Neptune & Galatea Overmantel Panel Relief
Creator(s): Grinling Gibbons 1648-1721
Date: Bill dated: 18 July 1701
Accession Number: DP/SC/1
Materials: Marble
Location: Dalkeith Palace, Midlothian (The Great Closet)
Credit Line (copyright notice for material) : The Buccleuch Collections/By kind permission of the Duke of Buccleuch & Queensberry, KT
NOTES ON THE ARTWORK
From the 1680s, Gibbons regularly created chimneypieces in stone. This marble overmantel relief depicting Neptune and Galatea was commissioned by Anne Scott, 1st Duchess of Buccleuch for Moor Park, Hertfordshire in 1701. A sea nymph attending Neptune, Galatea’s name translates as ‘she who is milk-white’ and as such, she was regularly represented in white marble. The Duchess was simultaneously undertaking works at Dalkeith, including the elaborate Great Closet which was fitted up in 1703-4 with a French (from Caunes-Minervois in the region of Carcassonne) red-veined marble chimneypiece, surmounted by the redeployed Galatea panel.
Further reading: Sally Jeffrey, ‘Grinling Gibbons’s Chimneypieces for the Duchess of Buccleuch’, The Georgian Group Journal, Vol. XXIV, 2016, pp. 1-22
Neptune & Galatea Overmantel Panel Relief © The Buccleuch Collections/By kind permission of the Duke of Buccleuch & Queensberry, KT
Neptune & Galatea Overmantel Panel Relief © The Buccleuch Collections/By kind permission of the Duke of Buccleuch & Queensberry, KT
1701 bill for Neptune & Galatea Panel © The Buccleuch Collections/By kind permission of the Duke of Buccleuch & Queensberry, KT
