Statue base for Dancing Faun(?), Grecian Valley, Stowe Landscape Gardens

Summary

Stone footing for statue base exposed during excavations in 1994. Statues subsequently reintroduced in 2007 and 2016.

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Monument Types

Description

(1) Square stone base discovered during 1994 whilst using a JCB to locate the gravel paths on the north side of the Grecian Valley. The base measures 0.89 x 1.04 metres and 0.3 metres in depth, comprising 2-3 courses of angular white rubble limestone bound with a soft, sandy orange/buff lime mortar. Larger blocks measuring up to 0.34 x 0.27 ms form the corners and the core is made up of smaller pieces of rubblestone.

The base is laid onto the underlying ginger/brown subsoil and is situated on a very slightly raised terrace.

The base was surrounded by six clusters of rubblestone, two of which can be identified with a reasonable degree of certainty as having been statue bases (see report Stowe/1). Archaeological Comments - Geophysics should be carried out on the site to determine whether there is more substantial evidence for the 12 missing bases for the shepherds and shepherdesses surrounding the Faun.

The base was exposed again and utilised for one of the restored statues in 2016 (see event no. ENA8177)

(2) On a circuit of the valley towards the end of the eighteenth century, the visitor would also have come upon the antique figures of The Athlete and The Dancing Faun, also brought from other parts of the garden in the 1750s. The Faun, a copy of the famous Medici Faun in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, was positioned in a grassy glade in the centre of a circle of shepherds and shepherdesses, which were moved from around the statue of Queen Caroline in the Queen’s Theatre in the early 1750s.

(4) The Circle of the Dancing Faun is first detailed in the Seeley Guidebooks in 1766. following Earl Temple's rededication of the Grecian Temple to Concord and Victory in 1762/3. Complementing th is rededication he and his Haed Gardener Richard Woodward re-ordered the Grecian Valley with, on the one hand, an heroic walk peopled by suitably heroic statues looking down into the valley, and on the other an accompanying pastoral walk looking out into the park and surrounding bucolic landscape.

During June-July of 2007 two statues - a Shepherd and Shepherdess - were brought back to Stowe from Castle House in Buckingham and relocated in this position. The original site for this group was the Queen's Theatre, surrounding the statue of Queen Caroline, however, she was moved to her present location in the 1760s and the shepherds and shepherdesses were most likely removed to the Grecian Valley at this time. The statues had been sold in the 1921 sale of Stowe and initially went to the Cobham Arms in Buckingham before being sold on to the owners of Castle House. The restoration of this statue group is somewhat conjectural as the archaeological evidence consists only of the single made-up base. The three lead statues copied from Anglesey Abbey were added at a later date - 2nd December 2016 (G Marshall)

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