The Dining-room is of faultless proportions, and its fittings—all precisely as originally planned by the architect—are in the best and purest taste. The ceiling is magnificently painted in compartments by Zucchi. The centre represents “Love embracing Fortune;” the oblong squares, the four Seasons; and the small circles, Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. In front of the recessed sideboard is a magnificent cistern, or cooler, cut out of a solid block of Sicilian jasper; and among the pictures are examples of Snyders, Zuccarelli, Ciro Ferri, Claude Lorraine, Jean Fyt, Romanelli, Helmbrecker, and others, and bas-reliefs by Collins and Spang.
On the Great Staircase are also many choice paintings (including, among others, examples of Carlo Maratti, Hamilton, and old Stone, and some fine statues and candelabra), while in the family wing of the house—in Lady Scarsdale’s Boudoir, the Ante-room, the Breakfast-room, and the other apartments—the assemblage of works of Art is very extensive and valuable. In the Corridor, too, are some good paintings, and many articles of virtu; while in the chimney-piece is an extremely fine plaque of Wedgwood’s jasper-ware.
The opposite wing is occupied by the Kitchen—a noble apartment with a gallery at one end, supported on Doric columns, and having over its fire-place the admirable motto, “Waste not, want not”—and the other domestic offices.
Cæsar’s Hall is the basement story beneath the portico, and is decorated with busts of the Cæsars, and medallions of Homer, Hesiod, Horace, and Tully; and in the Tetrastyle Hall, the staircases, and other parts of the building, are numerous works of Art of one kind or other.
The Garden Front, shown in the opposite engraving, is an adaptation of an idea taken from the design of the Arch of Constantine. The statues in the niches are Flora Farnese and an antique Bacchus. Over the pillars are medallions of Apollo and Diana, and the statues above are the Pastoral and the Comic Muses, Prudence, and Diana. By the steps are the Medicean and Borghese vases.
The South or Garden Front.
The entrance to the noble park of Kedleston is by a lodge, designed by Adams from the Arch of Octavia. From it the drive to the house is about a mile in length, amidst the finest forest trees, beneath which hundreds of deer browse in every direction. Nearing the house, the drive is carried over the magnificent lake on a bridge of purely classical design, enriched by statuary; and from it one of the finest views of the mansion and its surroundings is obtained. Near to the drive is a charmingly picturesque fountain, whose waters are constantly flowing through a lion’s mouth.
In the park are the medicinal springs known as “Kedleston Baths,” over which a plain, but picturesque, building was erected many years ago. The waters are the best of the sulphureous springs of Derbyshire, and approach closely, on analysis, to those of Harrogate. They were formerly in much repute, and years ago it was quite a trade for the poor people of Derby to fetch these waters to the town, where they were sold at a penny per quart, and were drunk in place of malt liquor by many of the inhabitants. Kedleston, in the latter part of last century, was, indeed, a very favourite resort with the Derby people, as is evidenced by the following curious advertisement of the year 1776:—“Kedleston Fly. Twice a day during the Summer Season. Will set out on Monday next, the 20th inst., from John Campion’s, the Bell Inn, in Sadler-gate, Derby; each person to pay One Shilling and Sixpence. A good Ordinary is provided each day at Kedleston Inn. If desired, the coach may be had from nine in the morning till two in the afternoon.” At Quarn, or Quarndon, about a mile distant, is another medicinal spring—this time of chalybeate waters, which were, and yet are, with those of Kedleston, much esteemed.
Of the fine old oaks in Kedleston Park it is enough to say they are among the largest and most picturesque in the kingdom, the “King Oak” being twenty-two feet in circumference at the bole, and the “Queen Oak” nearly as much—a truly stately and royal pair. Many others are also enormous in girth and stature. Of these oaks the Hon. Grantley Berkeley thus graphically writes:—“In the park and vale of Berkeley, as well as in the Forest of Dean, I have been used to view the oak-tree in perfection, as well as in gigantic decay, as in the case at Berkeley of ‘King William’s Oak,’ at the entrance to the park, set down as that tree was, and is now, in Domesday Book as a tree then so much larger than its fellows as to be selected in the survey as a mark for the parish or hundred of Berkeley. With all this timber lore, however, the tall oaks of Kedleston Hall astonished me, not in a few instances, but in hundreds, or indeed all over the park. Timber of all kinds stood on those emerald undulations (for never was a park or pasture greener), valued by their proprietor as much for intrinsic worth as for picturesque beauty, honoured in age, as they had been spared when from their ranks might have been hewn a fortune. So struck was I with the invariable size of these trees, that while casting a curious eye through the herds of deer to make myself acquainted with the best buck in that early season, destined for a trial of Pape’s breech-loading rifle—which had been returned to his hands to be rearranged after the trick it played me in the forest of Lord Breadalbane some time ago—I could not help stepping their circumference at the roots of some of them, the extent of which was as follows. The oaks very commonly reached to fourteen yards where they entered the ground, and ranged from that to fifteen and seventeen yards; while the ‘King Oak,’ standing by his ‘Queen’ of nearly the same size, measured twenty-two yards where it sought the earth. Three feet from the ground the girth of this monarch of the forest is twenty-five feet nine inches, and the timber contained in the tree is calculated at from eleven hundred to twelve hundred feet. The extraordinary beauty of these oaks—and their name, so to speak, is legion—lies in their immensely tall straight growth from the ground, scarcely ever putting forth a limb within reach of my upstretched hand. The same luxuriant fact in this enchanting park exists with all kinds of trees, and some of the broad-leafed elms round whose boles I stepped measured fifteen yards. Lord Scarsdale takes beautiful care of his trees, and when some high wind tears down a huge arm from his favourites, the splinters are all sawn smoothly off from the stem, and the wound is capped with lead to prevent the entrance of water.”