This richly illustrated book focuses on the extraordinary international networks resulting from the diaspora of more than 200,000 refugees who left France in the late 17th century to join communities already in exile spread far and wide. First-generation Huguenot refugees included hundreds of trained artists, designers, and craftsmen. Beyond the French borders, they raised the quality of design and workshop practice, passing on skills to their apprentices; sons, godsons, cousins, and to successive generations, who continued to dominate output in the luxury trades. Although silver and silks are the best-known fields with which Huguenot settlers are associated, their significant contribution to architecture, ceramics, design, clock and watchmaking, engraving, furniture, woodwork, sculpture, portraiture, and art education provides fascinating insight into the motivation and resolve of this highly skilled diaspora. Thanks to a sophisticated network of Huguenot merchants, retailers, and bankers who financed their production, their wares reached a global market.

Boughton House in Northamptonshire is a house of contrasts. Its magnificent, and at the same time, formal exterior in the French style gives little hint of the rambling Tudor manor house embedded within. Involvement with the law and politics at the highest level generated the wealth of its founders and builders, but enlightened artistic patronage and a strong aesthetic sense have been characteristic of many generations of the Dukes of Montagu and of Buccleuch since the 17th century. This book looks at the house and its furnishings.