Pablo Bronstein at Waddesdon Manor: The Temple of Solomon and its Contents

From July to November 2025, the celebrated artist Pablo Bronstein presented a bold exhibition featuring a new body of work in response to Waddesdon Manor as a Jewish country house, with a grand assembly of paintings exploring the legendary Temple of Solomon.

Described in detail in the Bible, no one knows what The Temple looked like and for centuries it has been reimagined by artists and designers, archaeologists, theorists and ideologues. As Oliver Wainwright explained in his interview with Bronstein in The Guardian, "In a brazen act of architectural cosplay, the artist has inserted himself into the minds of two contestants for a fictitious version of the Prix de Rome, a prominent prize for students of architecture in 19th-century Paris, as they compete to recreate Solomon’s Temple in their own image".

The interview explains how Bronstein “became fascinated by the construction of Jewish identity in the 19th century,” The work was commissioned alongside the wider Jewish Country Houses research project. 

And, as Artlyst points out, "Responding to its identity as a Jewish country house, Bronstein draws a subtle thread between the Temple’s mystique and the aesthetic politics of diasporic display".

See the exhibition page on the Waddesdon website and watch a video featuring Pablo Bronstein at Pablo Bronstein: The Temple of Solomon and its Contents at Waddesdon Manor.