The Cavendish clan included not only compulsive builders, but collectors, too. For a sampling of what they bought, see the show of 200 works from their private holdings (not the ones on public view) opening at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem on Saturday.
Not that the family's apartments will be stripped bare. The Cavendish family always has had a fear of empty spaces. They cannot stop acquiring and they cannot throw anything out, not even a broken soup tureen cover. They have about 100 of those.
They also have priceless treasures. Visitors to the house encounter paintings by Rembrandt, Tintoretto, and Sargent; a giant stone foot from ancient Greece; a library acknowledged as one of the greatest in private hands; frescoes with scenes from mythology, including the apotheosis of Julius Caesar and The Rape of the Sabines, which is in a bedroom reserved for the noblest of guests (possibly not the best location, given the subject); giant mineral specimens; a huge collection of white marble neoclassical sculpture; porcelain and silver in staggering quantities; and the propeller from a Rolls-Royce airplane (Rolls- Royce planes are made nearby.)
The house inspires fierce loyalty from those who work and live there, and pride in the estate's self-sufficiency. When the 11th Duke of Devonshire died in May, joiners from the house built his coffin out of Chatsworth oak. The seamstresses who labor endlessly in restoring the bed hangings and draperies are a team of local women. Sheep's wool from the property is used in carpets sold in the shop on the grounds. Vegetable gardens and grazing animals are in abundance. One has the sense that if Chatsworth were suddenly walled off from the rest of the world, life could go on quite well. Being walled off wouldn't induce claustrophobia, either: All told, the estate covers 35,000 acres.
READER COMMENTS »
View reader comments » Comment on this story »