I haven’t been to Boughton since I was an undergraduate. The only thing I remember from my previous visit was a long corridor of linen cupboards and being told that every year the family laid in a new set of linen which they used sequentially. They were still using eighteenth-century linen. It’s a sleeping beauty of a house, lost in the deepest Northamptonshire countryside and not much occupied since the death of John Montagu, second duke of Montagu in 1749, used by the family only for summer holidays.
This is the main north front, so French in style because it was almost certainly designed by an (unknown) French architect or designer after Ralph Montagu, first Duke of Montagu returned from serving as Ambassador in Paris:
This is the west front looking out onto the remains of the original formal garden:
Indoors, I was only able to photograph a small number of details which caught my eye. The portrait of John Montagu, Marquis of Monthermer by Pompeo Batoni:
A floral painting, I assume by Jean Baptiste Monnoyer:
A detail of a seventeenth-century mirror:
The state bed:
And the view from the window:
