RESTORATION WORK BEGINS ON HISTORIC DIANA FOUNTAIN IN BUSHY PARK
A small group of workmen braved the low temperatures to start work on cleaning and restoration of the Diana Fountain in the middle of Bushy Park this week.
They built a narrow ‘bridge’ between the base of the statue in the middle of the lake to carry the cleaning materials to the flagstones, the actual bronze statue, the plinth and the fountain.
A small orange dinghy has also been deployed to move cleaning materials from the lakeside to the actual fountain.
The fountain has stood in Bushy Park since 1713 and sits in the middle of the lake which is 120 metre in diameter.
During World War II the pool was drained and part of Chestnut Avenue was used for Camp Griffiss, the first headquarters of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) EF and the base where D-Day was planned. The base closed in the 1950s and Chestnut Avenue was subsequently restored.
A Royal Parks spokesperson told Teddington Town: “The Diana Fountain is currently undergoing a routine maintenance clean – which is anticipated to last until early 2025.
“There will be no road closures, or any major loss of parking spaces within this area of the park during this work. We’re sorry for any inconvenience that this may cause.”
HISTORICAL NOTE:
The Diana Fountain is a bronze statue of goddess on a marble and stone fountain, surrounded by bronzes of four boys, four water nymphs and four shells. It is located at the centre of a round basin at the junction of Chestnut and Lime Avenues.
Designed in 1637 by Hubert Le Sueur at the request of King Charles I for his wife Henrietta Maria, this bronze statue of a goddess (sometimes described as Arethusa) Le Sueur submitted an invoice for £200 for the statue.
The fountain was moved to the Privy Garden of Hampton Court in 1656. In 1713 the fountain and statue were moved to Bushy Park to the middle of Chestnut Avenue, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, where it still stands today.
The fountain was restored in 2009 as part of the Bushy Park Restoration Project.
The exact weight and height of the statue (2.38m tall and 924kg) were confirmed for the first time when it was moved for restoration.
During restoration, a stone was uncovered on the base of the statue for the first time. It had a crown and the date AR 1712 (AR for Anne Regis) and would have been added when the fountain and statue were installed in the basin.
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The bronze sculptures were originally commissioned by Charles I for Queen Henrietta Maria‘s garden at Somerset House in central London. The original design for the fountain was apparently by Inigo Jones, whose sketch drawing survives at Chatsworth House, showing figures recognisably the same as those in place today, but in a different arrangement and in a different stonework setting. The Somerset House base was lower, and the surrounding pool much smaller, enabling a much closer view of the figures than is possible today. The central figure is naked in the drawing, and parts of the design are closely copied from engravings of earlier fountains in Bologna and Augsburg.[3]
The execution of the gilt statue which forms the pinnacle of the tableaux has been attributed to Hubert Le Sueur, and related to payments to him from the king. The other metal sculptures, which are still ungilded, have been attributed to his rival Francesco Fanelli,[4] and also to Le Sueur; a mention by John Evelyn in 1662 gave the whole fountain to Fanelli,[5] but most historians follow the Royal Parks in preferring the documented involvement of Le Sueur. Preparation of the site had begun in 1633–34, and Le Sueur was given what appears to be his final payment after completion in 1637; Nicholas Stone was also paid for work on the stone elements, which were in black marble.[6] In the original arrangement, recorded in a drawing of perhaps the 1670s, the figures of the boys, now on the corners, were higher up, at a level between the central female figure above and the sea-monsters carrying women below, and the scallop shells were on the corners, level with the breasts of the four female figures, catching water spouting from the fish held by the boys.[7]
During the English Commonwealth Oliver Cromwell had the fountain relocated to the privy garden at Hampton Court Palace, where this and other such works were not popular with all his supporters; he was urged by a Mrs Nethaway to “Demolish these monsters that are set up as ornaments”.[8] It is in an inventory of 1659 that the central figure is first called “Arethusa”. After 1689 William III and Mary II commissioned Sir Christopher Wren to rebuild and expand much of Hampton Court Palace, and this eventually included the creation of Chestnut Avenue with its centrepiece the Diana Fountain as the grand approach to the Palace crossing Bushy Park. Wren, supervising William Talman, completed this part of the project in 1713 during the reign of Queen Anne. The top, scrolled part of the current base, and so the current rearrangement of the figures, is by Edward Pierce, in about 1690, when the sculptures were still in the privy garden, although the fountain was removed from there and put in storage in 1701. The lower rusticated part, “disproportionately tall”,[9] was erected for the new site in Bushy Park, and the central figure was gilded, apparently for the first time, for its re-erection.[10]
The female figure on top of the fountain “has over her long life been known as Diana, Arethusa, Venus and even Proserpina“, and recently “some younger visitors” take her for Diana, Princess of Wales.[11] The official view is now firmly that she represents Arethusa, although the fountain continues to be known as the “Diana Fountain”, and dissident views are still held by some parties.[12][13][14]
Charles I had the Longford River dug from the River Colne to Hampton Court Palace in order to power the palace water features,[15] and in 1713 Sir Christopher Wren utilised this water to give the complex a set of gravity fed water spouts. In the 297 years after the statue was relocated to its current site in the park, many of the waterspouts became clogged and only four were functioning before the renovations of 2009/10.
During World War II the pool was drained and part of Chestnut Avenue was used for Camp Griffiss, the first headquarters of SHAEF and the base where D-Day was planned. The base closed in the 1950s and Chestnut Avenue was subsequently restored.[16] The complex was renovated in 2010 and the main statue was re-gilded.[17]