You will probably have seen decorative plasterwork on the exteriors of old houses in East Anglia – in particular Suffolk and Essex – featuring imagery and patterns raked into the render, along with figurative emblems from animals, birds, flowers and bees to sheaves of corn and bunches of grapes.
Called ‘pargeting’ or ‘pargetting’ – the subject’s scanty literature seems to make the spelling interchangeable – it’s a traditional, predominantly 17th-century way of adding ornament to the exterior walls of timber-framed houses. Suffolk is a pargeting hotspot, especially in towns like Lavenham and Clare, while the Ancient House in Ipswich offers a very fine and prominent example of this old decorative art. Meanwhile, if you go to our neighbours, The Merchant’s Table in Woodbridge, you’ll find panels for sale by pargeting supremo Bill Sargent.
I went to join Bill’s one-day workshop for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) at the National Trust’s Heritage and Rural Skills Centre on the Buscot and Coleshill Estate in Oxfordshire. It’s commonly thought that pargeting came over with Italian craftsmen but, said Bill, while it’s likely local tradespeople indeed took inspiration from Italy, without access to gypsum they instead used lime plaster, which gives our own variant a more naïve, folksy appearance.
It is precisely this element that appeals. Pargeting should not be perfect: just as well for me as I have never plastered so much as a wall. My fellow pargetters in Oxfordshire were a real mix: a few professional plasterers who wanted to broaden their skills, one or two architects, a couple from San Francisco (who weren’t sure how they were going to get their panels home) and people doing it for pleasure, like me.
As we were invited to bring ideas and sketches I did some research at the London Library only to find that the literature on pargeting is thin on the ground. Country Life had a bit of a moment with it in the 1930s, but the key sourcebook remains Pargeting by Tim Buxbaum, published in 2007, which can only be found second-hand. A copy was available to read at the workshop.
Bill is a traditional plasterer and pargeter continuing in the footsteps of his grandfather. Alongside him was Andrew Fawcett, an artist and craftsman, Sean Wheatley, a master plasterer of the Worshipful Company of Plasterers and Michal Wolf, a plasterer and conservator in lime. Between the four of them, we had an expert team.
There are some recurring themes in pargeting: animals, birds, bees and so on. As I had seen a beautiful design of a bird with insects and foliage on a marble floor in the SS Giovanni e Paolo hospital in Venice a few weeks ago, I decided to adapt this for my own panel.
After an introduction to pargeting, including the composition of lime plaster past and present (sand, straw and animal hair feature strongly) and a 300-slide presentation of case studies, there was a freeform demonstration from Bill. We then prepared our own patterns, which involved drawing our designs onto paper, ensuring the scale was correct, before going to the lime studio where our panels of wet lime plaster were waiting for our own pargeting efforts.
For mine, I used a pencil to poke holes in the plaster and transfer my design onto the panel. Then, roughing up the areas to be worked on freehand, I built up the design using a variety of tools, using a paintbrush and water to smooth things over and amend errors.
Bill helped with my bird’s head, which started off resembling a thrush, then had a brief parrot stage and ended up more like a woodpecker. But that’s the beauty of pargeting which involves several tools. Feathers were done with the side of a paintbrush, eyes with the end of a tool. The wet lime plaster can also be either stamped, combed or formed freehand to create designs of varying complexity.
I learned that if you build something up too much it looks bulky and wrong, but if you don’t build it up enough the design can get lost. Bill came again to assist with my flowers and made them more stylised. The insects were tricky and ended up being quite ethereal: probably for the best as they might well have ended up looking up like small birds.
To round the day off, Michal gave a demonstration of lime washing (composition, adding colour and application) and Andrew went through the make-up of traditional colours used, but as I was trying to finish my insects, I missed much of this, so I am now planning a visit to Cornelissen in Bloomsbury to continue my plastering career. The workshop has made me look at the pargetted houses of Suffolk with renewed interest – and I'm sure that this traditional art is now due a far wider appreciation.
