All in One Basket

by Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire

  A sponsor was soon found in the Ford Motor Company. The two governments provided the horrendous sum for insurance and the plan was under way. The masterstroke of the organisers was the appointment of Gervase Jackson-Stops, the National Trust’s architectural adviser, as chooser and collector of the works of art. He came to Chatsworth many times in search of what he called ‘D.O.’s’, Desirable Objects, and each time he added something he said he MUST have. No doubt he did the same at Burghley House, Castle Howard, Woburn Abbey and the rest. Such is his charm, with an appalling stammer that he does not give in to, and his unrivalled knowledge and memory of what is where, Andrew found it impossible to refuse him anything. He would be the best burglar ever. He and Carter Brown commuted between Washington and England for months, choosing and persuading the owners till they got (very nearly) everything they wanted.

  When they had completed the list of D.O.’s from Chatsworth, Andrew got a letter saying Thank you very much, it is very kind of you to lend so much but they are all dirty and lots are broken, so will you please have them cleaned and mended before they go? No, I will not, answered Andrew. You can either have them as they are or you can’t have them at all. I believe other owners answered in the same sort of way, so poor old Gervase was in a bit of a fix. I don’t know how he and Carter managed it but in the event the Getty Foundation paid for cleaning and restoration. The glowing condition of the D.O.’s will make the pairs to those returning look a bit glum.

  You have no idea (but I’m sure you have) of the time it takes to pack and send such an extraordinary collection of objects, varying in size, make and shape, from Canova’s Three Graces from Woburn Abbey to a Fabergé snuff box from Luton Hoo, not to mention Lady Lambton’s tiara and the colossal marble foot from the Chapel Passage at Chatsworth. The great packing began in July 1985 and the last things left Chatsworth in early October. Each had its own box or packing case, made to measure and lined with the sort of thing I wish my mattress was made of, so they reclined in luxury and safety while crossing the Atlantic until unpacked with tender care by the white-gloved lads at the National Gallery. We were given photographs of what was taken and these were put up where the missing objects belong, with a notice saying ‘This Work of Art…’ to explain their absence.

  Meanwhile the National Gallery nearly lost its director. When Carter Brown was driving from Chatsworth to Castle Howard in the summer of 1984, he went the wrong way down a dual carriageway of the A1 and had a head-on crash with a lorry. He was badly hurt and spent weeks in hospital in York. Fortunately, he made a good recovery but it left him with a lot of pain from broken bones.

  I happened to be in Washington six months before the exhibition opened. At the time, Gervase and the Gallery’s brilliant designers were working from models of the proposed rooms, with all the objects cut out to scale. The part of the Gallery set aside for the exhibition was then just high white walls without a hint of the transformation that was to take place during the summer.

  As time drew near for the private view, the organisers set themselves another fearful task – as though they hadn’t already done enough. They planned a dinner at the National Gallery for the lenders and, more complicated still, they arranged for us all to be entertained at dinner the following night in private houses in Washington. Now Washington hostesses are famous, as we who are old enough to remember the musical Call Me Madam will know. I would not have wanted to be the person to decide who dined with whom and I believe the lobbying for bagging the more so-called glamorous of the English guests was interesting.

  A tour of Virginia houses was also arranged, which lasted several days, and this was taken up by many of the lenders and was greatly appreciated and enjoyed by all who took part. One thing which delighted me was that it never stopped raining all the time we were there. I shall never feel guilty again when our American guests find they have hit a wet spell in this country.

  To return to the exhibition, I went round at leisure four times. I should have liked to see it forty more. It is the best exhibition I have ever seen, really faultless. It isn’t often you can say that about anything. Inside that ultra-modern building, the designers recreated rooms from Tudor times till now, embellished with things familiar and unfamiliar. They chose not only the great works of art, known by all interested in such things, but curiosities and very private possessions – a number of which had been most generously lent by people whose houses are not open to the public. I say that, and underline it, because it is obviously good for a house like Chatsworth to be represented, but for someone like Lord Halifax, for instance, to lend his superb Titian, Portrait of a Young Man, is very public-spirited indeed. I remember seeing it in his human-sized drawing room in Yorkshire. It gives you the shock of recognition of genius. Nothing can compare with the way the Young Man seemed to be not just on canvas but in the room and ready to talk with the rest of the company. Such pictures on exhibition always start a spate of enquiries from people wanting a special visit to a private house, besides which there is security to be considered.

  There is no charge to go to the exhibition but visitors pass through a turnstile so numbers are known. You enter a huge modern building with one or two shockingly ugly mobiles floating overhead. Then the first room takes you straight into an atmosphere of Hatfield House or Haddon Hall or Penshurst Place. The jewel-like beauty of the Elizabethan portraits and the extraordinary Lumley Horseman (carved in oak and painted in oils, with stirrups, bit and axe made of iron – the earliest known equestrian statue, from Lumley Castle, Durham) silence the crowds who seem to have wandered into church.

  The next room is redolent of Hardwick Hall or Parham Park – a Long Gallery faithfully reproduced. The windows are leaded; the ever so slightly tinted glass was made in Germany. There is matting on the floor, admittedly not rush but the nearest thing to it, and the portraits of royal people, explorers and other worthies in the extravagant clothes of the time warrant going all the way to Washington to see. Of all the rooms in the exhibition perhaps this Long Gallery reminds you most of the real thing.

  From here you pass into a sort of giant silver-cupboard dominated by a glass-fronted wall of shelves, laden with incredible objects, from the jewelled Beaufort garter badges from Badminton to the vast Burghley wine cooler – a silver bath of fearsome proportions which was one of the extravagances the press fastened on in their reviews.

  Every now and again I came across something familiar in these most unfamiliar surroundings and I began consciously to look for Chatsworth things while other lenders looked for theirs. It reminded me of before the war when it was the fashion at smart weddings to display the presents. On one occasion my mother had been much amused by an old couple going round tables covered in grand things saying, ‘Where’s our blotter?’ Listening to the English voices was just like that, only it was, ‘Where’s our Rembrandt?’

  When we reached the early to mid-eighteenth century, I felt more and more at home as Lord Burlington’s loved possessions seemed almost to take over with the Grand Tour and what the guidebook refers to as ‘Souvenirs from Italy’. Some souvenirs these! There is a room devoted to Lord Burlington and the Palladian Revolution, which has several pictures of Chiswick Villa with furniture and other designs by William Kent, Burlington’s distinguished friend. Most of these are now at Chatsworth.

  You progress to an Adam room. Not my favourite period with its small, finicky and ladylike designs, but I know I am in a minority and I have to admire the skill of its execution. Here one is impressed once more by the meticulous attention to detail of the designers. As in all the rooms, the cornices and other architectural details are faithfully reproduced. Some of the furniture is on plinths a few inches high, which gives them importance and ensures that they are not kicked by passing feet. But the cleverness is that the plinths are made of polished boards of the same wood that was used for floors at the time when the furniture was made – oak in the earlier rooms, wide boards and other woods as we progress through the centuries. This little touc
h gives authenticity to the piece; it rings true. I don’t think I noticed it the first time round but then it impressed me as much as the specially made silk on the walls, woven in Suffolk. The compilers of the catalogue are too modest to describe all that they did and there are no photographs of their ‘rooms’, but I hope somewhere all their huge efforts are documented. It would serve as a pattern for anyone trying to do something similar in the future.

  All that is missing in this perfection is evidence of the désordre britannique, the hallmark of the English country house. A couple of toys (one broken), a sofa covered in newspapers, stray novels, an old dog flopped down by the fireplace and the smell of wet macs would have nailed any of the rooms as having been well and truly lived in by the same family in the same way for generations.

  One of the two things in the show that attracted the most attention (along with the Burghley silver wine-cooler) is the bed from Calke Abbey. The bed is English with Chinese hangings – embroidery of coloured silks and gold thread, close-covered on an oak and pine framework. It has been illustrated in colour in Country Life and is striking because of its intricacy of detail and brilliant colours. (Some of the trimmings look as if they ought to be on a ball dress rather than a piece of furniture.) It’s the very opposite of today’s fashion for pastel colours and is very refreshing indeed. It was found in packing cases at Calke, having arrived probably in 1734, and was never set up – which accounts for its immaculate state of preservation.

  I happened to be in the room with the bed while Henry Harpur Crewe of Calke was being interviewed by an American television company. It was as good as a play. His questioners were earnest and polite, so unlike their English counterparts who are neither. ‘Is it true that this bed arrived in your house two hundred and fifty years ago and was never unpacked?’ ‘Yes, absolutely true.’ Pause. ‘Why was that?’ ‘Well, I suppose they had other things to do. Oh no, they didn’t unpack it.’ As though it was perfectly ordinary, which of course it was at Calke. I couldn’t resist saying, ‘Henry, do get into that bed.’ And then the television people knew they were among a lot of loonies.

  And so you progress to the Rotunda, designed to show sculptures, through the Regency furniture and on to Victorian pictures where there are Landseers, including the dogs’ Trial by Jury from Chatsworth, and a marvellous giant Edward Lear of a Corsican forest from Beaufront Castle. There is some amazing furniture from Osborne House, made from antlers and even stags’ neatly divided slots (hooves), produced in Germany and belonging to the Queen.

  Then on through Edwardian portraits by John Singer Sargent, John Lavery and Alfred Munnings. In Munnings’ portrait The Princess Royal on Portumna (1930), the princess is painted on the grey horse given her as a wedding present by ‘The Hunting Women of Ireland’. The artist and sitter had three consecutive sittings during the Craven meetings at Newmarket. Munnings described it as his ‘best equestrian portrait’, adding, ‘The conditions under which I worked, including the weather, were the best I have ever known.’

  In Sybil Cholmondeley, Countess of Rocksavage (1922), a late work by Sargent, the sitter wears a copy of a sixteenth-century court dress specially commissioned from Worth, which cost over £200. Artist and sitter had a ‘month of sittings in the fog’, after which Sargent announced, ‘Sybil is lovely. Some days she is positively green’, a compliment apparently.

  There is a brightly-lit showcase with four tiaras and a library, which by its nature is almost impossible to reproduce satisfactorily, but the designers have made a good stab at it with some open books in showcases. The first day the exhibition was open to the public, I heard an English reporter ask a group of women what they liked best. Without hesitation they all said the tiaras. There is no accounting for taste. The doll’s house from Nostell Priory attracts a great deal of attention; it is a wonder of its kind. I think the selectors began to lose heart after this and the present day tails off sadly, saved by some nostalgic photographs of house parties at Cliveden and elsewhere.

  Not surprisingly, the exhibition had rave reviews from the press, with a few predictable exceptions. To give nothing but praise is more than journalists can bear and some papers had to be different. My son went on to Kentucky, to the centre of the American racing industry, and there an Irish-American paper had some rough stuff to say about the wicked English aristocrats grinding the faces of the poor to enable them to show off to one another by their extravagant purchases of works of art. The New York Review of Books gave a depressingly negative account, mostly directed at the owners because even that paper had to admit the quality of the exhibits. American House & Garden was scathing about the lenders in a tiresome, gossipy kind of way, but on the whole the reviewers gave it its due. Several have harped on the value of the exhibits and have hinted that because they have been chosen to go to Washington, their value has increased by 20 per cent (how they arrived at that figure I don’t know) and that some owners will be inclined to sell, having had this unrivalled opportunity for inspection by American antique dealers and collectors. Time will show if these journalists are right.

  As well as being generously entertained in private houses, as only Americans know how, we were also given tea at the White House by Mrs Reagan. This outing had its comic side. Among the heaps of paper with itinerary and invitations was an instruction that some other form of identification, as well as the invitation, must be produced for entry into the White House. Few of us had read or even noticed this, so we queued up at a lodge in the pouring rain while bemused guards had to decide if the motley crowd really were the Duke and Duchess of This-and-That or assassins. No one minded queuing or the rain – all are very used to both – but it was very funny indeed to see this rather bedraggled crowd of English grandees. One or two did look unlikely customers, chiefly Lord Neidpath who is always oddly dressed. For Mrs Reagan’s tea he wore a dirty white suit with a broad black stripe, a high wing-collar and gym shoes, and he hadn’t shaved for three days. However, he must have satisfied the police because I saw him at the sandwiches later on.

  When we got to about tenth in the queue to meet Mrs Reagan, we were stopped by a policewoman who showed us how to shake hands – something that has never happened to me before, but now I know just how to do it. We all managed and the First Lady stood patiently as we filed by. Then we could wander about the rooms as we liked. They are most beautifully kept; everything in spanking condition and just as it should be, flowers, carpets and curtains all gleaming.

  The dinner at the National Gallery was an eye-opener. In my long and spoilt life I have seen many wonderful entertainments but this had an originality which made it memorable. About four hundred people, I believe, all dressed in their best, which once in a while is a pleasure to see, were seated at round tables for eight. The tablecloths were made of flowery cotton – a nod to English chintz. Then something clever, which I have never seen before: on the tables, instead of the usual little bouquet of flowers of just the right height so you can see the people opposite, there were tall, narrow vases on plinths with a huge high arrangement – perfect for the immensely high space we were in. You couldn’t call it a room, it was a sort of first-floor hall which goes to the roof.

  The waiters in Washington are said to be out-of-work actors. I don’t know whether this is so but they certainly act being waiters very well. They are handsome, smiling young men, apparently enjoying themselves as much as the guests and it is extraordinary how this atmosphere pervaded the whole place – a gala if ever there was one. I sat next to one Mr Schultz, who I suddenly realised was the foreign secretary, and on the other side Mr Petersen, the managing director of the Ford Motor Company.

  The memory of all this excitement will remain with me. In tangible form there is the catalogue. ‘It weighs as much as a salmon and is as difficult to hold,’ someone said. True. It is also a work of scholarship, of utter fascination – history distilled through works of art. I cannot recommend it too strongly as a book to turn to for minutes or hours; every item is illustrated and i
t is beautifully written. Expensive, I know, but worth every penny.

  March 1986

  In 1995, dear good Gervase Jackson-Stops died. The unforgettable experience of this exhibition was due to him, more than anyone. I hope he realises, when he looks down on us who remain, how we all revelled in his creation.

  Marble Mania

  ‘I have made several journeys into Italy, and at Rome the love of marble possesses most people like a new sense.’ So wrote the 6th Duke of Devonshire, the ‘Bachelor Duke’, in his Handbook of Chatsworth and Hardwick of 1844.

  On his first visit to Rome in 1819 he was indeed possessed. He soon translated his new passion into reality, and marbles, both ancient and modern, arrived at Chatsworth by the dozen. His first purchase, for £2,000, was of two alabastro cotognino columns which he described as ‘the most beautiful in the world’. The now familiar story of an embargo on the export of antiquities put a stop to the transaction (Pope Pius VII claimed them for his new gallery at the Vatican) but the experience only increased the Bachelor Duke’s desire for these wonders.

  As always with the duke, friendship with an artist fuelled his wish to own some of the artist’s work, and he held the charming Antonio Canova in high regard. He was introduced to the sculptor by his stepmother, Elizabeth Duchess of Devonshire (Bess Foster of the famous ménage à trois was his father’s mistress and also the beloved friend of his mother, Georgiana). The widowed Bess lived in Rome where she organised and paid for what is now called a ‘dig’, which revealed the surrounding road and pavement in the Roman Forum as well as many fragments of antiquity.

  The duke was often to be found in Canova’s studio and before long he had acquired the seated figure of Napoleon’s mother, Madame Mère – ‘The old lady herself used to receive me at Rome, and rather complained of my possessing her statue, though my belief is that it was sold for her advantage’; a bust of Madame Mère; a bust of Petrarch’s Laura – ‘entirely formed by his own chisel’; Hebe, bought from Lord Cawdor – ‘Hebe came on springs by post from Wales’; and a colossal head of Napoleon – ‘Canova kept the large bust of Napoleon in his bed-room till his dying day. He finished it from the study of the colossal statue, now in the possession of the Duke of Wellington.’