Chatsworth, Arcadia Now

This painting, hanging in the Private Dining Room, was long thought to be a portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots by the Italian painter Federico Zuccaro. It was used by the sculptor Richard Westmacott as the model for his statue of Mary, commissioned by the sixth Duke, intended to stand on the so-called Queen Mary’s Bower, ambitiously redesigned as a shrine to the Scottish Queen — until the Duke came to his senses and cancelled the scheme as ‘a false sign of the romance of history’. A 1924 restoration of the painting showed that a red bead necklace and crucifix were, in fact, later additions, covering up a more worldly, glamorous pearl necklace. Her identity is unknown, but it has been recently suggested that she may be Margaret of Parma (the sister of Philip II of Spain, whose portrait hangs nearby in the Private Dining Room), and have been painted by an artist in the circle of the Spanish painter Alonso Sánchez Coello.

SEVEN SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF AN ENGLISH COUNTRY HOUSE

JOHN-PAUL STONARD FOREWORD BY THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE; PHOTOGRAPHY BY VICTORIA HELY-HUTCHINSON

No place embodies the spirit of the English country house better than Chatsworth. From best-selling books such as Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire and Chatsworth: The House by Deborah Mitford, the late Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, American audiences have long been transfixed by this remarkable place and its extraordinary collection of art and decorative objects.

Today, Chatsworth’s facade is newly cleaned and its windows freshly gilded. The forward-looking current Duke of Devonshire, who likes to say that “everything was new once,” has redone the public and private rooms. This tour-de-force volume is his telling of the story of Chatsworth through seven historical periods accompanied by stunning photographic portraits of the house, its collections, and the grounds.

Chatsworth contains countless treasures from Nicolas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego and Antonio Canova’s Endymion to seminal modern works by Lucian Freud and David Hockney. Though filled with works from different time periods, the collection represents the very best of the “new” from each artistic era.

John-Paul Stonard is an art historian educated at the Courtauld Institute of Art and contributes to the London Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement. The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire reside at Chatsworth, home to the family since 1549. Victoria Hely-Hutchinson is a photographer whose work has appeared in Dazed & Confused, New York, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and the Wall Street Journal Magazine.

420 pages, 7K x 11Y” 400 color photographs HC: 978-0-8478-7141-4 $65.00 Can: $85.00 February 15, 2022 Rights: US/Canada + Open Market RIZZOLI ELECTA