In a studio deep in Croydon, two supremely well connected ladies of Queen Anne’s court are about to go through an indignity they could never have imagined – to have their legs restored.
The National Trust has revealed details of one of the most unusual and ambitious art restoration projects it has carried out, to reinstate the petticoated lower legs to paintings 200 years after one of their owners ordered them to be cut off.
The sitters are Rachel Russell, the Duchess of Devonshire, and Lady Mary Somerset, the Duchess of Ormonde, who was eulogised by the poet John Dryden: “Whose face is Paradise, but fenced from sin/For God in either eye has placed a cherubin.”
They were painted by Michael Dahl and are from a set of eight portraits commissioned for the Beauty Room at Petworth House, a baroque palace in West Sussex.
The “Petworth beauties” hung there undisturbed for more than a century until the 1820s, when the house’s owner, the third Earl of Egremont, decided he wanted more wall space for new works celebrating the Battle of Waterloo. Six of the portraits needed to become three-quarter length, he said: “I will cut off their legs. I do not want their petticoats.”
The legs were duly cut off and the pictures rehung, but in 1995 National Trust curators discovered something remarkable. The legs had actually been folded and tacked behind the paintings.
The conservator Jim Dimond, who specialises in unusually damaged artworks, said it was slightly baffling that the paintings had been cut into separate pieces before being lined and wrapped around the back. “There is no logic to that … it makes no sense at all,” he said.
One theory is that someone, whether the earl or a member of his staff, had sudden doubts about the endeavour.
“The earl is not doing it because he hates the pictures necessarily,” said the curator Richard Ashbourne. “He is doing it because he wants to make more space in what is a really important room. He wants more pictures.”
The project is still in its early days, but cleaning has already given a glimpse of how spectacular the portraits will look. The removal of thick layers of varnish and overpainting reveal muddy brown skin tones to be pinky white.
The paintings are being restored before their display next year at Tate Britain as part of a major exhibition exploring baroque culture in Britain. Tabitha Barber, the gallery’s curator of British art from 1550 to 1750, said the plan was to recreate an element of their original display, with full length mirrors between them.
“The Dahls of Petworth are among the artist’s very best works and we always knew that we would want to include an example of them in our exhibition, hopefully in their original full-length format,” she said. “That the National Trust has agreed to embark on this ambitious conservation project is truly exciting.”
Dimond has until Christmas to complete the restoration and is quietly confident. The project is not without challenges though, including the fact that one of the portraits was not cut cleanly, leaving jagged edges to contend with.
The National Trust’s curator of pictures and sculpture, David Taylor, said the significance of the two paintings as part of the “extraordinary picture collection at Petworth” could not be overestimated.
“The 6th Duke of Somerset frequently dined in the room and hosted important visitors including Charles VI, future Holy Roman Emperor, where they would have been surrounded by the portraits looking down on them,” he said.
The two duchesses portrayed were both ladies of the bedchamber under Queen Anne, a monarch well known to modern audiences thanks to Olivia Colman’s Oscar-winning portrayal of her in the film The Favourite.
The paintings are part of a long tradition in Europe of series of “beauties” and are comparable to the Hampton Court set commissioned by Queen Mary in the 1690s.
British Baroque: Power and Illusion will open at Tate Britain on 5 February 2020
