Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
17
HYDE PARK STATUES AND MEMORIALS
Hyde Park is peppered with statues, none more colossal than the 18ft-high bronze of
Achilles
, in the southeastern corner of the park, designed in 1822 by Richard Westmacott
to commemorate the Duke of Wellington, and cast from captured French cannon. As the
country's first public nude statue it caused outrage, especially since many thought it a
portrait of the duke himself, and the chief fundraisers were “the women of Great Britain”. In
actual fact, it represents neither the duke nor Achilles, but is a copy of one of the Horse
Tamers from the Quirinal Hill in Rome. William Wilberforce led a campaign to have the statue
removed for decency's sake; a fig leaf was placed in the appropriate place as a compromise.
Visible to the north is the
July 7 Memorial
, a simple, startling memorial to the 2005 London
suicide bombings. The 52 stainless steel pillars stand nearly 12ft high, and each one is
inscribed with the victim's time and place of death. Only a short distance to the west, in The
Dell, a couple of boulders set in gravel within a copse of silver birch, form an even more
understated
Holocaust Memorial
.
To the north of the nearby Serpentine stands the park's over-manicured bird sanctuary,
overlooked by the
Hudson Memorial
, sculpted by Jacob Epstein and featuring a low relief of
Rima, a naked, female, South American version of Tarzan, and several exotic birds. (Rima the
Jungle Girl is the main protagonist in the 1904 adventure novel
Green Mansions
, written by the
naturalist and writer W.H. Hudson.) It's di
cult to believe now, but when the memorial was
unveiled in 1925, there was a campaign of protest against the statue, led by the
Daily Mail
.
Rima was considered too butch, the art too “Bolshevist” and the memorial later became the
victim of several (anti-semitic) attacks.
after Wellington bought the place in 1817. Wyatt faced the red-brick exterior with Bath
stone and more or less got rid of the Adam interiors. As a result, the house is very much as
it would have been in Wellington's day, and the current duke still lives in the attic.
The art collection
The house is worth visiting for the
art collection
alone. Wellington acquired the
paintings in 1813 after the Battle of Vittoria, when he seized the baggage train of
Napoleon's brother, Joseph, who was fleeing for France with two hundred paintings
belonging to the King of Spain. The best pieces, including works by de Hooch, Van
Dyck, Goya, Rubens and Murillo, cover the red walls of the
Waterloo Gallery
on the
first floor, where sliding mirrors cover the windows. The most prized works of all are
a trio by Velázquez -
The Water-Seller of Seville, Portrait of a Gentleman
and
Two Young
Men Eating at a Humble Table
- though Wellington preferred Correggio's
Agony in the
Garden
, the key for which he used to carry round with him, so he could take the
picture out of its frame and dust it fondly.
The rooms
Like several of the house's other rooms, the Waterloo Gallery was originally hung with
yellow satin, which, as one of the duke's friends lamented, “is just the very worst colour
he can have for the pictures and will kill the effect of the gilding”. It was here that
Wellington held his annual veterans'
Waterloo Banquet
, using the thousand-piece
silver-gilt Portuguese service, now displayed in the rather lugubrious
Dining Room
at
the other end of the house. Most of the Waterloo portraits are, in fact, hung in the
adjacent
Striped Drawing Room
, which is decorated like a military tent in the manner
of Napoleon's Loire chateau, Malmaison.
Canova's famous, more than twice life-sized,
nude statue of Napoleon
stands at the
foot of the main staircase, having been bought by the government for the duke in
1816. It was disliked by the sitter, not least for the tiny figure of Victory in the
emperor's hand, which appears to be trying to fly away. In the dimly lit
Plate and China
Room
, also on the ground floor, you can view numerous gifts to the duke, including a
four hundred-piece Prussian dinner service decorated with scenes of Wellington's life,
