PAINTED by both Annigoni and Lucian Freud, the dowager Duchess of Devonshire has always had an eye for art. Deborah Devonshire is perhaps still most widely recognised as the youngest and now only survivor of the family of girls made famous, or notorious, by four of her six Mitford siblings: Nancy, Jessica, Unity and Diana. But the duchess is a remarkably successful woman on anybody’s terms, and her life is celebrated in an exhibition that opened this week at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, to mark her 90th birthday and her 46 years’ management of one of the most magnificent houses in England.
Possibly in defiant retreat from fiction, Deborah Mitford declared quite early on that she never read a book; Evelyn Waugh once dedicated a volume to her which consisted entirely of empty pages, although gilt-edged. To her own great surprise she has produced several publications drawing on her experiences as farmer and chatelaine since her marriage to Andrew Cavendish, second son of the Duke of Devonshire, in 1941.
As his elder brother William was killed in action in 1944, shortly after marrying Jack Kennedy’s sister Kathleen, Andrew inherited the title as 11th Duke when his father died six years later. Diminished by absence, war and death duties, Chatsworth was in a perilous condition when in 1959 the duke and duchess decided to move back to the house.
Deborah became a superb farm and retail manager despite having once acknowledged that Ginger and Pickles, the story of a village shop by Beatrix Potter, is her favourite book. (As her friends include several writers and as the bibliophile duke owned the Heywood Hill bookshop the dowager has actually read one or two).
Together with her late husband she transformed Chatsworth without diminishing the atmosphere of what she has described as a “friendly palace”. Imaginatively aware of what visitors both need and admire (and Chatsworth gets about 30,000 a month at high season) they expanded its attractions to provide not only superb experiences for tourists but a productive underlayer of expertise in restoration, conservation and curatorship. Now supervised by Peregrine, the 12th duke, and his wife Amanda, work also continues on the house, with its new display of 450 years of family portraits.
It was the marriage of Charlotte Elizabeth Boyle, (daughter and heiress of Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and 4th Earl of Cork), to the 4th Duke of Devonshire which brought Lismore Castle (where philosopher and chemist Robert Boyle had been born in 1626) into the Devonshire embrace. In this plethora of numbered titles, that of Burlington has an added resonance, bequeathing with Charlotte not only Burlington House in London but Chiswick House, Boyle’s marvellous Palladian adventure. So it seems appropriate that it is with William Burlington, son of the 12th duke and grandson of the dowager duchess, that the family’s Waterford property has taken on a new cultural identity.
Over recent years contemporary sculpture has been sited in the castle gardens, but Lismore Castle Arts is William Burlington’s special project in which modern artists challenge both traditional creativity and the towered venue itself. Designed by architect Gareth O’Callaghan as a long contemporary space and directed by Eamonn Maxwell, the gallery’s programme this year consists of a solo exhibition by Gerard Byrne from April 24th. This is Byrne’s first major exhibition in Ireland in five years; it is curated by Mike FitzPatrick, and the gallery is co-commissioning a new film on Byrne’s work for the event.
Now another Charlotte, this time the daughter-in-law of Diana and Oswald Mosley and the editor of collections of Mitford correspondence, has produced In Tearing Haste, a selection from the 600 or so surviving letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor.
As with art, the duchess knows her horses: Leigh Fermor remembers taking retired Grand National winner Royal Tan, a gift to Deborah from Aly Khan, to the blacksmith in Lismore. Writing to Patrick in 1981, Deborah mourns that the Poussin Holy Family is to be sold to underpin the Chatsworth charitable trust, but by 1992 another letter discusses the possible purchase of sculptor Elizabeth Frink’s War Horse, 1991-92. Deborah hopes her son Peregrine “will try and persuade the dear old trustees to dig deep”. Frink’s horse was installed at the end of the Chatsworth canal, the “first important sculpture bought for the garden for 150 years”.
In these witty and compassionate pages the friendship thrives through the years as Leigh Fermor tramps from the Urals to the Andes and Deborah counts the morning eggs, moves north for the grouse (she is an expert game shot), or spends weekends at Sandringham and gives lectures on the uses of redundant farm buildings. Both of them write of their days or weeks in Lismore, where the gardens still keep the Paxton glasshouse (that at Chatsworth was taken down in 1920), built when Paxton was the presiding genius at both the palace and the castle.
In Tearing Haste; Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, Ed Charlotte Mosley (John Murray) £8.99.