Wedding Photographer Chatsworth — the Duke of Devonshire’s Palace, the Emperor Fountain and the Peak District
Chatsworth House is the greatest country house in England’s northern landscape — the ancestral seat of the Dukes of Devonshire in the Derbyshire Dales, whose Baroque south front overlooking Capability Brown’s designed park above the River Derwent, the Emperor Fountain (the highest gravity-fed fountain in England at 90 metres), the Cascade waterfall and the thousand-acre park traversed by the Derwent at its foot constitute a palace-and-landscape setting of international artistic significance. For Chatsworth wedding photography, the combination of the great Baroque house, the designed landscape park, the formal garden and the wild Peak District moorland rising to the east of the park together provide a range of portrait environments from palace-formal to mountain-wild that is entirely unavailable at any comparable English venue.
The South Front, the Cascade and the Park
Chatsworth’s south front — the Baroque facade of 1700 by William Talman, extended by the sixth Duke in the 1820s with the north wing by Wyatville — provides a palace-scale portrait backdrop of extreme formality: the long south front reflected in the lower parterre fountain, the stone balustrading above the formal garden’s south terrace and the park’s South Lawn opening beneath create a composed portrait setting of the highest possible English aristocratic grandeur. The Cascade — a formal water staircase descending from the Canal Pond through a series of balustraded limestone steps to the lower garden, designed in 1696 and the oldest surviving formal feature at Chatsworth — provides a portrait setting of unique Baroque water-garden character. The park’s Capability Brown landscape (1762–67), with its serpentine planting belts, the bridge over the Derwent and the long ha-ha wall, provides naturalistic landscape portrait settings of the designed-natural English style.
Haddon Hall, Edensor Village and the Derbyshire Peak District
Haddon Hall — three miles south of Chatsworth, a medieval manor house of the most complete survival in England, in continuous occupation since the twelfth century, with the Long Gallery, the chapel and the terraced rose garden — provides a complementary portrait setting of medieval domestic antiquity entirely different in character to Chatsworth’s Baroque formality. Edensor — the estate village rebuilt by the sixth Duke in the 1830s to Joseph Paxton’s designs, with its Germanic church and the mixture of architectural styles in the estate cottages — provides a formal estate village portrait setting immediately outside the park. The eastern moors above Chatsworth — the gritstone edges of Baslow and Gardom’s Edge, the heather moorland of Big Moor and the Derwent valley below — provide wild Peak District portrait settings within ten minutes’ drive of the house.