New for 2009...

		Catalogue No.	195
		Artist	Eileen Hogan
		Period	2006
		Title	Portrait of Ian Hamilton Finlay at Little Sparta
		Extra Information	Purchased at the 2008 Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. Oil paint and charcoal on paper.

The Sitting Room, to the right of the Entrance Hall, has been entirely re-decorated and a new lighting system installed to enhance the eighteenth-century pictures displayed in the room. The new wall colouring, a stippled terracotta, is much warmer than the previous pale green, and together with the lighting scheme has given the pictures a real lift. The Gainsborough Landscape looks particularly good, as do the three portraits by Reynolds - Mercury, Beggar Boy, and the Countess of Coventry - and you can now not fail to notice the Ibbotson of Grassmere.

In the Gardens is a new water feature - the Faux Fall - commissioned from the garden sculptor David Harber. This consists of a series of five highly polished steel panels set vertically at intervals on sloping ground over which water is pumped so that when viewed from the opposite stairway to the Four Seasons Walled Garden resembles a cascade!