The duke’s favourite statue, Endymion, was commissioned by him from Canova. He was on tenterhooks when its arrival in this country was imminent, and his sister said it was no good talking to him, he could not concentrate and was beside himself with anticipation and worry. ‘What anxiety for its voyage to England! A cast of it, sent from Leghorn to Havre, was lost at sea: it was to have been copied in bronze at Paris.’ Often the long and hazardous sea voyage was too much for the safety of the precious cargo. Thorvaldsen’s Venus arrived broken in three places – ‘A bracelet, hiding the fracture of the arm, is one that the Princess Pauline procured when she went into mourning on the death of Napoleon, and she gave it me for this object.’
After Canova’s death, which affected him greatly, the duke concentrated on other sculptors working in Rome, many of them pupils of Canova; he bought works on their merit but also perhaps to reflect his friendship with the master. Thomas Campbell took fourteen years to complete the seated figure of Princess Pauline Borghese – ‘She was no longer young, but retained her beauty and charm…Campbell used to bring his modelling clay to a pavilion in her garden. The little luncheons on those occasions were delightful; for the Princess Borghese, when compelled not to talk about dress, was extremely entertaining and full of the histories of her time.’
At Chatsworth the duke’s love of stone begins to show in the long wing that he added to the house in the 1820s. It was built by Wyatville and includes the Sculpture Gallery, designed to display his new passion. There is marble in every shape, colour and form: pillars, vases, plinths, urns, tazzas, table-tops, heads, bodies and legs of men, women and children, mythological wings supporting mythological horses, dogs, babies and snakes, in every pattern of salami, brawn, liver sausage, galantine, ballantine, pâté, ham mousse, veined Stilton cheese, Christmas pudding and mincemeat known to the buyer for a delicatessen.
In the crowd of gods and goddesses, emperors and vestals, you will find works by Kessel, Gibson, Tenerani, Thorvaldsen, Schadow, Albacini, Trentanove, Bartolini, Westmacott, Rinaldi, Campbell, Finelli, Tadolini – and a greyhound bitch and her puppies by Joseph Gott, ‘the Landseer of marble’. But Canova remained the favourite. His tools are preserved behind a glass panel and are ‘certainly the last he employed’.
So much for the Bachelor Duke’s modern sculpture, which is such a feature at Chatsworth, admired again today as it was when first acquired. He was also an ardent collector of antiquities. At Smyrna in 1838, his catholic taste made him buy the Greek bronze head of Apollo, c. 470 BC, Chatsworth’s most important antique sculpture. It is now in the British Museum, having been taken for death duties in the 1950s. Wisely, he kept ancient and modern apart. Under a draughty stone arch at the entrance to the garden, he arranged the bits and pieces of architectural and other fragments collected on his journeys. When we cleared an impenetrable mass of rhododendrons in the garden in the 1980s we found a Greek altar from the island of Milos – mentioned by the duke in his Handbook and hidden for a hundred years. Each piece held a particular memory for him of a place or person and he wrote their detailed descriptions in his Handbook. Many came from Canova’s own collection, including a group noted by the duke as being ‘rich, busy and pleasing’ – words which conjure up the writer himself.
The most impressive and powerful of all are the two Egyptian figures of Sekhmet, goddess of war and strife, half-woman half-lion, hewn from dark granite, ‘sent home by a famous traveller and purchased by me in the New Road’. These massive creatures are from the Temple of Mut at Karnak and date from c. 1360 BC. I can’t make up my mind whether their powerful presence is malign or benign, but they certainly dominate the Chapel Passage.
Taste in works of art is notoriously susceptible to fashion and none more so than the neoclassical pieces in the Sculpture Gallery. Andrew’s Granny, who reigned at Chatsworth from 1908 to 1938, detested them and tried to lose them by scattering pieces around the house and even in the garden. She considered them to be so much bulky trash. A nadir was reached in the 1950s when an inventory valued the whole collection, including six works by Canova, at under £1,000. The sculptures have not changed – taste has.
October 2001
Bruce, Mario, Stella and Me
In early summer 1995, the photographer Bruce Weber was working on Long Island with our granddaughter Stella Tennant, who is a model. Bruce was planning to come to England and asked Stella if she knew of a house, perhaps in the country, which would make a good background for pictures of her in the next season’s clothes. So Stella telephoned to ask if they could come to Chatsworth. Bruce liked the idea of taking family pictures in a family house, so the plan was made.
The ‘shoot’, when Stella arrived with Bruce and his eleven assistants, was of a very different kind to when King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra came to shoot at the beginning of the last century. Pheasants were the target then and photographers were kept at bay.
The nursery was used as headquarters and in no time big trunks of clothes from some of the most famous fashion houses in Europe and America were unpacked and their contents hung on the portable rails usually kept near the entrance hall for people to hang coats when they arrive for charitable events. Three tables were covered in pairs of shoes of all colours of the rainbow, with the highest heels I ever saw. Bruce’s team wasted no time in getting to work and Stella was soon sitting in a chair being made up.
Chatsworth has been much photographed and it is difficult for someone who has never been before to find a new site, but Bruce saw at once where he was to work and chose original places for Stella to pose. Stella’s parents (our daughter Emma and son-in-law Toby Tennant), brother Eddie, sister Isabel with her two-year-old baby, Rosa, Andrew and myself were all brought into the ‘shoot’, as well as another granddaughter, Jasmine Cavendish, and our dogs.
The teamwork of Bruce’s assistants was fascinating to watch. They seemed to sense when he needed them and surrounded him with all he required – one holding the silver umbrella to shade the lens, others with extra cameras changing films at top speed. Joe McKenna, the stylist in charge of how the clothes, shoes and hats looked on Stella (who is as much at home in the lambing sheds of her father’s farm in Scotland as she is on the catwalks of Paris, Milan and New York), is a master of his craft.
I have kept a few clothes I bought in Paris in the late 1950s and I showed them to Joe and his assistants. I had no idea they would be so interested. Forty-year-old Lanvin, Dior and Balmain garments were admired like Old Master paintings. They even photographed the labels as works of art in themselves.
The shape of 1950s coats and dresses has come back into fashion, as inevitably happens if you keep clothes long enough. So I was persuaded to put on one or two, while Stella wore the latest models. I am afraid the fifty-one-year difference in our ages was very apparent, but the Lanvin coat I wore at Ascot in 1959 compared well with Stella’s new one by Prada. Bruce made me wear a red satin Balmain ball dress of 1960 – beautiful, certainly, but out of place at even the grandest entertainment now – to feed my chickens. The iron spoon and tin bucket were a huge contrast to the exquisite satin.
I have seldom met such a charming group of people – so hard-working, oblivious of the long hours, dedicated to their profession and to Bruce himself, who is a shining star. We were all very sad when the trunks were packed, the troupe left and the nursery was quiet again.
Stella also wrote down her recollections of that weekend.
The floor outside the nursery at Chatsworth is covered in ancient linoleum. It has a warmth and a particular smell that always remind me of when I was young, especially the excitement of arriving for Christmas. However, I wasn’t opening presents last time I visited. I was there for a fashion shoot with Bruce and his team, along with all my family. It was strange to wander through those familiar rooms and find them full of alien clothes, shoes, bags and all kinds of accessories; even stranger to think that these were the same rooms that my sister Izzy and I had roller-skated wildly round as children.
My family was amazed by the scale of the shoot, which surpassed all their expectations. The weekend was a new experience for me too – introducing my family to fashion and fashion to my family. Not only did my family get an unusual insight into what my work involves, but the role reversals were hysterical – my brother in Prada! Mum in Blahnik shoes! I’ve never seen her in anything other than gardening trousers or knee-length tweed. Fortunately, Joe skilfully managed to put her in outfits that suited her and in which she felt comfortable.
Granny, on the other hand, has a fantastic collection of clothes. (Now that the 1950s look is back in, she is in serious danger of having her wardrobe raided by her granddaughters.) I was amused when some of the shoot rubbed off on her and, having looked through Joe’s wardrobe, she has placed an order for a Helmut Lang suit. Dad isn’t male-model sample size, so no orders there, but Mum’s getting some Manolos for Christmas.
As well as the fun and peculiar buzz of doing a fashion shoot with my family, it will be invaluable for us to have the pictures. In The Pursuit of Love, my great-aunt Nancy compared such family portraits to flies held in the amber of the moment…
In September 2006, another famous photographer worked at Chatsworth for a day: Mario Testino, a great friend of Stella. He took the pictures at her wedding in 1999, when she married his erstwhile assistant, David Lasnet, in the Scottish Borders on a May day of freezing cold and biting wind. The French guests had come dressed for summer and rued the choice, but it was the happiest day for all concerned.
Mario Testino, like Bruce Weber, is one of those all-time charmers who has the knack of making his subjects feel happy and at home in whatever outlandish garments the magazine decrees. He seemed to take a fancy to Chatsworth, which fired his enthusiasm and produced some memorable photographs for Vogue’s ninetieth anniversary issue. I described his visit in a letter to Paddy Leigh Fermor later that month.
So one Mario Testino, famous photographer, came in a helicopter with a crew of makeup, hairdresser, ‘fashion editor’ etc from London.
I’ve got a really beautiful dress, grand evening, given me by Oscar de la Renta, so that was my kit. They bound Stella’s legs, up to where they join her body, in tartan. A Union Jack flag hung from her waist & her top was what my father would have called meaningless.
Hair skewbald/piebald, all colours & stuck up in bits. THEN they produced ‘shoes’ with 6 inch heels. More stilts – she could hardly put one foot in front of the other, wobbling & toppling, and being 6’ tall she turned into 6’ 6”.
(I forgot to say to Paddy, a prop was a big toy lamb, legs dangling as though dead.)
We looked just like that Grandville drawing of a giraffe dancing with a little monkey. I was the monkey.
Fashion is as queer as folks.
July 1995
Romney Marsh and Other Churches
One of the great charms of England is the variety of country. You drive fifty miles and find yourself in a different world: different voices, landscapes, soil, breeds of sheep and, most noticeable, different buildings. But one feature is constant throughout the towns and villages of every county, and that is the churches and cathedrals. Not constant in date, shape, make or style but in the fact that they are there and, until not so long ago, that their towers or spires were the tallest buildings in the landscape, drawing attention to themselves as landmarks and proclaiming their importance to locals and travellers alike.
It is difficult to decide on a favourite. For myself, I so much prefer English churches to the more theatrical and dusty European ones, however magnificent their architecture. I so agree with the English nanny who was taken with her charges to Chartres Cathedral and, when they came out into the fresh air so beloved by nannies, was asked what she thought of it: ‘Well, it’s a bad light for sewing in there.’
The construction of these buildings seems nothing short of miraculous. Who designed them? How many people worked on them and for how long? How was it done? How and where did they get the stone? And WHY? If we ponder these questions of village churches, what about cathedrals? Ely, which makes you gasp when you walk in and look up, or Wells with its magical Chapter House stairs. In some cases the answers to these questions are known – the dates, a few facts, such as the stone having been brought from Caen in France, it being comparatively easy to bring by sea. Easy? Well, it depends on what you mean by easy.
What is difficult to evaluate today, and can hardly be imagined, is the faith that inspired these incredible buildings. It is this that gives them an indefinable sense of wonder. I find it intensely moving to go into a church alone, to allow the atmosphere to overwhelm me and take me for a few minutes back into the past, to drink in the peace which such an atmosphere brings. It eases the mind and puts the bothers of everyday life into perspective.
The fourteen churches that come under the Romney Marsh Churches Trust are truly amazing, from the smallest – St Thomas Becket, Fairfield, with its inspired white-painted pews, edged in black, that are unlike any other church interior – to the Cathedral of the Marsh, the vast St George at Ivychurch, which must have been too big for the community it served even seven centuries ago. Why that size? The churches are spread around Rye, on the wetlands that support the Romney Marsh sheep (which make such good eating). In our crowded country, the area is a haven of peace; the ancient roads that thread their way past dykes and through flood plains are emptier than those of the remote Peak District two hundred miles north.
Someone sent me a newspaper cutting with an article about walking on Romney Marsh next to an article about walking in Derbyshire. What caught my eye was the grumble of the Marsh walker when he came to a ploughed field on his way to a church, and sticky grey earth piled on to his boots, thus inconveniencing him. More space was given to the mud on his boots than to his description of the church. I wonder how he would have reacted to the slightly bigger inconveniences which must have beset the builders and congregations of centuries ago.
I think it is simpler when you’re old. I suppose long experience of the trivia of life makes one glad to be able to absorb the other sort of experiences, to be able to consider the wonder of buildings, of their builders, of the generations of preachers and lay people who guarded their sanctity and the centuries of prayer that have left their mark. How else can you explain what one feels?
When my sisters and I were children at Asthall, in Oxfordshire, the churchyard was almost in our garden. Although we weren’t allowed to, we used to watch the funerals from the nursery window, fascinated. My sister Jessica and I fell into a newly dug grave once and our much older sister Nancy pronounced fearful bad luck on us for the rest of our lives. We must have driven the grown-ups mad, writing Greta Garbo and Maurice Chevalier in the church visitors’ book. I’ve since read in John Piper’s brilliant piece in the 1937 Shell Guide to Oxfordshire that ‘the inside of Asthall Church is like a church furnisher’s catalogue’, and that ‘there is a fourteenth-century canopied effigy of Lady Joan de Cornwall’. All very fine but lost on me at the age of six.
Later we moved to Swinbrook, a few miles from Asthall, still on the River Windrush. It has a church of great beauty which contains the amazing early seventeenth-century monuments of the Fettiplace family – stone men lying full-length on their sides, heads supported on their hands, elbows resting on stone pillows – described by John Piper as ‘intelligent, wicked looking former lords of the village, lying on slabs like proud sturgeon in enormous wall tombs’.
There is also a big wooden board in the church at Swinbrook with the Ten Commandments painted in a beautiful script. Another board announces that in 1617, £10 15s 9d was left by a benefactor with instructions that the income from this sum be used for ‘charitable purposes’ for the poor of the parish. But the last sentence dashes all hopes for the unlucky poor. ‘This money is now lost,’ it states.
My father used to take the collection at services and would pass round the plate twice to our aunt, his penniless sister. This happened every Sunday and the
second time round she used to frown at him. He would remain in front of her looking hopeful until she slapped his hand, which set us off on the peculiar agony of church giggles.
I suppose there is no church in the country that does not have a memorial to its sons killed in the two world wars. Sometimes whole families of young men are listed as having died. If one of several brothers survived the Great War to father a son, as like as not that son’s name will be among the dead of the last war. These memorials set one wondering what this country would be like now had those wonderful people, many of them just boys when they died, survived.
We know that regular congregations of churchgoers are getting smaller (except, I must say, at our village church in Derbyshire where I believe the church is full for two reasons: firstly, because the vicar is loved and, secondly, because he uses the 1662 Prayer Book and King James Version of the Bible). But the milestones of life – christenings, weddings and funerals – are still celebrated in church. The people who do not go regularly to church but who use it, as it were, for these purposes take it for granted that it will be there when they need it and would be dismayed if it suddenly wasn’t.
Even more surprising are the memorial services to people who made a point of not going to church all through their adult lives. Yet when they die their relations feel they must arrange a memorial service in church. There seems to be a deep necessity for saying the final goodbye in the safety and sanctity of such surroundings. Humans have a need for a faith in which they can immerse themselves, even for a short time, to celebrate or to mourn. When the mind is all over the place, the Church provides something ancient and lasting – a feeling of stability that nothing else can equal.
All in One Basket Page 23
