painter from the same period
as that so vividly in The
Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell – men working for seven
or eight pence an hour. With the Leach
firm, Parr was probably not subject to arbitrary wage cuts or lay-offs; nonetheless
in the Edwardian era his income and family standard of living was very basic,
while his meticulous accounts echo the philanthropists’ concern with pence and
half-pence. All the more amazing his creation
of a unique interior.
More details on
the DPH website http://davidparrhouse.org/
