William Waldorf Astor

William Waldorf Astor was educated in Germany and Italy, taking a degree at Gottingen, before studying at Colombia Law School. He spent years in Italy as the equivalent of US ambassador. He was undoubtedly a deeply cultured and multi-lingual man, with the means to be on a continuous historical and archaeological spending spree. His later life, after the death of his wife and younger daughter, was peripatetic, spending much of the year in Switzerland and Italy. His European ancestry and culture is important to him. Although his literary heroes that dot Two Temple Place are mostly from English and American sources, several are not: Dante, Francesca de Rimini, Voltaire and a character from Madame de Stael all appear in the Great Hall. The great staircase is adorned with perhaps our finest works: the characters of Dumas’ Three Musketeers.

Among the most striking ornaments of Two Temple Place are items which draw directly from his cosmopolitanism. First, the extraordinary staircase floor and fireplace, aping as they do the finest church floors (the Cliveden chapel floor is by the same craftsman), and even including porphyry (clearly a personal favourite, there is a huge, almost priceless, amount of it at Hever). Second, Clayton and Bell’s two wall-windows of stained glass, themselves in a Bavarian German, not British, style with their single image. Each shows a vista of Sunrise or Sunset. Knowing Astor’s annual migrations to Switzerland and Italy makes those choices all a little clearer.