Chatsworth: the transformations behind a vision of timeless perfection

“Of all the great things that the English have invented”, wrote Henry James in his 1883 book Portraits of Places, “the most perfect, the most characteristic . . . is the well-appointed, well administered, well-filled country house.” Wandering around the library of such a house in winter is to experience, according to James, “the compendious genius” of the English, in the setting of their most timeless invention.

Chatsworth in Derbyshire, home to the Dukes of Devonshire (otherwise known by their family name of Cavendish) for more than 300 years, might be considered the epitome of James’s ideal. It is certainly well filled, home to an extensive private art collection. It could also be considered well administered, having been transformed in the second half of the 20th century under the aegis of the 11th Duchess, Deborah.

After opening to the public in 1948, it is now one of the most visited stately homes in the country, attracting, pre-pandemic, more than 600,000 visitors in 2019.

And yet, as I discovered when writing Chatsworth, Arcadia, Now, a book about the history of the house and the Devonshire Collections, the sense of tradition and timelessness you might assume of such a place is a phantom.

Over the centuries, Chatsworth has been shaped by a dizzying series of transformations, each new duke (the current, Peregrine Cavendish, is the 12th) rearranging, undoing, reconfiguring the work of their predecessors, stamping their own vision on the place. Rather than reassure us with a vision of unchanging perfection, as Henry James had it, such a house is better placed to prepare us for the shock of the new.

The changes are everywhere. The 1st Duke’s house, built around 1700, is only partially recognisable from the painting made at the time by the Flemish artist Jan Siberechts. Under the 4th Duke, in the 18th century, the garden and landscape were given a then radical makeover by Capability Brown, including diverting the River Derwent and changing the surrounding scenery to make it appear more “natural”.

During the 19th century, the most far-reaching changes were made by the 6th Duke, who built a sprawling north wing that completely changed the profile of the house. It was designed by the fashionable architect Jeffry Wyatville, who also redid much of the interior.

The 6th Duke, known as “Hart”, was little concerned with preserving the historic character of Chatsworth, creating a gallery filled with contemporary art in the form of sculpture by the Italian artist Antonio Canova and his followers.

In 1893, Chatsworth was one of the first large houses in the country to install electrical lighting. The shifting scenery seemed only to accelerate during the 20th century. One of the most radical acts was the relinquishing of a group of treasures from the collections, including the “Chatsworth Apollo”, one of the few surviving pieces of bronze sculpture from antiquity, and also Hardwick Hall, another Cavendish house, to meet astronomical death duties — 80 per cent of all family assets — after the death of the 10th Duke in 1950.

These were part of essential changes made by the 11th Duke, Andrew, and his wife Deborah Devonshire. Where so many large houses were being destroyed — more than 270 in the three decades after 1945 were documented in the 1974 V&A exhibition The Destruction of the Country House 1875-1975 — Chatsworth confounded expectations and defined what a successfully run country house should be — not only well filled and well administered, but also well visited.

This embrace of transformation continues. As part of a decade of work completed in 2018, overseen by the architect Peter Inskip and the interior designer David Mlinaric, with the help of art historian Jonathan Bourne, a new gallery was constructed on the second floor.

This is the setting for an installation by ceramicist Jacob van der Beugel — biscuit-coloured panels of porcelain covering the walls, patterns of jutting elements forming abstract portraits of the Duke and Duchess and their family based on their DNA code. It is one of the many contemporary works around the house that can stop you in your tracks.

The challenges to country houses do not stop at commissioning the right art. The rise of social justice movements, and in particular of Black Lives Matter, intensifies a question that goes to the heart of the estates and collections of old families.

In the case of Chatsworth there are no published connections between the Cavendish family — whose wealth came largely from land holdings bought in the 16th and 17th centuries and dynastic marriages — and historic slavery. The house is not mentioned, for example, in the 2013 publication “Slavery and the British Country House”. But it is impossible to escape the question in a place of such wealth and privilege.

One sculpture on the visitor route at Chatsworth, “Bust of an African Woman” by Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier (1851), depicts a formerly enslaved woman in bronze. The lack of name or other identity raises the question as to who the sitter was, and what now she might represent, if not a 19th-century assumption of European superiority. At this time of national self-examination, rather than removal to storage, Chatsworth has deliberately retained the work, along with explanatory material about its origins and acquisition.

The lesson from Chatsworth is that the survival of any such house depends on the willingness to adapt. I’m struck by how inappropriate is the Cavendish motto “Cavendo Tutus”, or “Safety through caution”, carved in large letters across the south front of the house. It appears more like a wink to the attentive visitor than a mission statement. A cautious Duke and Duchess might not, for example, have engaged the punk collagist and performance artist Linder to be artist-in-residence in 2017.

At Linder’s “Bower of Bliss” performance, the 12th Duke and Duchess joined a small audience, standing and wearing snake masks, to watch two ornately attired dancers writhe around the canal pond lawn, accompanied by electronically synthesised sound from a horn fashioned by the Chatsworth plumber.

A more cautious Duke and Duchess might not have engaged the punk collagist Linder as artist-in-residence

Non-traditional commissions have a history at Chatsworth, from the portraits of family members by Lucian Freud from the 1950s on, right back to the 1st Duke, who engaged the leading English Baroque painter James Thornhill to cover the walls and ceiling of one upstairs saloon with a dramatic and violent painting, “The Rape of the Sabine Women”.

It was part of a wider scheme of decoration that signalled, through a series of allusive images, the 1st Duke’s allegiance to the political revolution that saw the Protestant William of Orange and his wife Mary ascend to the English throne.

Thought of political revolution might be far from the minds of visitors to Chatsworth nowadays, occupied rather with the juxtaposition of a great historic collection with often puzzling, challenging contemporary art. Yet a spirit of revolution, at least in the aesthetic realm, is never far away — and proof of how much that timeless invention, the English country house, now depends on a bold spirit of adaptation and change.

“Chatsworth, Arcadia, Now” by John-Paul Stonard, with a foreword by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire (Particular Books, £50)

Chatsworth’s bananas

As much as our heritage may owe to Chatsworth House, one rarely thinks of bananas, reports Peter Chapman.

The stately home has long had its quirky side — quite recently in its history, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire (see main story) was referred to in the 2014 New York Times obituary of her as “the last of the eccentric Mitford sisters”. But a lowland tropical fruit associated with the English Peak District?

The banana as we know it today — if maybe not for very much longer — is a progeny of the Cavendish family, Chatsworth’s founders and occupants for many generations.

This dates to the 1830s when the family employed Joseph Paxton as its gardener, as well as designer of its dramatic greenhouse. It helped win him the commission for the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Between times, Paxton was at work in the humid comfort of Chatsworth’s greenhouse developing a variety of banana, a fruit rarely seen outside the tropics. He named it the Cavendish and a banana plant duly went on show at the Crystal Palace (see picture).

The family says he’d been inspired by the image of a banana within the exotic wallpaper of a Chatsworth room. The evidence was rediscovered in the 1920s behind a four-poster bed.

Originally of Derbyshire, the Cavendish banana accounts for nearly all world banana exports and is a staple of the household fruit bowl.

The outlook, though, is not bright. Bananas come in about 300 types, not all of them edible, and display a genetic defect that weakens their defence against vigorous tropical pests. One, Panama disease, attacks the roots of the plant and could prove deadly for the Cavendish, as it has for other bananas in the past.

In a similar spirit to Paxton at Chatsworth, experts across the world are now racing to develop a type that is both edible and can survive.

Peter Chapman is an FT commissioning editor and author of Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World (Canongate, 2007)

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