The Anteroom at Rempstone Hall, Nottinghamshire

This present picture was part of a series depicting Rempstone Hall, Nottinghamshire aggrandised in 1796 for William Gregory Williams by the architect Samuel Stretton (d. 1811). It was subsequently bought by John Smith Wright of the Nottingham banking family who married Lady Caroline Sitwell in 1821. She compiled an album of watercolours, poems and ephemera of Rempstone from which this drawing was once part. The present watercolour reveals that Lady Sitwell was a highly competent artist as well as an avid collector of pictures and objects. The album was sold to Elizabeth Catheray whose grandfather bought Rempstone in the 1920s and it remained in the family until the late 1970s when the house was sold to the Convent of the Holy Cross. The album was later dispersed in the 1980s.