Taste and passion — with a dash of luck

Available from Heywood Hill, 10 Curzon Street, London W1J 5HH

Producers of ‘period dramas’, on film or television, go to tremendous trouble to create the right ‘period look’. In the late Victorian town house, everything is late Victorian; in the Regency rectory, everything is Regency; and so on. All of which is, of course, absurd — not as absurd as having late Victorian things in the Regency house, admittedly, but absurd nonetheless. For most well-stocked houses — except those of the mail-ordering nouveaux riches —have always contained a mixture of styles, an accumulation of objects from earlier periods.

If this is true of any house where the contents have been added to over several generations, how much truer it is of Chatsworth, whose owners stopped being nouveaux riches some time in the 16th century. Here we are faced not just with many generations of ownership by the Cavendish family, but with centuries of serious collecting, on a scale that could be matched by few other private collectors in the country.