Chatsworth, the great English country house, is clearing out its attics and has roped in Sotheby’s to organise the sale of the huge variety of objects therein, primarily furniture (from 16th century fragments) and architectural fixtures like mantelpieces and brackets.
A lot of it comes from Devonshire House, which used to stand on Piccadilly but was demolished in 1925, and other pieces come from numerous estates that the family owned, both outright, and through marriage. Chatsworth is a big house, but there’s just so much stuff that they’ve decided to kill several birds with one stone – clear the attic, raise some funds for the Trust which is responsible for the house (and they’ve been in the midst of renovations so the funds would surely be useful), find new homes for some of their precious objects which, after all, require maintenance, and give several lucky ones a chance to share in their material heritage.
This can be a difficult decision to make for anyone, and one’s first impulse could be to cry foul, of disposing one’s heritage, etc. etc. But as you can see from this video (and we can vouch for) Chatsworth has invested in getting their records in place, and so each object on sale has a clearly identified provenance and details of production, etc. In fact, you can see in this architectural digest that they’ve used a number of their old photographs to identify each piece and its location (especially in the case of at Devonshire House) and the accompanying video introduction is informational too. We think that as long as it’s all scrupulously documented, it’s fine – it’s the under-the-counter deals that are anathema. Take a look a let us know what you think. This links up to the larger debate on deaccessioning/ disposing collections, and the movement of Indian material heritage outside the place of origin/ the original collection, in this case, India.