Untitled
Category
Furniture
Date
circa 1900 - 1940
Materials
Pine, oak, velvet, silk, feather and metal thread.
Measurements
347 x 262 x 262 cm
Place of origin
England
Order this imageCollection
Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire
NT 1127927.1
Summary
A large four-poster bed, English, late 19th/early 20th century. The posts round-section and of oak, and on square-section foot blocks, joined at the top with pine rails and with an oak headboard. Covered with a counterpane of brown velvet applied with Elizabethan petit-point slips, and lined with brown silk, made from a canopy originally in the High Great Chamber. The centre slip a crest, and the arms of Cavendish impaling Hardwick, beneath the crest of a coronet and a knotted serpent. --This bed was restored by the 6th Duke from the canopy dating from the time of Christian Bruce in the High Great Chamber (en suite with the Farthingale chairs); he found the restored canopy too 'glaring' for Hardwick and took it to Chatsworth. The canopy was brought back by the Duchess Evelyn and made into a state bed for the Withdrawing Chamber. Evelyn wrote in her ‘Notes’ dated 1946 that, 'The huge bed was a bad error of judgement on my part. The canopy was brought away from the State Bedroom at Chatsworth. It had been restored or made up by the 6th Duke. (Mr. Crace was then the upholsterer from London who did much rather inferior work here). We required another bedroom so I had a bed made to fit the canopy not realising what a gigantic one it would be.'
Provenance
The bed frame made by Evelyn, Duchess of Devonshire (1870-1960). Thence by descent, until transferred from the Treasury in 1984.