The plaster ceiling and doorcases, in the Wyatt style, date from the 1930s, when the 2nd Lord Faringdon made extensive alterations to Buscot, intending to return the house to its original eighteenth-century appearance. The inlaid marble chimney-pieces at either end of the room were introduced at the same time. Both date from the late eighteenth century, and one has always been in the house, though moved from another room. Pictures The room is mainly hung with portraits, including three by Reynolds, acquired by the 1st Lord Faringdon in the 1890s. The portrait of the Countess of Coventry (10) is a comparatively early work of 1764. The two sentimental subjects of the Beggar Boy (17) and Mercury (15), a decade later, show a different, and less usual, facet of Reynolds’s character – fanciful rather

than austerely classical. Over the chimney-piece, Gainsborough’s monochromatic Landscape (16), bought by the 2nd Lord Faringdon in 1935, may be one of the two pictures sent to the Academy in 1772, which Horace Walpole described as ‘very great effect, but neat, like needlework’. Furniture and Ceramics As in the Hall beyond, most of the furniture here is of the Regency period, much of it incorporating the brass inlay fashionable at the time. This decoration, harking back to the tradition of Boulle, can be seen on the large rosewood sofa table at the western end of the room, and the pair of rosewood card tables, with elegant lyre-shaped supports, made by the leading cabinet-makers of the day, Gillows of Lancaster. The eight single chairs with sabre legs, grained to simulate rosewood, exemplify a type of painted decoration characteristic of the period. The mahogany dwarf bookcases on the left-hand (north) side of the room are also English, though in a more openly French style, with gilt-bronze mounts, and the motif of crossed spears familiar from the engravings of Percier and Fontaine. In form, they share much in common with the side cabinet made by James Newton for Belton House, Lincolnshire, around 1807. Between the windows is a pair of rosewood cabinets with marble tops and gilt monopodia. The chandelier is a good example of a Regency glass ‘lustre’, and the gilt pelmet boards, with elaborate scrolls terminating in eagles’ heads, are of the same period, moved here from the drawing room at Barnsley Park, when Nash carried out his alterations there in 1810.    The large painted vase on the sofa table is Bloor Derby of about 1820; the hexagonal famille rose vases on the dwarf bookcases are Chinese of the Qianlong period (1736–95), while much of the blue and white porcelain here, and on the card tables, dates from the earlier Kangxi reign (1662–1722). Sculpture and Metalwork On the dwarf bookcase at the far end of the room are two nineteenth-century Italian bronzes depicting David (after Michelangelo) and Antinous (after the Antique). A silver-gilt ewer, by Boucheron of Paris, and an Empire ormolu figure of Napoleon as First Consul, stand on one of the card tables. A bronze statuette of the Young Bacchus, by J M Swan, RA (1847–1910), can be seen on the near bookcase. The inkstand on the sofa table is hallmarked 1813, though foreshadowing, in a surprising way, some of the motifs of the late Art Nouveau. The table also supports a nineteenth-century Neapolitan bronze of the Young Bacchus (originally known as Narcissus), after an Antique bronze excavated at Pompeii in 1862, the last such find to gain celebrity through reproduction. To the right of the door leading back into the Hall is a bronze head of Lady Faringdon, standing on a mahogany torchère, commissioned in 1996 by the partners of Cazenove & Co., and sculpted by Philomena Davidson-Davis.