The Tapestry Room at Weston Park

The Gobelins tapestries in the Tapestry Room were commissioned especially for Weston Park by Sir Henry Bridgeman, Capability Brown's patron. They are incredibly rare and are one of only six sets of Gobelin tapestries of their type to have been commissioned by a British artistocrat from the French tapestry manufacturers. The closest comparable set was supplied to another of Capability Brown's patrons, the 6th Earl of Coventry for Croome Court, Worcestershire. The Coventry tapestries have long since left Croome and are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Designed by the artist Francois Boucher and made under the aegis of Jacques Neilson, the panels are a feast of illusion. Their edges are woved to look like gilded frames, within which what appear to be damask panels have oval pictures of the lives and loves of the Roman gods suspended against them. Exotic birds - of the kind that would have been in the menagerie at Weston - fly around the panels, to create an air of fantasy.