Fantastic carvings among treasures saved for history
FOLLOWING on from last week’s piece on Chatsworth House, I wanted to find out more about the amazing wooden carvings of game birds and was delighted to discover so much more – all hail Google.
The game birds are crafted from limewood and my favourites, seen here, surround one of the wonderful fireplaces in the house. However, there appears to be a mystery surrounding who actually carried out the work.
After thorough investigation my money is on the hand of Samuel Watson.
In the late 17th and early 18th centuries England produced a number of highly-skilled carvers who drew inspiration from the genius of Grinling Gibbons and sometimes worked alongside him.
In some instances their work has wrongly been attributed to Gibbons himself, as has been and still is the case with Samuel Watson (16621715) of Heanor, who worked in wood and stone, alabaster and marble at Chatsworth House between 1691 and 1711.
Although Samuel Watson’s name occurs regularly in the payments made by the 1st and 2nd Dukes of Devonshire during these years, his work soon became associated with the name of Grinling Gibbons, which appears nowhere in the Chatsworth accounts.
It was not until the late 18th and early 19th centuries that Samuel’s son and grandson, Henry and White, both of whom worked as carvers and masons at Chatsworth, revealed Samuel’s drawings, accounts and contracts in a bid to honour his achievements.
My research also uncovered the fascinating story of how Chatsworth as we know it today nearly didn’t happen and it was only through a mixture of ingenuity, imagination and sheer bloody mindedness that the place was preserved for posterity.
The domain of Chatsworth was purchased by Sir William Cavendish and it was he in 1553 who began the old mansion, which after his death in 1557 was completed by his widow, Bess of Hardwick. Here in succeeding years Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned five times.
The present mansion includes the old Palladian pile started in 1687 by the first Duke of Devonshire and the north wing added in 1820.
With its 636,000 visitors a year, Chatsworth House may have become one of our greatest stately homes. However, life in the Duke of Devonshire’s grand mansion wasn’t always a bed of roses. In 1946, The Sphere painted a rather bleak and uninspiring outlook for the house, a stark contrast to its present-day fortunes.
Back then, ‘one of the private treasure-houses of the nation’ was reduced to one housemaid, a sole survivor of a pre-war domestic staff of 40.
Chatsworth House was without a duke. Taxation at the time made it impossible for the 10th Duke, Edward William Spencer Cavendish, to live there in the old style, while the servant problem was almost insuperable.
The future of Chatsworth eventually rested on his second son, Andrew Robert Buxton Cavendish.
The Chatsworth estate was saddled with debt. Death duties, liabilities from previous incumbents and a depression in British agriculture all contributed to its downfall.
While Chatsworth was mothballed, everything was being done to preserve its treasures, including its magnificent library, with its 35,000 books, many being irreplaceable first editions and the art collection, including canvases by Murillo Van Eyck, Titian, Reynolds and other masters.
A small staff of experts were brought in to repair years of inevitable neglect.
Pictures were cleaned and the books whose leather was becoming brittle were dressed in ointment developed by the British Museum.
When the 10th Duke of Devonshire died in 1950 there were death duties of £7 million.
The 11th Duke, Andrew Cavendish, along with his wife Deborah (‘Debo’), fought hard to keep the estate, selling tens of thousands of acres of land, transferring Hardwick Hall to the National Trust in lieu of taxes and selling major works of art.
Chatsworth House opened to the public in 1949, but it would take until 1959 for the 11th Duke of Devonshire to move back into the house.
It was a happy outcome and the rest, as they say, is history.