From du Cerceau to du Cerceau: Scottish aristocratic architectural taste, c. 1570 to c. 1750

The 1990 exhibition curated by Charles McKean and Deborah Howard was the decisive victory in a war waged for a century between those arguing that French influence was pervasive in the elite architecture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Scotland and those claiming it was overwhelmingly a home-grown phenomenon. This, together with Charles's subsequent publications and especially The Scottish Chateau, demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that there was extensive French influence. This article extends this debate by focusing on the influence of the printed pattern books of Jacques Androuet du Cerceau (fl. c.1545–c.1585) on one house, Careston Castle, five miles west of Brechin in Angus, and goes on to suggest that their influence pervaded Scottish architecture much more widely than hitherto realised, only fading after 1745.