The physical interiors of early modern England exist now only in fragments or later re-modellings, but piecing together this evidence shows how care for materials, improvisation and a willingness to use painted illusion gave internal spaces a degree of visual cohesion. Three other kinds of evidence offer more to the historian: the documentary sources of commissions and inventories, the small but significant number of representations in paint and print, the descriptions of contemporaries, all of which sometimes complement each other but often tell us more about their various and highly individual modes and conventions of recording than give us a composite understanding.
Maurice Howard is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Sussex. His books include The Early Tudor Country House 1490-1550 (1987), The Tudor Image (1995), and The Building of Elizabethan and Jacobean England (2007). He co-authored The Vyne: A Tudor House Revealed (2003), and co-edited Painting in Britain 1500-1630 (2015). He was Senior Subject Specialist for the Tudor and Stuart sections of the British Galleries at the V&A, and is a former President of the Society of Antiquaries of London and the current President of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.