'My dad always said it was the blood of the maid who had been killed. The painting was like having a thriller on the wall': The art that will get your guests talking

Who would have thought the victim of a murder could make a piece of good dining-room art? Yet, for those sitting around the table at Ston Easton Park, Somerset, it proved an ideal conversation starter. It brought out the Agatha Christie in everyone and, in its own dark way, did exactly what dining-room art is meant to do: give people something to talk about.

The story of the painting made a particular impression on author Emma Craigie, not least because the murder was meant to have taken place at Ston Easton itself, where she spent an influential part of her childhood. ‘The painting was called Four Servants of Ston Easton Estate. It was by Thomas Beach, a pupil of Reynolds,’ she explains. ‘It featured, as its name suggests, four servants (unusual in itself), one of whom, a maid, was said to have been murdered. In an attic room of the house, there was a dark stain on the floor. My dad always said it was the blood of the maid who had been killed. The painting was like having a thriller on the wall.’

Not every house can count on an artistic murder mystery to entertain guests, however, and the question of what makes good dining-room art is an issue that new country-house owners also appear to be facing: Charlie Thomas of Bonhams has noticed that, post-covid, ‘many people who had lived in major cities moved into much larger houses and suddenly found themselves with extra rooms to fill — including the dining room. They started with the table, chairs and sideboard and then realised they needed the art on the walls, too’. What, indeed, were they to put?

The answer, it seems, is that almost anything can work, as long as it fulfils certain criteria. ‘Bear in mind,’ says art dealer, writer and broadcaster Philip Mould, ‘that a dining room is a place where people are often seated in the same spot for two or three hours — without escape. Its walls, therefore, offer a unique opportunity for contemplation.’ Historically, Mould points out, the trend was for still lifes of animals, fowl, fruit, game and flowers, ‘the work of painters such as Melchior d’Hondecoeter and Jan Weenix, no doubt intended in part to aid digestion’. However, his own preference is for modern British portraits, ‘works that bring recognisable humanity to the gathering, spark conversation and offer someone else to commune with once you have exhausted those on your left and right’.

Like Mould, interior designer Jane Churchill believes that, ‘if you’ve got anything that’s going to be a talking point, into the dining room it goes’. She also stresses that, ‘when it comes to dining art, things are a lot less formal’ than in the past — the kitchen has increasingly become a favoured eating area. ‘Where once the old family portraits dominated rather dark dining rooms, we now see clients being a lot more creative and colourful. We had a client who had some wonderful Picasso prints that needed a good audience. Her solution was to display them on the far wall and create an open bookcase alongside, with pots, books and china. Her own favourite is a modern ink-on-paper piece featuring a bright pink butterfly by Sarah Graham.’

Don’t ‘put people off their food’ is the golden rule of natural-pigment paint evangelist and country-house interior designer Edward Bulmer. ‘Not long ago, I had dinner in a large Victorian dining room. Across the wide mahogany table was a full-length St Sebastian commanding the height of the wall and the centre of the room. The flesh oozing blood from the arrows of his martyrdom was hardly a conducive sight.’

Another tip is to choose pictures that appeal to the entire family, if the dining room is one that you use informally at home. In his Herefordshire home, Bulmer once hung The Flagellation of Christ at the Column by Jean Baptiste van Loo. ‘I saw it as a beautifully rendered figure. However, this is not what my daughters felt and one day they asked if we really had to have all the “old pictures” in that room.’ The new works he’s placed on the walls are now ‘a mixture of commissions and acquisitions, all from friends, and so have become a much more meaningful talking point for all generations’.

Statistically, says Thomas, reflecting on content sales handled by Bonhams, ‘if you are going to work out a percentage of what we see in country-house dining rooms, portraits win’. When it comes to what is actually bought, portraits by recognised artists are consistent successes. He calls ‘orphans’ the pictures where the identity of the sitters is unknown and suggests that one solution to the dining-room art conundrum could be to buy these orphans and cover the walls with them en masse. He has seen this done to striking effect in a French château.

The late Martin Miller, antiquarian and co-founder of the Miller’s Antiques Handbook & Price Guide, also used to do this incredibly well in his own houses, buying up quantities of similar prints or paintings to cover the walls with them. When it comes to portraits, however, interior designer Lucy Manners, who lives, with her husband, James Hervey-Bathurst, in the historic setting of Eastnor Castle, cautions that some country-house dining rooms can be very similar, ‘with walls hung exclusively with ancestors, many of whom are not particularly handsome or beautiful. It works better when there are some paintings by good artists and if those paintings are well lit, which is what we have done at Eastnor’.

In such cases, she recommends introducing variety into the hang: a strong modern work, for example, can reset the entire room. ‘I saw a Lucian Freud in one dining room recently, which worked very well because it was so strong.’ A particularly celebrated example of a dining room peppered with portraits is the State Dining Room at Knowsley Hall, Merseyside, home to the Earl and Countess of Derby. When Lady Derby, an art historian by training, arrived, she found that ‘all the portraits were jumbled up in no particular order’. She promptly took them down, unframed them for surface cleaning and frame conservation and rehung them in pairs, arranged in chronological order of succession. ‘I find them very useful for explaining the 600-year history of the Stanley family.’

Her personal favourite is a portrait with a distinctly pioneering backstory: Lady Margaret Beaufort, painted by the English School as a femme seule, a rare position that allowed her to administer her own estate rather than cede control to her husband, Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby. As Lady Derby notes, ‘Beaufort was both the first Countess of Derby and the King’s mother to Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty’.

In the family’s private dining room, where storytelling remains just as important, but the mood is more relaxed, the emphasis shifts from dynastic history to personal narrative. ‘We have a charming Romney of the children of the 12th Earl of Derby, Edward, later the 13th Earl, and his sister Charlotte, both looking rather wistful and sad. Their mother ran off when they were little and their father was pursuing a famous actress in London, so the siblings became very close.’

Perhaps one of the most extraordinary dining rooms in the country is at Trafalgar Park in Wiltshire. When political adviser Michael Wade bought the house (which he has since sold) in 1995, much of it had fallen into ruin. The first thing he did was to restore the old Music Room — featuring a mural painted by Giovanni Battista Cipriani in 1766 — and turn it into a dining room. ‘It depicted romantic paintings of Aphrodite, the Three Graces and Shakespeare. The ceiling and wall areas below the dado rail were decorated so as to frame the mural. The result was to provide a sumptuous immersion when dining at night by candlelight.’

It is a reminder that a mural is not merely decorative, but one of the most powerful ways of transforming a dining room into a complete visual experience — and one that certainly provides a talking point. Whether you opt for mythological murals or Picasso prints, the best dining-room pictures perform their oldest duty: they break the ice, warm up the conversation and occasionally steal the show.

Long before the pudding arrives, someone, somewhere, will always lean forward and ask: ‘So, what’s that one about?’ — especially if it happens to depict the victim of a murder.