The beautiful drawing room faces south and west. It has an impressive typically Lutyens mantel-piece.

The Chippendale mirrors were a gift from Lord Lothian under which are two ornate and heavily carved giltwood console tables with ochre marble tops in the style of the period of George I. The Lavar Kirman carpet has panels of Islamic script with quotations from various Persian poets and prophets.

The works of art in this room reflect the period in which the Embassy was built and first occupied. The inter-war years were a period of enormous productivity in British painting. These works are representative of the different styles that emerged during this period.

The influence of Impressionism can be seen in Ginner’s Novar Cottage, as well as Royle’s Corfe Castle. Burra was a member of Paul Nash’s Unit One group of artists, and was influenced by the surrealism that emerged in Nash’s work of the 1920s. Both Nash and Ginner were official war artists of the First World War. Duncan Grant’s Still Life Lime Juice predates the building of the Embassy by over a decade, but it is representative of the early 20th century art of the Bloomsbury Group that influenced subsequent painters.

In the anteroom is a painting of An Unknown Man by Hogarth, and opposite it is Barbara Hepworth’s Ballet, Giselle, 1950.

The Morning Room
This room is used as a small dining room. It has a window overlooking the main staircase from which Lutyens intended that children might watch guests arrive.

The works in the room demonstrate the impact of American Abstract Expressionism on British Art of the 1960s and 1970s. Abstract Expressionism was the most powerful force in American painting in the years following the end of the Second World War.

Central characteristics of this movement were the use of paint to convey or create emotive responses and an evident enjoyment in the material possibilities of paint. Some British artists of this generation, like Peter Lanyon, exhibited their work in the United States and were brought into contact with the Abstract Expressionists there; others, like John Hoyland, saw the American paintings at an important exhibition in London in the late 1950s. Both Peter Lanyon and Roger Hilton were involved in artistic movements in St Ives in the 1950s and 1960s.

Move on to the Dining Room.