Free admission to Fairfax House for York residents during 5-6 May 2012
Residents of York can visit Fairfax House for FREE during the weekend of 5-6 May 2012! This is because Fairfax House was closed in January during the York Residents Festival, when attractions throughout York are free to residents. All you need is your valid YorkCard, and you can enter and look around the house (including the wonderful York Civic Trust exhibition Views of York: Portrait of a City 1610 to the Present Day) without paying the normal admissions charge.
For more information and visit the Fairfax House website, contact Fairfax House on 01904 655543 or call in during House opening hours.
‘Rough-Hewn Matter and the Romantics in Yorkshire’: a lecture by Professor David Hill
Terry and the Chocolate Orange – Thursday 5 and Saturday 7 April 2012 – with Jenna Drury of Mud Pie Arts.
Welcome to the new 2012 season at Fairfax House, the finest Georgian town house in England. A bumper programme of events and activities is coming up over the spring and summer, including one of the most important exhibitions ever held of 
In the 
Just at the time when this armchair was being constructed, however, a change was taking place, with the arrival of mahogany in substantial quantities from the West Indies. Within a relatively few years mahogany had almost entirely supplanted walnut in furniture manufacture. The suitability of mahogany for fine decorative carving was an important factor in ensuring its popularity. The contrast between the coarseness of carving in walnut, with its open graining, and the fine effects which could be achieved when fine-grained mahogany was the medium, are illustrated by a comparison between the lion featured last week and that which provides our Friday Face this week. This lion is also from the cabriole leg of a piece of furniture: a mahogany dressing bureau of c.1735, presently in 
This brief but, we trust, pleasant little post, intended to fill in while Fairfax House’s resident blogger and tweeter is laid low with a putrid seasonal fever, takes the form of a musical interlude. The Georgians loved their music, and Fairfax House is a very musical place, with wonderful musical instruments in the rooms and musical themes and images incorporated into the decoration. We will have more to say about this in the new year, but for the moment enjoy these details of (clockwise from top left) the square piano by John Haxby of York, 1792, presently in the Dining Room; decorative plasterwork featuring musical instruments and a musical score, also in the Dining Room; the spinet by John Kirsham of Manchester, 1769, in the Saloon; and, from the Saloon ceiling, plasterwork decoration incorporating musical instruments and the score of ‘Belinda and Amelia’, a song published in 1758. And to make this a real musical interlude, 
The lion is carved in a vigorous style with stylized garlands of foliage projecting from its open mouth (reminiscent of the heraldic form of lion known as jessant de lis) and tumbling down the front of the leg towards the plain club foot. Strongly moulded curves bracket the lion’s face. The carving is energetic and unsophisticated, with strong deep mouldings and coarsely modelled textures, because the relatively coarse grain of walnut does not lend itself to fine detail and subtle effects. Mahogany is much harder to carve than walnut but is suitable for much finer and subtler treatments. Next week’s Friday Face will be another carved lion mask from the leg of a piece of furniture in Fairfax House made only ten years after this chair, but in mahogany rather than walnut. The two will make an interesting comparison.
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