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upset one’s Palladian ideal, leading to a variety of ingenious meth- ods for disguising openings. Key amongst these was the ‘jib door’, defined by the OED as ‘a door flush with the wall in which it stands, and usually painted or papered so as to be indistinguishable from it’. 9 Often hidden by a convenient tapestry or papered with suitably neoclassical wallpaper in other staterooms, jib doors in libraries could serve a unique dual purpose. When decorated with false shelves and false book spines, they maintained symmetry and at the same time gave the impression that one’s library (and hence one’s learning) was significantly more extensive than it was. The importance of this latter function should not be underesti- mated, and library trickery of all sorts could be employed to give the impression of a vast dynastic family library, housed in an equally vast library room. The famous Hugh Douglas Hamilton conver- sation piece of the extravagant Sir Rowland Winn (1739–85) and his Swiss wife Sabine (d.1798) at Nostell Priory is a fine example. Intended for their St. James’s London house, it depicts the couple in their newly commissioned Robert Adam Library at Nostell Priory, in front of the huge Chippendale Library desk. In Hamilton’s pic- ture the library room has been ‘flattened’, the four walls morphing into one wall behind the subjects, giving the impression that the Yorkshire Library was four times its actual size. 10 The extraordinary rococo library interior at Shugborough is as deceptive in the flesh as Hugh Douglas Hamilton’s portrayal of the Nostell library room was in oils. One of only two interiors at Shugborough to predate Samuel Wyatt’s 1790–98 remodelling of the house, the library was designed by Thomas Wright and was described by Lady Gray on a visit in 1748 as ‘exceedingly odd and pretty’ with good reason. 11 It straddles the divide between the late 9 . ‘jib-door, n.’ OED Online . Oxford University Press, accessed March 3, 2016. The OED cites the earliest known use as 1800 in E. Hervey’s Mourtray Family , but it was undoubtedly in use considerably earlier (see references in footnote 18). 10 . See A. Laing, ‘Sir Rowland and Lady Winn: A Conversation Piece at Nostell Priory’ in Apollo (London: National Trust, published in association with Apollo Magazine, 2000), 14–18, and V. Coltman, ‘Classicism in the English Library: Reading Classical Culture in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in Journal of the History of Collections , 11 (1999), 35–50. 11 . Bedfordshire County Record O Y ce, Grey MSS:L30/9a/2/3, cited in J. M.
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