An exhibition of "other people's brilliance and imagination"...
Living With Art We Love is an exhibition presented by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire included in the house until 9 October.
It features favourite pieces from their acquisitions over the past 40 years, few of which have been on public display, and includes paintings, sculpture, ceramics, textiles and furniture from artists including Michael Craig Martin, Edmund de Waal, Natasha Daintry and Felicity Aylieff.
These contemporary artworks can be seen on display alongside historic art from the Devonshire Collections rarely seen in public, including major works by Poussin, Rembrandt and Boltraffio.
The exhibition is included with all house tickets.
Here, the Duke of Devonshire introduces the exhibition:
By the end of 2022, Amanda and I will have been lucky enough to have lived full time at Chatsworth for almost 16 years. Not nearly as long as my parents or indeed the 6th Duke, but much longer than most other Dukes and Duchesses.
We were 62 years old when we arrived and we bought with us 40 years of things that we had acquired including a fair amount of art. Since we arrived we have continued to accumulate mostly contemporary works and so we thought it might be of some interest to share our accumulations.
Historically many generations of my family have more or less completely redecorated and repurposed large parts of this house for their use and in their taste. Since the 1950s, when the main rooms and spaces became fully dedicated to our visitors, this process has slowed down somewhat.
Many of our acquisitions have naturally found a home in the rooms in which we live but, for 2022, we are moving many of them to more public spaces. We make absolutely no claim to these works constituting a collection of any art historical importance, we are certainly not scholars, but we do share a deep love for other people’s brilliance and imagination.
Amanda and I were both exposed to contemporary art where we were respectively brought up. After Amanda’s father’s early death, she and her mother, June Heywood Lonsdale, moved to a modern bungalow with the interiors designed by Jon Bannenburg in the early 1960s. The sitting room had no fireplace, one wall was entirely glass, another was filled by a huge black PVC covered sofa, and the third was a sliding partition into which the yacht interior designer had inserted a series of coloured glass portholes. The dining area was dominated by a seven-foot high Francis Bacon painting.
My surroundings were much more old-fashioned. I moved into Chatsworth with my sisters and our parents in 1958. There was, and is, lots of giltwood furniture and 17th and 18th century art. But in 1959 Lucian Freud’s portrait of my mother 'Woman in a White Shirt', arrived and was hung in a place of honour in the main drawing room.
As with June Heywood Lonsdale’s Bacon, the Freud portrait caused much upset, indeed horror from most of our parents’ friends. So Amanda and I were learning the same lessons, that taste is a very individual thing and we had no need to accept traditional anything.
Our acquisitions include much Modern British art but there are some more contemporary pieces, especially furniture and ceramics. The three site-specific ceramic commissions, Edmund de Waal, Jacob van der Beugel and Natasha Daintry, may, by their very nature, endure where they are longer than most of our other purchases but we expect that it is all transitory as has been much of the historic collection. That’s fine, it is the way of generational taste; it is what happens in houses that are lived in; without it Chatsworth would be full of Elizabethan art and craft.
This exhibition is a marker in time, a record of two peoples’ passion but it has no pretension to any enduring importance.
Stoker Devonshire
Image credits and copyright:
1. Portrait of Amanda Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, when Marchioness of Hartington, with a budgerigar 'George' | 1981 | © Michael Leonard
2. ‘ Inside and Out ‘ | Tarka Kings | 2019 - 2022 | Gold, Steel, cut Stone and Paper | Jewellery designed by Tarka Kings and co produced by Louisa Guinness
3. Devils Marbles Collection | 2016 - Evensong | © Pippin Drysdale
4. somewhere and somewhen | 2019 | porcelain, gold, alabaster, marble, aluminium and plexiglass
66 x 140 x 30 cm | © Edmund de Waal | Courtesy of the artist | Photo: Mike Bruce
