Enfilade

This book was published in the UK in the fall by Penguin, with a US release scheduled for March from Rizzoli. (I’m always interested in the decision to use different covers for British and American audiences. -CH)

John-Paul Stonard, foreword by The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, with photographs by Victoria Hely-Hutchinson, Chatsworth, Arcadia, Now: Seven Scenes from the Life of an English Country House (New York: Rizzoli Electa, 2022), 420 pages, ISBN: 978-0847871414, $65.

No place embodies the spirit of the English country house better than Chatsworth. From best-selling books such as Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire and Chatsworth: The House by Deborah Mitford, the late Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, American audiences have long been transfixed by this remarkable place and its extraordinary collection of art and decorative objects.

Today, Chatsworth’s facade is newly cleaned and its windows freshly gilded. The forward-looking current Duke of Devonshire, who likes to say that “everything was new once,” has redone the public and private rooms. This tour-de-force volume is his telling of the story of Chatsworth through seven historical periods accompanied by stunning photo-graphic portraits of the house, its collections, and the grounds.

Chatsworth contains countless treasures from Nicolas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego and Antonio Canova’s Endymion to seminal modern works by Lucian Freud and David Hockney. Though filled with works from different time periods, the collection represents the very best of the “new” from each artistic era.

John-Paul Stonard is an art historian educated at the Courtauld Institute of Art and contributes to the London Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement. The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire reside at Chatsworth, home to the family since 1549. Victoria Hely-Hutchinson is a photographer whose work has appeared in Dazed & Confused, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and The Wall Street Journal Magazine.