Bird’s-eye view of estate on show at Chatsworth
VISITORS CAN now discover how Chatsworth House appeared in the early 18th century thanks to the arrival of a landscape painting giving a detailed bird’s eye view of the estate.
A View of Chatsworth by Jan Siberechts, painted circa 1703, is now on display at the stately home in Derbyshire after being acquired for the Devonshire Collection, one of the largest and most significant private art collections in Britain.
This large-scale, detailed painting is one of a series of landscape paintings of the house and garden detailing major changes through the past 400 years.
Until now a painting of the house and garden in the 1st Duke of Devonshire’s time was missing from the collection. The current Duke of Devonshire, Peregrine Cavendish, said: “I am extremely excited that this landscape has joined the Devonshire Collection.
“It will be of great interest to our visitors as it portrays on a grand scale a complete view of Chatsworth, house, garden and park as built and laid out by the 1st Duke and this enables us all to know so much more about Chatsworth at the very beginning of the 18th century”.
This bird’s-eye view of Chatsworth originally belonged to Admiral Edward Russell, later 1st Earl of Orford. It passed by descent to his great-niece Letitia Tipping who married the 1st Lord Sandys in 1725, and has remained in the Sandys family until now.