Kingston Lacy
Kingston Lacy is a manor house in the county of Dorset in Great Britain . Classified as a Grade I cultural monument, the mansion is five kilometers northwest of Wimborne Minster and is famous for its rich art collection.
history
In 1634 Sir John Bankes acquired Corfe Castle . However, the castle was destroyed in the English Civil War in 1646 , so that in 1663 his son Ralph had a new mansion , called Kingston Hall , built as a family seat at Wimborne Minster . In the centuries that followed, the house served as the country residence of the Bankes family. The explorer and Egyptologist William John Bankes spent his life in the first half of the 19th century buying works of art and antiques, which he collected in the family mansion now known as Kingston Lacy.
Under Walter Ralph Bankes and his wife Henrietta , who outlived her husband by 49 years after his death in 1904, the house was a glamorous meeting place in the Edwardian era , when Edward VII was also a guest in Kingston Lacy. Her son Ralph Bankes died childless in 1981 and bequeathed the mansion with all furniture and art treasures as well as 64 km² of land to the National Trust , the largest donation the organization has received to date. However, Kingston Lacy was in dire need of restoration, so it took the National Trust restorers five years to restore the house to its circa 1900 state. The mansion is open today between March and October and is considered a prime example of the work of the National Trust.
investment
The original house, completed in 1665, was designed by Roger Pratt . In the 1780s, Henry Bankes the Younger had the architect Robert Furze Brettingham rebuilt. From 1835 to 1841 his son William John Bankes had the house redesigned by Charles Barry in the style of a Venetian palazzo. The previous brick walls were clad with light Caen stone , the house received a dome, the balustrades and the striking corner chimneys. Inside, a magnificent staircase made of Carrara marble has been installed that leads over the loggia into the splendidly furnished reception rooms. The library and salon of these rooms are from the late 18th century renovations. The library's ceiling fresco, The Separation of Day and Night , was made by the Renaissance painter Guido Reni . The drawing room houses one of the largest collections of family portraits in Great Britain. The room is also furnished with paintings by Rubens and valuable furniture and china.
- The Egyptian Hall shows William John Bankes' collection of antiquities, which includes bronze cats and other funerary objects from Egypt. The collection is the largest private collection of Egyptian antiquities in Great Britain.
- The Spanish Hall was designed by William John Bankes for his collection of Spanish paintings that he brought together throughout his life. The gilded ceiling and the gold-covered leather wallpapers come from Venetian palaces.
The house's collection of paintings includes works by Rubens, van Dyck , Tizian , Tintoretto , Jan Brueghel the Younger , Veronese , Reynolds , Lely and Kneller .
garden
The old, formal garden was converted into a landscape garden in the 1780s . The manor house is accessed from the east via a four-kilometer-long avenue made of over 700 old beeches. The trees were planted in 1835 and will therefore have to be replaced shortly to be on the safe side. The house itself is surrounded by an eight-hectare park, which consists of spacious lawns with individual trees to the north and east. On the east side there is a 1899 landscaped parterre garden with the four seasons performing statues. Behind it, a row of Lebanon cedars laid out around 1835 extends to the east. A fern garden laid out in raised beds also dates from the same period. In the south of the house there is a wide, tree-lined lawn, in the center of which is the 2nd century BC. BC, an Egyptian obelisk from Philae , which was erected there in 1827 by William John Bankes.
The Japanese tea garden in the southeast of the garden, laid out at the beginning of the 20th century, has recently been restored. This garden restoration was one of the National Trust's largest gardening projects.
The garden turns into a 3200 hectare pasture and park landscape with intact farms that belong to Kingston Lacy, partly demarcated by a Ha-Ha . In this park landscape is also, about 2 km northwest of the manor house, the Iron Age, about 2500 year old Hillfort Badbury Rings .
Web links
- National Trust: Kingston Lacy
- Images of England: Kingston Lacey
Individual evidence
- ^ The National Heritage List: Kingston Lacey House. Retrieved January 5, 2012 .
- ↑ Patrick Taylor: English Gardens. Country parks and cottage gardens in Great Britain and Ireland. Dorling Kindersley, Starnberg 2005, ISBN 3-8310-0781-0 , pp. 45-46.
Coordinates: 50 ° 48 '36.5 " N , 2 ° 1' 58.3" W.