After a 24-year project, the National Trust has finally finished the restoration of a set of 16th-century tapestries at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, the longest such endeavour in its history.
On Thursday, the final tapestry in the set of 13 Gideon tapestries was unveiled on the wall of the long gallery, the culmination of a painstaking effort to clean and handstitch the huge pieces one at a time, at a cost of £1.7m.
“It has been quite emotional because this is the first time I’ve seen them all on the walls together, and this project was in the background of my every day for so long,” said Denise Edwards, the former general manager of the estate who retired last year, having overseen the project since 2003.
“They were supposed to be completed in 2021, the year I was due to retire, but they got delayed because of Covid so I stayed on because I really wanted to see the project through to the end,” she said. “It has taken up a lot of my life for 20 years.”
The enormous works, 6 metres tall and more than 70 metres in length, are considered to be one of the most ambitiously scaled tapestry sets of their time, and were last on display together before the project began in 1999.
Hardwick Hall, an Elizabethan country house situated on a hilltop between Chesterfield and Mansfield, was at one point surrounded by nine coalmines. “You can imagine all the pollution that brought, and with leaky windows they were absolutely filthy,” Edwards said. “And cleaning them is just the beginning of the battle – then it’s repairing all the damage done to the fine silks of the tapestries.”
The set was bought by Bess of Hardwick, one of the richest women of her time and a friend of Elizabeth I, in 1592 after the death of the lord chancellor Sir Christopher Hatton, who had commissioned them for his estate in Northamptonshire.
Bess paid £326 15s 9d, after negotiating a small discount due to the inconvenience of having to paint over Hatton’s coat of arms, and it was the largest and most expensive single purchase she made for the house.
The set, which depicts the biblical story of Gideon who led an army to save his people from the Midianites, has remained in the long gallery at Hardwick Hall since the end of the 16th century, and unlike many other tapestry sets it has never been moved or cut up.
“One of my favourite stories about them is that there used to be whippet racing in the long gallery, and in one of the early tapestries they cleaned, they analysed the water they washed them with and found dog urine. So the whippets obviously peed against these precious Gideons,” Edwards said.
Each tapestry took more than two years to restore, after a process involving a thorough vacuum to remove loose fibres, dust and soot, and a journey to Belgium for specialist wet cleaning.
National Trust conservators used specialist conservation stitching with hand-dyed yarns to repair damaged areas, with each tapestry taking about 5,000 hours to complete.
“We work through it slowly in 20cm sections at a time, and we use different conservation stitches to bring structure to the tapestry and to fill in the design where it’s missing due to damage,” said Yoko Hanegreefs, a textile curator, adding that “recipe books” for bespoke dye colours were created to maintain consistency over the life of the project.
“We use wool and stranded cotton to do that because they have faded and no longer have the brightness new silk would have. It’s such a privilege to work on something like this and to see all these years of work finally come to an end with the finished result just incredible,” Hanegreefs said.
Visitors can see the full Gideon set at Hardwick Hall, and there are plans to remove portraits hanging on some of the tapestries so they can be viewed unrestricted as they would have been 400 years ago.
“This has been a very long-term project but it’s for the long term,” said the hall’s collections and house manager, Elena Williams. “We want people to be able to access them into the future and removing all the dirt and grime means we can actually understand the story again and see them for the works of art which they are.”
