Lunch with the FT: Jacob Rothschild 与FT共进午餐：罗斯柴尔德家族

By Jackie Wullschlager
Published: April 16 2010 18:12 | Last updated: April 16 2010 18:12

Idon’t, you know, usually give interviews. So if you decide to write anything, I’d rather it wasn’t about me.” With this unpromising plea for discretion, my host Jacob Rothschild offers a glass of Château Duhart-Milon 2000, a Rothschild wine – his cellars contain 15,000 bottles, going back to 1870 – and insists that what is interesting is not himself but “what we’re doing at Waddesdon”, the National Trust property that houses the Rothschild collection.
Lord Rothschild, 73, is known for tremendous dynamism while staying resolutely behind the scenes. If the tall, thin man standing before me in tweed jacket, grey turtle-neck jumper and black trousers looks familiar, it is not because he has cultivated a public persona; it is because the long oval face, high forehead and arched, hawk-like eyes, as well as the intellectually engaged expression, resemble exactly his 1989 portrait by Lucian Freud.
I comment on this likeness. “When he paints us we think we look awful and horribly old, then 20 years later we’re pleased,” he says drily. Freud’s painting is in the National Portrait Gallery – “not because of me, but because of him”. A second version hangs at Waddesdon Manor alongside David Hockney’s 2003 double portrait of Lord Rothschild and his daughter Hannah, eldest of his four children.
Rothschild has invited me to Eythrope, Buckinghamshire, for Sunday lunch. We are in the 19th-century tea pavilion that is his private home, next to his Waddesdon estate. His wife Serena is skiing in Switzerland, and this is the only free slot in his overloaded schedule as banker, arts philanthropist, collector and country house owner.
After working in and then resigning from the family bank NM Rothschild & Sons, he founded J Rothschild Assurance Group, now St James’s Place, with Sir Mark Weinberg in 1991. He is also chairman of his investment trust company RIT Capital Partners and his other business concerns include Spencer House Capital Management and the mini-merchant bank Spencer House Partners.
As a philanthropist, his achievements include restoring the publicly owned Somerset House, one of the neoclassical jewels of London, and establishing it as a centre for the visual arts, and ensuring the future of the Courtauld Institute of Art, which contains an unrivalled collection of impressionist and early modernist masterpieces. As a personal project he bought Spencer House in St James and spent £16m returning it to 18th-century glory.
To all those activities, he has brought individual flair and an instinctive grasp of the innovations needed to uphold historical continuities. Today he says that his “main interest” is the reinvigoration of Waddesdon Manor, the neo-Renaissance chateau built in the 1880s by Ferdinand de Rothschild. The house has just opened for the summer 2010 season with an unexpected twist: the dramatic installation of Jeff Koons’s reflective blue 6ft 6in high chromium stainless-steel “Cracked Egg” and, from May 1, chandeliers and furniture by the witty, irreverent Brazilian designers Humberto and Fernando Campana.
Rothschild describes his family as having “operated the first European business, in a way, and, genetically, they got lucky”. Since the mid-19th century its members have tended to offset their astounding wealth and lavish properties with a sober, retiring private demeanour.
We chat in an opulent Eythrope drawing room – deep soft beige sofas, long coffee tables heaped with art books, and superb Chilterns views, though the eye is drawn, above all, to a huge, modernist grey chandelier. It is by Diego Giacometti, brother of the more famous Alberto. “Oh, I was in the Paris studio when Diego was making the chandeliers for the Picasso Museum and he said, ‘Do you want me to make them for you as well?’” he explains. “All the chandeliers in the house are by him.”
A sly black cat by Alberto Giacometti is stretched out beneath a Freud etching of a garden. “I worship Giacometti,” says Lord Rothschild, leading me past another of the sculptor’s figures, a serpentine upright female form, into a dining room lined with 18th-century rococo panels. Serving dishes are already spread on an antique sideboard: we help ourselves to roast chicken, pan-fried new potatoes, brussels sprouts – from the estate – and carrot and swede purée. All are cooked to tender perfection in plain English style.
We sit at a circular table laid with a white cloth and groaning with silver, candles, flowers and piles of books. Lord Rothschild eats slowly and little, while talking in measured tones that do not entirely conceal his excitement about new developments at Waddesdon. “Cracked Egg”, he explains, is owned by Mark Getty, son of the billionaire Sir Paul, and a “close friend and neighbour” who as a resident non-domicile cannot bring it into the UK without paying tax. “So I said, ‘It’s more fun to have it down the road than not to see it at all – can we borrow it?’” It joins contemporary works including Sarah Lucas’s surreal horse and cart “Perceval” and a chandelier of broken china commissioned by Lord Rothschild from the inventive German lighting designer Ingo Maurer, whose work is collected by museums including New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The piece is, says Lord Rothschild, “funny, witty, a breath of fresh air in the house, and our bestselling postcard”.
I laugh out loud at Maurer’s shimmering iconoclasm. “Yeah, that’s what we feel like doing with our porcelain,” Lord Rothschild mutters. Does that imply Waddesdon is a burden? “It’s a burden I enjoy,” he says cautiously, admitting “it would be impossible to live in the house in this day and age.” He runs the manor semi-independently for the National Trust, which received it in 1957 as a bequest from his cousin James, along with its contents and 2,000 acres of grounds. Lord Rothschild owns the rest of the Waddesdon estate.
Today, such private/public sector overlaps in the arts are increasingly successful. Of more than 40 Rothschild mansions built around the world in the 19th century, only Waddesdon still has its collection intact and is open to the public. With nearly 400,000 visitors a year, it is the National Trust’s most visited house and epitomises how the English country house now markets itself as a chic-eclectic mix of styles, media and collapsed aesthetic hierarchies, relevant to young audiences – and emblematic of 21st-century social shifts.
Not that hierarchy has vanished from Eythrope. As Lord Rothschild pours me another glass of smooth, deep-ruby bordeaux, Clive, a fully uniformed butler in pinstripes, waistcoat and tails, brings dessert – intimidatingly large apple and blackberry tarts. “Would you like to share one?” Lord Rothschild asks, slicing the pastry in half and giving me the lion’s portion of tumbling blackberries.
In its Victorian heyday, Waddesdon’s menus were so acclaimed that the Queen sent her cook to learn from the Rothschild chefs. More recent state visits have included presidents Reagan, Clinton and Mitterrand. He inherited the estate in 1988 from James Rothschild’s widow Dorothy: “She didn’t know whom she would leave it to but I was pretty close to her. It was rather awkward to mention it but I had a pretty shrewd idea it would come to me. My interests [in the arts] were always that way.”
This was probably inevitable: he has not only the Rothschild collector’s gene but on his mother’s side a dose of Bloomsbury. His grandmother Mary Hutchinson was Lytton Strachey’s cousin, “so my mother was half-Strachey and my upbringing was very art-orientated”. His father Victor, third Lord Rothschild, by contrast sold the contents of his Piccadilly town house and his country estate at Tring in a sensational auction in 1936. “He joined the Labour party. He didn’t think worldly goods were what he was about. My parents divorced. There was the usual awkward business of going between them but I was mostly with my mother. She remarried to a Greek painter Nico Ghika, so we were always around artists and intellectuals.”
His grandmother was a friend of Matisse – Lord Rothschild pronounces it “Maahtisse”, with a stretched out “a”. “For her birthday every year Maahtisse used to send her arum lilies, painted on the inside. Can you imagine the trauma of watching Maahtisse paintings wither in front of you?”
Matisse’s closest friend, an obscure painter called Simon Bussy, married Mary’s imperious cousin Dorothy Strachey, who noted scornfully that no one will ever “look at his work or take the smallest interest in it”. But Mary did, giving her grandson for his 11th birthday a Bussy bird painting. “I liked it very much, and started collecting him when I was 19. Would you like to see them?” He shows me jewel-like animal and bird studies, and a mural-sized white-green painting with flattened planes depicting two girls taking tea.
“I love Bussy,” says Lord Rothschild. “I get to love the things I find out about and love them even more. I get infectious enthusiasms.” Bussy, “a bridge between the 19th century and modernity” is a true independent-minded connoisseur’s subject – and a symbolic favourite, surely, for a man whose every move combines loyalty to history with a canny eye on the future. He sees Waddesdon as a “monument to the Rothschild family”.
Lunch over – Clive sees us out with a bow – he drives me across the estate in a grey Mercedes past arable fields, dairy, stables: “It’s like a little principality,” he says. I am visiting a week before the house opens but the drive is lined with daytrippers’ cars – French landscape architect Elie Lain’s terraced gardens with their fountains, and a recent adventure playground, are attractions in their own right. We turn a corner and suddenly the towers and turrets of a fantastical Loire chateau look-alike come into view. “It’s rather a surprise in the Buckinghamshire countryside, isn’t it?”
It is a Brideshead moment: the lord of the manor opening the silent house off-season, blinds down, furnishings under wraps, for a swift, clandestine tour. The hushed darkness resonates with the temperament of its creator, the grieving widower Ferdinand de Rothschild, who “consoled himself by building Waddesdon” between 1877 and 1883 and filling it with 18th-century French decorative pieces embodying le goût Rothschild. It is a taste, says Lord Rothschild deliberately, “which is not my greatest passion but I admire it very much and have tried to educate myself in it”.
The Red Drawing Room, with its Savonnerie “Sun King” carpet and Reisener cabinets, both with royal provenance, and Reynolds and Gainsborough portraits, typifies the Waddesdon style of “French furniture, English painting”, though the greatest Rothschild Gainsborough is absent. “My father, much to my rage, sold the supreme masterpiece ‘The Morning Walk’ to the National Gallery.”
Ferdinand de Rothschild died in the house, shortly after writing, “I am a lonely, suffering and occasionally a very miserable individual despite the gilded and marble rooms in which I live.” Now Lord Rothschild’s interventions are piercing the heavy splendour of his ancestor’s style. As former chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund (1992-1998) – “chief shopper for the British nation” – he “had to look at everything”; he oversaw the spending of £1.2bn and has an optimistic eclecticism.
Among his other purchases for Waddesdon are Angus Fairhurst’s “funny and melancholy” bronze gorilla hoisting a big fish under his arm, “A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling”; Leon Bakst’s depiction of Rothschild family members in “Sleeping Beauty”; and a pair of “irresistible” canvases by Giovanni Panini recording festivities on the Dauphin’s birth in 1751. Lord Rothschild eyed these, priced – I discover later from another source – at $10m each, for years before he “made a sporting offer which, to my horror and delight, was accepted”.
Clive is waiting to drive me to the station. Lord Rothschild points out the aviary that will be the comically appropriate venue for “Cracked Egg”, that symbol of 21st-century decadence. Koons’s piece is in the process of being installed and “is fun, interesting and will give us a different audience”, Lord Rothschild asserts. “The question is, what’s the encore?”
www.waddesdon.org.uk
Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s visual arts critic
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Eythrope, Waddesdon, Buckinghamshire
Roast chicken
Panfried new potatoes
Brussels sprouts
Carrot and swede purée
Poppy seed baguette
Apple and blackberry tarts
Bottle Château DuhartMilon 2000
Total No charge
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To the mansion born: the Rothschilds’ sumptuous villas
More than 40 Rothschild villas were built in the 19th and early 20th centuries. All were sumptuous; their diverse fates reflecting the many strands of European cultural and political history.
Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat: It took Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild seven years (1905-1912) to have this belle époque pink wedding cake palace finished to her exacting standards; she then spent just three nights of her life there. Overlooking both Villefranche and Beaulieu bays in the south of France, it is the most stunningly situated of all Rothschild villas. Now state-owned, it hosts a summer opera festival, Les Azuriales, where evenings conclude with a starlit dinner in the gardens .
Palais (Nathaniel) Rothschild, Vienna: Baron Nathaniel opened this neo-baroque palace in 1878 with a huge housewarming ball. Fifty years later the Nazis confiscated the property and used it as an interrogation centre during the second world war. They imprisoned its owner, Baron Louis, for a year before accepting a ransom for his release. The Allies bombed the palace in 1944 – the Rothschilds returned to find a smouldering ruin in 1945. The remains were torn down and the estate sold to the Austrian Chamber of Commerce.
Tring Park, Hertfordshire: Tring Mansion, built by Christopher Wren, was extended into a French-style chateau by Lionel de Rothschild, who bought the estate for £230,000 in 1872. His grandson Walter collected animals, including a kangaroo, as a child. Aged seven, Walter declared that he would build a zoological museum; this opened in the grounds in 1892. Walter drove around Tring in a carriage pulled by six zebras. His heir Victor sold Tring in 1936; the house is now a performing arts school. Tring was one of seven Rothschild mansions, including Waddesdon and the lavish Mentmore, in the Vale of Aylesbury, aka Rothschildshire.
Chateau de Ferrières, outside Paris: “Build me a Mentmore but twice the size” demanded Baron James de Rothschild on seeing his cousin’s Buckinghamshire home. Inaugurated in 1862, the chateau was the largest and most luxurious in France. Within a decade, the Germans seized it, making it the site of talks between Bismarck and the French following the Franco-Prussian war (1870-1871). In 1940 the Nazis occupied it, looting the vast art collection. Empty until 1959, it was refurbished by Guy de Rothschild, who donated it in 1975 to the chancellery of the University of Paris.
JW

I don't, you know, usually give interviews. So if you decide to write anything, I'd rather it wasn't about me.” With this unpromising plea for discretion, my host Jacob Rothschild offers a glass of Château Duhart-Milon 2000, a Rothschild wine – his cellars contain 15,000 bottles, going back to 1870 – and insists that what is interesting is not himself but “what we're doing at Waddesdon”, the National Trust property that houses the Rothschild collection.	“你知道我一般不接受采访，所以如果你要写点什么，我宁愿不是写我。”我的东道主雅各布•罗斯柴尔德(Jacob Rothschild)一边让人失落地请求慎重，一边递给我一杯“都夏美伦堡2000”(Duhart-Milon)，这是罗斯柴尔德家族出产的一种葡萄 酒。他的地窖里藏有一万五千瓶葡萄酒，年份最早的是1870年。他强调说，有意思的不是他本人，而是“我们在沃德斯登庄园(Waddesdon Manor)正在做的事情”。该庄园是英国国家名胜古迹信托(National Trust)的产业，存放着罗斯柴尔德家族的收藏品。
Lord Rothschild, 73, is known for tremendous dynamism while staying resolutely behind the scenes. If the tall, thin man standing before me in tweed jacket, grey turtle-neck jumper and black trousers looks familiar, it is not because he has cultivated a public persona; it is because the long oval face, high forehead and arched, hawk-like eyes, as well as the intellectually engaged expression, resemble exactly his 1989 portrait by Lucian Freud.	年届73岁的罗斯柴尔德勋爵，素以活动能力极强、但坚持留在幕后著称。他是瘦高个儿， 穿着斜纹软呢上衣，里面套着灰色高领毛衫，底下是黑色长裤。如果说站在我跟前的这人看上去很眼熟，那可不是因为他把自己塑造成了公众人物，而是因为他的面 容与卢西安•弗洛伊德(Lucian Freud)在1989年为他画的肖像一模一样：长椭圆形的脸庞、高耸的前额、弯弯的像鹰一样的眼睛，还有那若有所思的神情。
I comment on this likeness. “When he paints us we think we look awful and horribly old, then 20 years later we're pleased,” he says drily. Freud's painting is in the National Portrait Gallery – “not because of me, but because of him”. A second version hangs at Waddesdon Manor alongside David Hockney's 2003 double portrait of Lord Rothschild and his daughter Hannah, eldest of his four children.	20年后对肖像觉得满意
Rothschild has invited me to Eythrope, Buckinghamshire, for Sunday lunch. We are in the 19th-century tea pavilion that is his private home, next to his Waddesdon estate. His wife Serena is skiing in Switzerland, and this is the only free slot in his overloaded schedule as banker, arts philanthropist, collector and country house owner.	我对他说那幅画画得很像，他淡淡地回答道：“当初我们觉得他把我们画得很难看，显得非 常老，20年过后，我们觉得很满意。”这幅画目前收藏在英国国家肖像馆(National Portrait Gallery)。“人家收藏这幅画，不是因为我，而是因为他。”在沃德斯登庄园有这幅画的复制品，与大卫•霍克尼(David Hockney)在2003年为罗斯柴尔德勋爵和他女儿汉纳(Hannah)画的双人肖像画挂在一起。勋爵有四个子女，汉纳是最大的孩子。
After working in and then resigning from the family bank NM Rothschild & Sons, he founded J Rothschild Assurance Group, now St James's Place, with Sir Mark Weinberg in 1991. He is also chairman of his investment trust company RIT Capital Partners and his other business concerns include Spencer House Capital Management and the mini-merchant bank Spencer House Partners.	这是一个星期天，罗斯柴尔德邀请我来白金汉郡Eythrope用午餐。我们坐在这座建 于19世纪的茶阁里。这是他私人的家，紧邻他的沃德斯登庄园。他的妻子塞丽娜(Serena)正在瑞士滑雪。现在是他唯一的空闲时段，身为银行家、艺术慈 善家、收藏家和乡村住宅业主，他的日程排得满满的。
As a philanthropist, his achievements include restoring the publicly owned Somerset House, one of the neoclassical jewels of London, and establishing it as a centre for the visual arts, and ensuring the future of the Courtauld Institute of Art, which contains an unrivalled collection of impressionist and early modernist masterpieces. As a personal project he bought Spencer House in St James and spent £16m returning it to 18th-century glory.	他早先在家族银行NM Rothschild & Sons工作，后来辞职，1991年与马克•温伯格爵士(Mark Weinberg)合办了J Rothschild保险集团，该集团如今更名为St James's Place。他还是旗下投资信托公司RIT Capital Partners的董事长。他名下的企业还有Spencer House资本管理公司、小型商人银行Spencer House Partners等。
To all those activities, he has brought individual flair and an instinctive grasp of the innovations needed to uphold historical continuities. Today he says that his “main interest” is the reinvigoration of Waddesdon Manor, the neo-Renaissance chateau built in the 1880s by Ferdinand de Rothschild. The house has just opened for the summer 2010 season with an unexpected twist: the dramatic installation of Jeff Koons's reflective blue 6ft 6in high chromium stainless-steel “Cracked Egg” and, from May 1, chandeliers and furniture by the witty, irreverent Brazilian designers Humberto and Fernando Campana.	在慈善事业方面，他修复了伦敦的新古典主义明珠之一、公共所有的萨默塞特宫 (Somerset House)，把它建成一个视觉艺术中心，并为考特奥德艺术学院(Courtauld Institute of Art)的未来提供了保障。考特奥德艺术学院藏有一批无与伦比的印象派和早期现代派的杰作。另外，他个人买下了位于圣詹姆士的斯宾塞宫(Spencer House)，并斥资1600万英镑进行修建，恢复了它在18世纪的壮观景象。
Rothschild describes his family as having “operated the first European business, in a way, and, genetically, they got lucky”. Since the mid-19th century its members have tended to offset their astounding wealth and lavish properties with a sober, retiring private demeanour.	在这些活动中，他展现了维系历史连贯性所需的个人天赋和创新才能。他说，他现在的“主 要兴趣”是重振沃德斯登庄园。这座19世纪80年代由费迪南德•罗斯柴尔德(Ferdinand de Rothschild)建造的新文艺复兴风格的城堡，刚刚进入2010年夏季开放季节，伴随着一个出人意料的新变化：工人们正在安放杰夫•昆斯(Jeff Koons)设计的高6英尺6英寸、亮闪闪的蓝色高铬不锈钢“打碎的蛋”(Cracked Egg)。而且，从5月1日起，将布置由机智诙谐、玩世不恭的巴西兄弟设计师温贝托•坎帕纳和费纳多•坎帕纳(Humberto and Fernando Campana)设计的枝形吊灯和家具。
We chat in an opulent Eythrope drawing room – deep soft beige sofas, long coffee tables heaped with art books, and superb Chilterns views, though the eye is drawn, above all, to a huge, modernist grey chandelier. It is by Diego Giacometti, brother of the more famous Alberto. “Oh, I was in the Paris studio when Diego was making the chandeliers for the Picasso Museum and he said, ‘Do you want me to make them for you as well?'” he explains. “All the chandeliers in the house are by him.”	罗斯柴尔德家族“运营第一家欧洲企业”
A sly black cat by Alberto Giacometti is stretched out beneath a Freud etching of a garden. “I worship Giacometti,” says Lord Rothschild, leading me past another of the sculptor's figures, a serpentine upright female form, into a dining room lined with 18th-century rococo panels. Serving dishes are already spread on an antique sideboard: we help ourselves to roast chicken, pan-fried new potatoes, brussels sprouts – from the estate – and carrot and swede purée. All are cooked to tender perfection in plain English style.	罗斯柴尔德形容他的家族“从某种意义上来说，曾经运营第一家欧洲企业，而且在遗传上运 气不错”。从19世纪中叶以来，为了避免引起世人对他们的惊人财富和奢华房地产的注意，罗斯柴尔德家族成员往往采取一种清醒、低调、隐秘的行事作风。
We sit at a circular table laid with a white cloth and groaning with silver, candles, flowers and piles of books. Lord Rothschild eats slowly and little, while talking in measured tones that do not entirely conceal his excitement about new developments at Waddesdon. “Cracked Egg”, he explains, is owned by Mark Getty, son of the billionaire Sir Paul, and a “close friend and neighbour” who as a resident non-domicile cannot bring it into the UK without paying tax. “So I said, ‘It's more fun to have it down the road than not to see it at all – can we borrow it?'” It joins contemporary works including Sarah Lucas's surreal horse and cart “Perceval” and a chandelier of broken china commissioned by Lord Rothschild from the inventive German lighting designer Ingo Maurer, whose work is collected by museums including New York's Museum of Modern Art. The piece is, says Lord Rothschild, “funny, witty, a breath of fresh air in the house, and our bestselling postcard”.	我们在Eythrope的一间布置得富丽堂皇的会客室闲谈。屋子里摆放着柔软深陷的米 黄色沙发，长长的茶几上堆满美术书，放眼就是奇特恩斯山(Chilterns)美景。不过，最醒目的还是一只硕大的现代主义风格的灰色枝形吊灯。这枚吊灯 出自迭戈•贾柯梅蒂(Diego Giacometti)之手，名气更大的阿尔伯特•贾柯梅蒂(Alberto Giacometti)就是他的兄弟。对此罗斯柴尔德解释说：“噢，我那时在巴黎的工作室里，迭戈正在为毕加索博物馆(Picasso Museum)制作枝形吊灯。他问我，‘你也想要这样的枝形吊灯吗？'屋子里所有的枝形吊灯都是他设计的。”
I laugh out loud at Maurer's shimmering iconoclasm. “Yeah, that's what we feel like doing with our porcelain,” Lord Rothschild mutters. Does that imply Waddesdon is a burden? “It's a burden I enjoy,” he says cautiously, admitting “it would be impossible to live in the house in this day and age.” He runs the manor semi-independently for the National Trust, which received it in 1957 as a bequest from his cousin James, along with its contents and 2,000 acres of grounds. Lord Rothschild owns the rest of the Waddesdon estate.	阿尔伯特•贾柯梅蒂雕塑的一只淘气的黑猫，从弗洛伊德的一幅花园版画下穿出。罗斯柴尔 德勋爵说道：“我崇拜贾柯梅蒂。”他带着我经过这位雕塑家的另一部作品——一个站立的像蛇一般扭曲着身体的女人——走进一间墙壁上挂满18世纪洛可可绘画 的餐室。一张古董餐具柜上已经摆好各式菜肴。我们自己拿了烤鸡、煎新土豆、球芽甘蓝（庄园出产的）以及用胡萝卜和大头菜做的蔬菜浓汤，都是地道的英国菜 式，火候恰到好处。
Today, such private/public sector overlaps in the arts are increasingly successful. Of more than 40 Rothschild mansions built around the world in the 19th century, only Waddesdon still has its collection intact and is open to the public. With nearly 400,000 visitors a year, it is the National Trust's most visited house and epitomises how the English country house now markets itself as a chic-eclectic mix of styles, media and collapsed aesthetic hierarchies, relevant to young audiences – and emblematic of 21st-century social shifts.	铺着白色桌布的圆形餐桌上堆满银餐具、蜡烛、鲜花和成撂的书。罗斯柴尔德吃得很慢，而 且很少。他说话慢条斯理，但难掩对沃德斯登庄园最新进展的兴奋。他解释说，“打碎的蛋”是亿万富翁保罗•盖蒂爵士(Paul Getty)之子马克•盖蒂(Mark Getty)的，马克是他的“挚友，也是邻居”。他是非长住居民，要把“打碎的蛋”带到英国就得交税。“于是我说，‘与其看不到它，不如让它呆在路的另一 头——我们能借一下吗？'”除了“打碎的蛋”，还有其它当代艺术作品，包括莎拉•卢卡斯(Sarah Lucas)的超现实主义马车雕像“Perceval”，以及罗斯柴尔德勋爵委托富有创造力的德国灯光设计师英格•摩勒(Ingo Maurer)设计的一只由碎瓷制成的枝形吊灯。罗斯柴尔德表示，这枝吊灯“很有趣、很好玩，是屋里的一股新鲜气息，我们卖得最好的明信片就是它了”。摩 勒的作品得到各博物馆的收藏，包括纽约的现代艺术博物馆(Museum of Modern Art)。
Not that hierarchy has vanished from Eythrope. As Lord Rothschild pours me another glass of smooth, deep-ruby bordeaux, Clive, a fully uniformed butler in pinstripes, waistcoat and tails, brings dessert – intimidatingly large apple and blackberry tarts. “Would you like to share one?” Lord Rothschild asks, slicing the pastry in half and giving me the lion's portion of tumbling blackberries.	“没错，我们就想把自己的瓷器砸碎”
In its Victorian heyday, Waddesdon's menus were so acclaimed that the Queen sent her cook to learn from the Rothschild chefs. More recent state visits have included presidents Reagan, Clinton and Mitterrand. He inherited the estate in 1988 from James Rothschild's widow Dorothy: “She didn't know whom she would leave it to but I was pretty close to her. It was rather awkward to mention it but I had a pretty shrewd idea it would come to me. My interests [in the arts] were always that way.”	说到摩勒反叛传统的风格，我大笑了起来。“没错，我们就想把自己的瓷器砸碎，”罗斯柴 尔德勋爵小声说。言外之意，是否沃德斯登庄园是个负担？“我享受这个负担，”他谨慎地说道。他承认：“在当今这个时代，要居住在庄园里是不可能的。”他以 半独立的方式，为国家名胜古迹信托管理着沃德斯登庄园。他的堂兄詹姆士(James)在1957年把庄园，连同藏品和2000英亩土地遗赠给国家名胜古迹 信托。罗斯柴尔德勋爵则拥有庄园的其余部分。
This was probably inevitable: he has not only the Rothschild collector's gene but on his mother's side a dose of Bloomsbury. His grandmother Mary Hutchinson was Lytton Strachey's cousin, “so my mother was half-Strachey and my upbringing was very art-orientated”. His father Victor, third Lord Rothschild, by contrast sold the contents of his Piccadilly town house and his country estate at Tring in a sensational auction in 1936. “He joined the Labour party. He didn't think worldly goods were what he was about. My parents divorced. There was the usual awkward business of going between them but I was mostly with my mother. She remarried to a Greek painter Nico Ghika, so we were always around artists and intellectuals.”	如今公私合营的模式在艺术品领域越来越成功。19世纪，罗斯柴尔德家族在世界各地兴建 了40多所庄园，如今唯有沃德斯登庄园藏品保存完好并向公众开放。这座庄园每年游人近40万，是国家名胜古迹信托名下游人最多的一座建筑，体现了这栋英国 乡村建筑把自身定位为由各种风格、媒介和扁平的审美等级体系构成的优雅及兼收并蓄的混合体，迎合年轻人的品味，也象征着21世纪的社会变迁。
His grandmother was a friend of Matisse – Lord Rothschild pronounces it “Maahtisse”, with a stretched out “a”. “For her birthday every year Maahtisse used to send her arum lilies, painted on the inside. Can you imagine the trauma of watching Maahtisse paintings wither in front of you?”	倒不是说Eythrope不存在等级差别了。罗斯柴尔德勋爵又给我倒了一杯口感醇和、 泛着暗红色光泽的波尔多葡萄酒，这时，一身细条纹制服、穿着背心和燕尾服的管家克莱夫(Clive)端来了饭后甜点——硕大的苹果和黑莓馅饼。“你想跟我 分一块吗？”罗斯柴尔德勋爵问道。他把馅饼斜斜地切成两半，把大的那块递给我。
Matisse's closest friend, an obscure painter called Simon Bussy, married Mary's imperious cousin Dorothy Strachey, who noted scornfully that no one will ever “look at his work or take the smallest interest in it”. But Mary did, giving her grandson for his 11th birthday a Bussy bird painting. “I liked it very much, and started collecting him when I was 19. Would you like to see them?” He shows me jewel-like animal and bird studies, and a mural-sized white-green painting with flattened planes depicting two girls taking tea.	庄园的菜谱颇负盛名
“I love Bussy,” says Lord Rothschild. “I get to love the things I find out about and love them even more. I get infectious enthusiasms.” Bussy, “a bridge between the 19th century and modernity” is a true independent-minded connoisseur's subject – and a symbolic favourite, surely, for a man whose every move combines loyalty to history with a canny eye on the future. He sees Waddesdon as a “monument to the Rothschild family”.	在维多利亚女王时代的鼎盛时期，沃德斯登庄园的菜谱颇负盛名，连女王都派人来跟罗斯柴 尔德家的厨子学做菜。近代到访过的国家元首则包括里根、克林顿和密特朗等。罗斯柴尔德勋爵于1988年从堂兄詹姆士的遗孀桃乐茜(Dorothy)手上继 承了庄园。“她不知道要把它留给谁。但我和她的关系很亲近。当时要说出口很尴尬，但我很敏锐地预感到会留给我。我的兴趣一向就在那方面（艺术）。”
Lunch over – Clive sees us out with a bow – he drives me across the estate in a grey Mercedes past arable fields, dairy, stables: “It's like a little principality,” he says. I am visiting a week before the house opens but the drive is lined with daytrippers' cars – French landscape architect Elie Lain's terraced gardens with their fountains, and a recent adventure playground, are attractions in their own right. We turn a corner and suddenly the towers and turrets of a fantastical Loire chateau look-alike come into view. “It's rather a surprise in the Buckinghamshire countryside, isn't it?”	这大概是无可避免的：他不但拥有罗斯柴尔德家族的收藏家基因，他母亲那边与布鲁姆斯伯 里(Bloomsbury)圈子也有渊源。他外祖母玛丽•哈奇逊(Mary Hutchinson)是李顿•斯特雷奇(Lytton Strachey)的表姐妹。“所以我母亲有一半的斯特雷奇血统，我小时候所受的教育非常偏重于艺术方面。”相比之下，他父亲，也就是第三任罗斯柴尔德勋 爵，则在1936年的一场引起轰动的拍卖会上，卖掉了他在皮卡迪利的镇屋和在Tring的乡村住宅的藏品。“他加入了工党，他认为经营财产不是他要干的事 情。我父母离了婚，处在他们俩中间通常很尴尬，但我多数时候是跟我母亲在一起。她后来再婚，嫁给一个希腊画家尼可•基卡(Nico Ghika)，所以我们总是跟艺术家和文人在一块儿。”
It is a Brideshead moment: the lord of the manor opening the silent house off-season, blinds down, furnishings under wraps, for a swift, clandestine tour. The hushed darkness resonates with the temperament of its creator, the grieving widower Ferdinand de Rothschild, who “consoled himself by building Waddesdon” between 1877 and 1883 and filling it with 18th-century French decorative pieces embodying le goût Rothschild. It is a taste, says Lord Rothschild deliberately, “which is not my greatest passion but I admire it very much and have tried to educate myself in it”.	他外祖母是马蒂斯(Matisse)的朋友——罗斯柴尔德勋爵念成 Maahtisse，把第一个元音拉长了念。“那时，每年她过生日，马-蒂斯都会送给她里面画了画的海芋花。你能想象看着马-蒂斯的绘画在你眼前枯萎时， 心里那种难受吗？”
The Red Drawing Room, with its Savonnerie “Sun King” carpet and Reisener cabinets, both with royal provenance, and Reynolds and Gainsborough portraits, typifies the Waddesdon style of “French furniture, English painting”, though the greatest Rothschild Gainsborough is absent. “My father, much to my rage, sold the supreme masterpiece ‘The Morning Walk' to the National Gallery.”	马蒂斯最要好的朋友，一位叫做西蒙•布希(Simon Bussy)的无名画家，娶了玛丽的表姐妹桃乐茜•斯特雷奇(Dorothy Strachey)。性情专横的桃乐茜看不起布希的画，说没有人会“看他的画或对他的画有一丁点兴趣”。但玛丽不然。在罗斯柴尔德11岁生日时，外祖母送 给了他一幅布希画的鸟。“我非常喜欢这幅画，19岁时我开始收集他的作品。你想看看吗？”他给我看一些珍稀的动物和鸟类习作，还有一幅壁画大小的白绿两种 颜色的图画，画的是两个喝茶的女孩。
Ferdinand de Rothschild died in the house, shortly after writing, “I am a lonely, suffering and occasionally a very miserable individual despite the gilded and marble rooms in which I live.” Now Lord Rothschild's interventions are piercing the heavy splendour of his ancestor's style. As former chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund (1992-1998) – “chief shopper for the British nation” – he “had to look at everything”; he oversaw the spending of £1.2bn and has an optimistic eclecticism.	倾向于喜欢自己发现的画
Among his other purchases for Waddesdon are Angus Fairhurst's “funny and melancholy” bronze gorilla hoisting a big fish under his arm, “A Couple of Differences Between Thinking and Feeling”; Leon Bakst's depiction of Rothschild family members in “Sleeping Beauty”; and a pair of “irresistible” canvases by Giovanni Panini recording festivities on the Dauphin's birth in 1751. Lord Rothschild eyed these, priced – I discover later from another source – at $10m each, for years before he “made a sporting offer which, to my horror and delight, was accepted”.	“我喜欢布希，”罗斯柴尔德勋爵表示，“我倾向于喜欢自己发现的画，而且越来越喜欢它 们。我得了传染性激情病。”布希是“连接19世纪和现代性的一道桥梁”，是真正具有独立思维的鉴赏家应该关注的。对于一个所作所为结合了对历史的忠诚与对 未来的精明展望的人来说，收藏布希的作品更是具有象征意义。勋爵把沃德斯登庄园视作“罗斯柴尔德家族的纪念碑”。
Clive is waiting to drive me to the station. Lord Rothschild points out the aviary that will be the comically appropriate venue for “Cracked Egg”, that symbol of 21st-century decadence. Koons's piece is in the process of being installed and “is fun, interesting and will give us a different audience”, Lord Rothschild asserts. “The question is, what's the encore?”	午餐结束后，克莱夫鞠躬目送我们走出餐室。然后罗斯柴尔德勋爵开着一辆灰色梅赛德斯 (Mercedes)，带着我在庄园里转悠。我们经过了可耕作的田地、牛奶场和马厩等处。“这里有点像一个小公国，”他说。这时离庄园开放还有一周的时 间，可我们一路上碰见了许多来此作一日游的汽车——出自法国园林设计师艾莉•雷恩(Elie Lain)之手的台地花园和喷泉，以及新建成的一处儿童游乐园，本身就很吸引人。我们拐弯的时候，一座奇幻的看似法国卢瓦尔风格的城堡突然映入眼帘。“在 白金汉郡乡下看到这样的建筑，很让人惊奇吧？”
www.waddesdon.org.uk	这是一个“故地重游”的时刻：在淡季里，庄园主打开满室寂静的屋子，窗帘拉着，家具上 罩着布，进行一趟匆匆而又秘密的游览。黑暗中的宁静，让人想起庄园创建者——失去妻子的悲伤男人费迪南德•罗斯柴尔德的性情。“作为慰藉”，他在 1877-1883年期间建造了沃德斯登，并购置了各种体现罗斯柴尔德“品味”的18世纪的法国装饰品。这是一种品味，罗斯柴尔德勋爵郑重说道，“这种品 味虽然不是我最喜爱的，但我非常敬佩，也试图培养这种品味。”
Jackie Wullschlager is the FT's visual arts critic	“法国家具、英国绘画”
..................................................	“红色会客室”里铺着萨伏内里“太阳王”地毯，摆放着Reisener橱柜，两者都有皇室渊源，墙上挂着雷诺兹(Reynolds)和庚斯博罗 (Gainsborough)的肖像画，正体现了沃德斯登“法国家具、英国绘画”的风格。但罗斯柴尔德家族曾经拥有的最伟大的庚斯博罗画作却不在了。“我 父亲把最好的杰作《清晨散步》(The Morning Walk)卖给了国家美术馆(National Gallery)，让我非常生气。”
Eythrope, Waddesdon, Buckinghamshire	费迪南德在这座庄园里逝世，辞世前写下这样的字句：“尽管我住在金碧辉煌的大理石房子 里，但我是个孤独、痛苦、有时十分乖戾的人。”眼下罗斯柴尔德勋爵正在打破他的祖先营造的浓烈华丽的风格。身为国家遗产纪念基金会(National Heritage Memorial Fund)前主席(1992-1998年)——“英国国家首席采购员”——他“必须什么都要考虑”；他那时监督着12亿英镑经费，他抱着一种乐天的折衷主 义。
Roast chicken	他为沃德斯登庄园购买的其它作品包括：安格斯•菲赫斯特(Angus Fairhurst)的一尊“有趣而忧伤”的青铜雕像：一只大猩猩胳膊底下挟着一条大鱼，名字叫做“思维与感觉的若干差异”；列昂•巴克斯特(Leon Bakst)以罗斯柴尔德家族成员为原型绘制的“睡美人”(Sleeping Beauty)；乔瓦尼•帕尼尼(Giovanni Panini)纪录1751年法国皇太子出生庆祝活动的两幅“不可抗拒”的油画。罗斯柴尔德勋爵盯上这些作品好几年后，“开出了一个公道的价格，竟被接受 了，让我又惊又喜”。我后来从另外一个渠道得知，每件作品价格是1000万美元。
Panfried new potatoes	克莱夫正等着载我去火车站。罗斯柴尔德勋爵指给我看鸟舍——象征21世纪颓废风气的 “打碎的蛋”就准备摆放在那里，这显得很滑稽。“打碎的蛋”正在安置之中。勋爵说，这件作品“好玩，有趣，将给我们带来新的游客。现在的问题是，再来一个 什么呢？”
Brussels sprouts	沃德斯登庄园的网址：www.waddesdon.org.uk
Carrot and swede purée	雅姬•武尔施拉热(Jackie Wullschlager)是FT的视觉艺术评论员
Poppy seed baguette	译者/杨远