This painting of unusually large scale (at just over 14 feet long) depicts the entrance front of the great house of Denham Place, Buckinghamshire and has been attributed to the artist Peter Hartover. The painting, which can be dated on the grounds of stylistic comparison with other of Hartover’s works to around 1675, records the appearance of Denham Place after the addition of a vast façade by Sir William Bowyer (1612-79) in the 1650s and before its rebuilding by Sir Roger Hill from 1688.

The painting has been attributed to the artist Peter Hartover by John Harris in his seminal study The Artist and the Country House. The style and arrangement of the figures in the foreground are comparable to the group of Sir John and Lady Swinburne receiving guests at the gates of Capheaton in Northumberland as depicted in a painting known to be by Hartover and dated 1674. Hartover is known to have been the partner of one Robert Crossby ‘of London’, but a series of views signed by him or identifiably in his style, reveal that he later spent some time working in the north east of England.

Sir William Bowyer’s alterations transformed Denham into the largest of all known ‘artisan mannerist’ houses and, as the painting records, provided a statement of considerable and unusual grandeur. The brick façade was organised around the motif of repeating columns, each with a prominent stone capital, which took the form of a giant order to the wings, whilst the whole was surmounted by a handsome parapet supporting twenty-four busts. These were later transferred to the house and gardens of Sir Roger Hill’s building, which can be seen below in a painting circa 1705, possibly by John Drapientier.

These magnificent pictures represent an examples of the form of the house painting, which was at this date still in the early stages of its development. At around this time families began to commission such paintings either from pride in their possessions, as a depiction of major architectural alterations or as a record of an old family home before its replacement by a newer building.

A photograph taken June 29, 1925 depicts Denham Place as it stood in the 20th century, the house appearing in form much as it did in the Drapientier painting.