I have been waiting till the end of the week to do a small amount of investigation about the antique heads that line the corridors at Chatsworth and which caught my attention as I was waiting for the bus. I assume that they were collected by the sixth Duke, about whom the DNB is unexpectedly uninformative, in spite of his being the subject of a full biography, The Bachelor Duke by James Lees-Milne, and a passionate and knowledgeable collector of both antiquities and, more especially, modern sculpture (in his Handbook to Chatsworth, he described how ‘it was in vain to hope for time or opportunities of collecting really fine ancient marbles’). He was in Rome in 1819, where his step-mother lived, and recorded what he bought and saw, including his commission from Canova of Endymion.

These were the busts that attracted my attention:-