VENICE, CIRCA 1840

Harlaxton Manor was constructed in 1831 for businessman Gregory Gregory, who employed two of the leading architects of the day, Anthony Salvin and William Burn to design the new building. Gregory inherited the manor in in 1822 from his uncle George de Ligne Gregory. The original Harlaxton manor was an ancient building; built in the 14^th century it had been used by John of Gaunt as a hunting lodge, but by the early 19^th century it was in a desperate state of repair. Rather than restoring the old manor Gregory started afresh and the building and furniture of the manor became his all-consuming passion, taking twenty years to complete.

Designed in a grandiloquent style reminiscent of the celebrated Elizabethan prodigy houses of the 16th century such as Hardwick Hall and Montacute, the finished result, completed in 1851, was a histrionic blending of Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean architecture. The interior decoration and furnishings of Harlaxton Manor more than matched the imposing exterior. The diarist Charles Greville, visiting during the construction in the 1830s, wrote of Harlaxton ‘nothing can be more perfect than it is, both as to the architecture and the ornaments…he (Gregory) travelled to all parts of Europe collecting objects of curiosity, useful or ornamental, for his projected palace’ (C. Greville, The Greville Memoirs: A journal of the reigns of King George IV, King William IV, and Queen Victoria, 1896, Longmans, p. 45).

Gregory Gregory enjoyed just three years in the completed manor before his death in 1854. The manor then passed to his cousin George Gregory. After his death in 1860 the estate passed to his distant relative John Sherwin Gregory who lived there with his wife until his death in 1869. His widow Catherine continued to live at the manor until her death in 1892. The manor then passed to Thomas Sherwin Pearson Gregory and it was eventually sold on the request of his son Philip John Sherwin Pearson-Gregory following his inheritance of the manor in 1935.

The present pair of mirrors were included in the inventory of Harlaxton Manor of 1864, where they were listed as hanging in the Great Drawing room (Gold room) and described as ‘A pair of Girandole mirrors with figures of Hercules & Omphale, boldly carved & gilt frames relieved with blue mother of pearl’. With their bold sculptural outline, the present lot certainly embodies the criteria noted by Greville in his diary of the ‘objects of curiosity’ collected by Gregory Gregory for his ‘projected palace’. They subsequently passed down through the family and were photographed in the drawing room at Denton Manor, Lincolnshire on 8 November 1887.