East Gallery
Reached from the Grand Hall. Three paintings, one of which the staff have learned not to look at directly.
The Bamberg Window
A portrait from life, commissioned by Sir Philip four years after a pencil sketch of the same face had already been drawn an ocean away, by someone who had never seen the man, from nothing but a description given at a dinner party in Geneva.
Read how the sketch was found →
The Toulon Goya
Sir Philip wrote to Spain asking for a battle scene. The letter reached the wrong Goya, and what arrived instead was a face from the Black Paintings years, unlabeled ever since, and hung where the morning light reaches it last.
The Harvest
A quiet field scene, and not the one it first appears to be. Look past the men with their shovels and their boiling kettle, to what they are actually gathering: human and horse bone, dug out of the Waterloo ground decades after the battle and rendered down for bone meal, sold on to fertilizer merchants who never asked where the harvest came from.
American Frigate! Closing Fast!
Sir Philip's ship, caught mid-chase. Pocock painted the whole thing from a sailor's own account, down to a detail nobody asked for: look closely at the lookout's telescope, and there is sea spray on the lens. The story behind it is HMS Falcon.
Ox and Voss
Ox on the left, built on a scale that makes the globe between them look modest by comparison; Voss on the right, hand resting on the other side of it. It hardly looks it in this canvas, but Voss stood a full six feet himself. Ox was simply larger again. Forty-some years of friendship between them, by the family's count, and the globe they're both touching marks out a fair portion of how much of it they spent covering ground together.
The Voss Arms
Shield: azure, a frigate of thirty-six guns in full sail, sailing to the sinister, her hull striped black and white, with three mullets about her; on a chief wavy, a naval cutlass proper laid horizontally between two cannonballs. Crest: upon a naval crown, a lion rampant guardant holding in its dexter paw a tattered Union Flag. Supporters: on the dexter, a Devon bull standing on a patch of turf; on the sinister, a dolphin haurient, leaping from the waves. Motto: Audax at Fidelis, on a scroll beneath.