Patroness of the Arts
As well as her love of building exquisite houses, Bess was also a keen art collector. After all, what was the use in having a beautiful house without à propos decorations and furnishings? Her taste for fine furnishings is thought to have come from her time with the Grey and Zouche families as a teenager. The description of her bed at Chatsworth is astonishing, and reveals the opulence of her tastes: ‘a bedstead, a tester valance and posts, covered all of black wrought velvet and gold lace and gold fringe [with] curtains of black damask all trimmed with gold lace’.
One of Bess’s main passions as a collector was tapestries. A 1553 inventory from Chatsworth reveals that Bess owned 58 fine tapestries, some of which were embroidered with gold, silver, and even pearls. Bess was also a talented needlewoman, and would often weave her own tapestries, sometimes to memorialise her deceased husbands. At Wingfield, she even sewed with Mary, Queen of Scots, to pass the time. In the winter of 1592-93, Bess spent a whopping £326 on the Gideon Tapestries from the estate of Sir Christopher Hatton. She used the 7×6 metre tapestry to decorate the long gallery at Hardwick.
Bess also commissioned and purchased fine oil paintings, including scenes from the Bible and Classical Literature. She also had many portraits, including one of Queen Elizabeth painted sometime in the 1590s, and several of herself. Her taste in furniture also leaned towards the elaborate and beautiful, including the so-called ‘Sea-Dog Table’, a walnut table top supported by four winged dogs with fish-tails. The lack of a library at Hardwick Hall occasioned comment, but Bess owned a few books, and never professed to be an academic. She was, however, an aesthete, and one with a fortune to spend on fine art.