The White Room

The White Drawing Room was Lady Walpole's drawing room and Lady Churchill's favourite room.

• View the White Room virtual tour
• Move on to the Terracotta Room
• Back to the Front Door

About the White Room

The ceiling of the White Room features a three-dimensional floral design that recaptures 18th century country-house style:

• the rose of England;
• thistle of Scotland;
• daffodil for Wales; and
• shamrock for Ireland.

The Bohemian glass chandelier, converted to electricity from candlelight, is one of a pair. The other is in the Terracotta Drawing Room.

The Staffordshire pottery figurines of 19th century politicians include Prime Ministers Robert Peel and Viscount Palmerston. They were not specially made, but were widely collected at the time, much as commemorative mugs and plates are now.

Much of the furniture in this room is by Adam, including gilt chairs and an oval mirror.

This room is where Edward Heath, known as a conductor and lover of classical music, kept his grand piano. He would play while looking out over the garden.

It is also the room where Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman died in 1908.

The renovations of the past decade have made this room more stately, and consequently it has become a frequent setting for television interviews and high profile audiences. However, it is also available to staff for smaller, day-to-day meetings.

The Art of the Room

The White Room contains works by one of the most important English landscape painters of the nineteenth century, J M W Turner (1775-1851). The paintings, The Ford and Sketch for 'East Cowes Castle, the Regatta starting for their Moorings' No. 1, are on loan from the Tate Gallery.

Richard Wilson (1713-1782), a Welsh artist, painted The Cock Inn, Cheam Common around 1745, and although his later work was influenced by French landscape artists, this picture owes more to Netherlandish painting. It has been suggested that the painting shows the contrast between the tavern and the peasants who patronised it on the left, and the country house and its upper class inhabitants on the right. The Cock Inn was apparently one of Wilson's more successful early landscapes; there are no less than four surviving versions of the scene, one of which is in the Tate collection.

View of St Paul's and Blackfriars Bridge by William Marlow (1740-1813) was once owned by David Garrick, the famous eighteenth-century actor. The image was made famous through a contemporary engraving of it published in 1777. Other paintings in the White Room show eighteenth and nineteenth century English landscapes by John Linnell (1792-1882), James Stark (1794-1859) and Thomas Bardwell (1704-1767).

There is a bronze statuette of Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), which is a reduced version of the Crimean Memorial in Waterloo Place in London, erected in 1915. Florence Nightingale was born in Florence and became the first woman to be awarded the Order of Merit, for her work during the Crimean War and fundraising and campaigning for the improvement of nursing and public health. The sculptor of this work, Arthur George Walker (1861-1939), created other public monuments including a statue of the British suffragette Mrs Pankhurst at the entrance to Victoria Park Gardens in Westminster.