PAINTING PORTAL TO HOUSE’S PAST
Flemish landscape artist’s painting offers an insight into how stately home looked in the 18th century
Stunning view of how stately home looked in 18th century
A BIRD’S-EYE view, it captures everything in minute detail – from the colours of the flowers in the elaborate gardens to the splashing water from the numerous fountains.
Thanks to the arrival of a huge landscape painting, visitors to Chatsworth House can now see what it looked like in colour 300 years ago.
The painting – which fills an entire wall – shows the sight which would have confronted a visitor who had crossed the bleak moor from Chesterfield.
“In those days when travelling was very much a risky business – you might be held up by a bandit – to see this Baroque house and formal gardens in rural Derbyshire must have been incredible,” said curator Charles Noble.
It is thought the first Duke of Devonshire (inset), who created the house and its gardens, commissioned the painting by the Flemish landscape painter Jans Siberechts, around 1703, and made sure all the latest developments were added – including the famous Cascade water feature, then still in its early days. The painting also shows water spurting from the original willow tree fountain, of which the traveller Celia Fiennes wrote in 1696, “all of a sudden by turning a sluce it raines from each leafe and from the branches like a shower”.
Mr Noble said: “The house is not exactly as it was, but 90 per cent. The Baroque square house was changed in the 1830s when the North Wing was added. What has disappeared very much are the gardens.”
The gardens have since turned into lawn, and the Cascade has been lengthened. The Cascade House shown in the foreground is probably an addition by another artist around 1707 to 1710.
Mr Noble added: “The painting is a fabulous record and many things have changed since the early 1700s. We have the fun of seeing for the first time in colour parts of the garden that we only know about either through engravings or from the archives here.
“You can look in the gardens and see the fountains that are no longer there, the Neptune fountain on the west side of the house, or on the middle par terre, there are two water amusements never seen before – extraordinary things.
“We see in colour the first Duke’s squirting willow fountain made by Mr Ibeck in 1693 and the precursor of the willow tree fountain we see today.”
One mystery is why the painting did not go into the Devonshire collection, but that of another family.
It originally belonged to Admiral Edward Russell, later 1st Earl of Orford, a close friend and political colleague of the 1st and 2nd Dukes of Devonshire.
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.
When Mr Noble first saw the painting in 2008, it was covered in a thick orange varnish.
“When we were invited to see it prior to sale we found it had been cleaned and relined and was showing all that detail we had missed. It was amazing, one of those miracle moments,” he said.
The Duke of Devonshire added: “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.”