I have been puzzling over the group of farm buildings on the road north of Fordcombe as to why I could not find out more about them because it’s a group of such obvious architectural quality (as Marie Willey says, like a photograph from Edwin Smith). The answer is that it is the home farm for Anthony Salvin’s demolished South Park in the parish of Penshurst, not Fordcombe, described by John Newman (rightly) as ‘a wonderfully romantic group by Devey’. It’s romanticism is part original, with a group of seventeenth-century farm buildings, and part self conscious as the work of George Devey, who was trained as a painter by Cotman, marked the beginnings of the vernacular revival.
hello, I’d love to see a photograph of these lovely sounding buildings….
Thank you,
R
Look back at Fordcombe (1). Charles