The Property of
MEMBERS OF THE BEAUMONT FAMILY
THE BRETTON PARK CARVINGS
(Lots 107-109)
Bretton Park, Yorkshire, a Palladian mansion, was built in 1730 for Sir William Wentworth, Bt., by Colonel James Moyser. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries distinguished architects added to and altered the house: John Carr 1793, William Atkinson 1807, Sir Jeffry Wyattville 1815, George Basevi 1842 (see: H. Colvin, British Architects 1660-1840, London, 1978, pp.565, 196, 76, 962, 95)
In the two 1938 Country Life articles on Bretton Park by A. Oswald (LXXXIII, 1938, pp.530-535 and 554-559), the carvings are illustrated in Lord Allendale's Study (lot 108 and the carving sold in these Rooms, 5 July 1990, lot 29). The author says that lot 108 is by Grinling Gibbons and the other two are by a carver named Rogers. However lot 108 only incorporates a few pieces of seventeenth century carvings and is essentially nineteenth century like lots 107 and 109 in the style of the finest virtuoso wood-carver in Europe, Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721) and can be compared with his work for Sudbury Hall, Derbyshire in the late 1670's (see: G. Beard, Grinling Gibbons, London, 1989, figs. 43, 44).
It is most likely that the Bretton Carvings were all supplied by, and in the case of lot 108 'restored' by, Rogers in the early 1850's soon after the death of Thomas Wentworth Beaumont (died 1848). William Gibbs Rogers (1792-1875), the distinguished woodcarver and restorer earned fame emulating the renowned carving of Grinling Gibbons (d.1721). Rogers had been employed at Sudbury in 1838, under the direction of the dealer E.H. Baldock, and retained fragments of the carving in his Hanway Street studio. (We are grateful to Andrew Barber for this information.) In Christie's catalogue, 17 June 1858, of Mr Rogers' collection of his own carvings and the work of others such as Gibbons, it was stated that he could 'equal, if not surpass his great forerunner, Gibbons'. He exhibited at the 1851 Exhibition and other exhibitions and was patronised by Queen Victoria, who granted him a Civil List pension for his contribution in reviving the standard of ornamental wood-carving. A pair of swags by Rogers are illustrated in C. Gilbert, Furniture at Temple Newsam and Lotherton Hall, London, 1978, vol. II, no. 381.
These carvings celebrate the bounty of nature with their garlands of fruit and flower embellished with trophies of fish, fowl and game (the gentleman's pursuits). It is likely that Wentworth Blackett Beaumont, 1st Baron Allendale, employed Rogers to execute the carvings as an appropriate frame for his ancestral portraits following his marriage to Lady Margaret Anne Burgh, daughter of the 1st Marquess of Clanricarde, 1856. Bretton Park was sold by the 2nd Viscount Allendale in 1948 at which time the carvings were removed.
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