The State Drawing Room

Apartments of state in houses were intended for the reception of the reigning monarch, and the resident family would not have inhabited the rooms themselves. The layout and sequence of rooms is derived from the apartments in royal palaces in London and continental Europe. The decoration and furnishing of these interiors was lavish and of the  highest quality to be found in the house. 

By the 19th century the state rooms had become deeply unfashionable, and their survival without major alteration is unusual. They were first used for their original purpose by a visiting monarch in 1913 when George V and Queen Mary stayed at Chatsworth, using the State Bedchamber and State Music Room as their bedroom and dressing room.

In 1939 the rooms were emptied and used as dormitories for Penrhos College, a girls’ boarding school evacuated to Chatsworth during World War II. The atmosphere of this time was captured by Edward Halliday (1902-1984) who recorded the State Drawing Room in a painting which now hangs in the Green Satin Room. 

The State Drawing Room served as the first withdrawing room in the state apartment, into which select members of the Court could retire from the Great Chamber. 

The ceiling, by Louis Laguerre, depicts an Assembly of the Gods. In the coving there are smaller scenes telling the story of the affair between Venus, goddess of love and Mars, god of war. Vulcan, Venus’s husband who was responsible for forging weapons, is outraged when he discovers the infidelity. 

The Mortlake Acts of the Apostle tapestries date to the mid 1630s, and were woven from designs by the Renaissance artist Raphael (1483-1520), originally designed for tapestries which decorate the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. We do not know when the tapestries were moved to this location but we do know the 6th Duke reframed them in the 1830s. In 2014 a major conservation project was begun to repair and protect these important pieces of English weaving.

A section of the Mortlake Tapestries

The tapestries had suffered heavily from highly acidic atmospheric pollution known by conservators as ‘Derbyshire dirt’. Exposure to light had further degraded the tapestries, especially those opposite the windows, leaving them in a highly fragile state. One by one they were taken down, washed to remove dirt and reduce the acidity and then full remedial stitch conservation was applied to the weaving itself. The conservation of each tapestry took over a year. The final tapestry from this set was sent away for conservation in 2018. 

In 2006-2007 the State Apartment was redisplayed following an in-depth research project, in order to evoke a clearer sense of how they might have looked when first furnished. The furniture is presented against the wall, as was the tradition in the 18th century, chairs only being brought into the centre when they were required. 

The cabinet opposite the windows and the two similar ones are made of Chinese lacquer, and take their name from the Coromandel coast from where they were exported to Europe. Crowded on top of the cabinets are displays of Chinese porcelain, highly prized in Europe when the secret for creating true porcelain had not yet been discovered in the west.

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