Moor Park in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, more often than not crops up in books with reference to a) its association with the Duke of Monmouth, or b) its earlier, celebrated, garden. What makes investigation tricky, however, is that no image exists of the house that the Duke and Duchess of Monmouth built on the site of an older Jacobean property in 1679, and no traces of the historic garden survive.
The building itself is now the headquarters of Moor Park Golf Club. Much altered in the eighteenth century, the Palladian exterior is unremarkable, and not the focus of this article*. Of more interest are the interiors, some of which survive from the Monmouths’ rebuild, and I had the opportunity to photograph these on a tour of the house earlier this year.
While questions of attribution of interior features remain, fortunately a series of documents has survived that reference individuals. Hugh May is named as the supervisor of works, with the carver Grinling Gibbons and the Baroque painter Antonio Verrio receiving payments for their work in the ‘Great Room’ (now Thornhill Room) during the period of the Monmouth’s rebuild.
Further significant renovations were undertaken to the exterior and interior in the 1720s. James Thornhill was commissioned to paint the ceiling of the Great Hall and the walls of the stairs, but appears to have resigned his commission after an argument with the new owner, Benjamin Haskins-Stiles. The trompe l’oeil ceiling of the hall (see top), an imitation of the ceiling of St Peter’s, Rome, is assumed to be Thornhill’s work, though the wall paintings (below) were completed by the Italian artists Francesco Sleter and Jacopo Amigoni.
There are landscaped areas of garden to the east of the house, though the once celebrated terraced gardens of the Duchess of Bedford (who owned Moor Park in the 1620s) are long gone. Intriguingly, no archaeology appears to have been done to identify where exactly these were, but a fascinating and detailed account of their appearance was penned by Sir William Temple in 1685, remembering the gardens he had visited thirty years earlier (an artist’s impression based on this account is at the bottom of this page).
I’ve included further photos of Moor Park’s interior below, which each require further investigation. Other outstanding questions of interest include the connections between Moor Park and nearby Cassiobury house (Watford), which were both worked on during the period by Hugh May, and the involvement in the 1720s of the Italian architect, Giacomo Leoni, a somewhat forgotten figure who also worked at Cliveden.
* For detailed info on the history and fabric of the building see P. Drury; S. Jeffery; D. Wrightson, ‘Moor Park in the Seventeenth Century,’ The Antiquaries Journal, 96, 2016, pp 241–90.
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