History
The house was built from 1759 to 1771 for Edwin Lascelles, whose family had bought the estate after making its fortune in the West Indies through Customs positions, slave trading and lending money to planters. The house was designed by the architects John Carr and Robert Adam.
Much of the furniture is by the eighteenth-century English furniture designer Thomas Chippendale, who came from nearby Otley.
Lancelot "Capability" Brown designed the grounds to which Sir Charles Barry added a grand terrace, in 1844.
Artist Thomas Girtin stayed at the house many times, painting the house itself and also the surrounding countryside and landmarks, such as the nearby Plumpton Rocks which at the time was owned by the Harewood Estate.
Harewood House has a long history of hosting visitors interested in its imposing architecture and collections of paintings. The first guidebook to the home was published early in the nineteenth century.
The house served as a convalescent hospital during both World War I and World War II.
The archives of the Lascelles family and the Harewood estate are held at West Yorkshire Archive Service. in Leeds.
Since 1996, part of the house's grounds have been used as the village in the ITV soap opera Emmerdale, which had been based in two different Yorkshire villages since its inception 24 years earlier.
Read more about this topic: Harewood House
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“America is, therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s history shall reveal itself. It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of Old Europe.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)