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Saturday 27 August - Sunday 23 October 2016
GARDENS FOR THE DUCHESS
Hidden Treasure.
Among the many works of art in the Portland Collection, a plain mahogany, upright, table-top box could easily be overlooked. This particular box, with treasure hidden within, is a stereoscope or ‘Taxiphote’: two eyepieces allow a viewer to see stereoscopic photographs in astonishingly realistic three dimensions.
The Portland stereoscope contains 50 pairs of Lumière ‘Autochrome’ glass transparencies, the first commercially available direct colour photographic process introduced in 1907. Taken between about 1908 and 1928, most of these photographs show the new gardens at Welbeck Abbey laid out for Winifred Duchess of Portland. A distinguished architect, a landscape painter and a famous plantswoman (and an army of skilled gardeners) made these some of the most beautiful flower gardens ever seen in Britain.
These extraordinary, brilliantly colourful images from the early years of the last century evoke a lost world of exquisite gardens, grace and generosity when the social life of Welbeck Abbey reached its greatest climax during the lifetimes of the 6th Duke of Portland and his beautiful Duchess.
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