Queen Victoria makes a return to Chiswick House

‘The Royal Garden Party at Chiswick’ by Louis William Desanges

“An evocative snapshot of the royal family at the peak of their power” – historian Deborah Cadbury

‘The Royal Garden Party at Chiswick’, a print showing Queen Victoria with her family and 300 distinguished guests in the gardens of Chiswick House in 1875, is back on display in Chiswick House for the 150th anniversary of the occasion.

The Queen was a frequent visitor to Chiswick House. She came as a young woman in her twenties and was hugely impressed with the Italian style of the building, the beauty of the gardens and the hospitality of the Duke of Devonshire.

By 1875, when the Queen was 56, her eldest son Albert Edward, who later became King Edward VII, was living at Chiswick House. He was the Duke of Devonshire’s tenant from 1869 to 1877 and regularly held garden parties in the grounds.

Contemporary reports in The Times record at least one party a year and two in each of the years 1870-1873. Variously called ‘dejeuners’, ‘breakfasts’ or ‘garden parties’, they started in the late afternoon and finished mid evening.

Queen Victoria came to the 1875 party by train from Windsor with a detachment of the First Life Guards, but she didn’t enjoy it. She wrote in a letter that the found the garden parties a ‘dreadful, fatiguing bore.’

Video: Esme Whittaker, former curator of Chiswick House, English Heritage, talks to The Chiswick Calendar about Queen Victoria’s connections with Chiswick House

Esme Whittaker, curator of Chiswick House in 2016 when the picture was last on display, told The Chiswick Calendar then:

“Unfortunately by this stage in Queen Victoria’s life I think she’d got a little world weary and tired of doing these kind of things. She comments on the fact that there’s lots of standing around and waiting, and that there were new people every where to greet, but she’s very much doing her duty”.

Her husband Prince Albert had died more than a decade earlier and she was left to carry out these duties on her own.

At the 1875 garden party there were several members of the Russian and German royal families present, as well as the future kings Edward VII and George V, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, the Earl of Beaconsfield, former Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, and various members of the aristocracy.

The figures in the picture are all numbered and the corresponding guide lists all the names, including many of the British royal prices and princesses, earls and dukes  and their partners, the Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, the Prince and Princess Louis of Hesse and the Crown Prince of Russia.

Also listed is Lady Randolph Churchill, mother of the future prime minister, who would have been just 21, and recently married to Lord Randolph Churchill, having been introduced by the Prince of Wales, at a sailing regatta in the Isle of Wight two years earlier.

Torin Douglas, the director of the Chiswick Book Festival, said:

“The picture was last displayed at Chiswick House during the 2016 Chiswick Book Festival, just for one day, and I am delighted that it is now back for everyone to enjoy whenever the House is open. I’m very grateful to the English Heritage curators Dr Lydia Miller and Dr Emily Burns for making it possible”.

Chiswick Book Festival has published the guide to the picture online so people can work out who is featured in it.

The historian Deborah Cadbury who lives in Chiswick and wrote Queen Victoria’s Matchmaking: The Royal Marriages that Shaped Europe, said:

“The image of a Royal Garden Party at Chiswick House gives an evocative snapshot of the royal family at the peak of their power.”

The original picture by Louis William Desanges was 16ft by 7ft. The Prince and his family sat for Desanges in 1875 but the picture was lost in a fire at the premises of the Autotype Company in 1879. Fortunately the print remains and is on display whenever the house is open.

You can find the online guide to who is in it here: ‘The Royal Garden Party at Chiswick’

Chiswick House has just launched its programme of activitied for the summer holidays, which includes a huge inflatable assault course and a return of the Ben & Jerrys Sundaes in the Park Festival.

READ ALSO: Summer holiday programme at Chiswick House includes massive inflatable

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