6 hours ago
‘Irreplaceable' bronze statues stolen during manor house festival
It was the first day of the summer jazz festival at Iford Manor. The sun beamed on the blooming gardens and the sound of a saxophone filled the air but the contentment was about to come to an abrupt end.
On Friday morning, the owners of the country estate near Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, woke to discover that four bronze sculptures had been taken from the grade I listed gardens overnight.
Among the missing pieces was a copy of Rome's Capitoline Wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, including its plinth, which had been in the gardens for 120 years, a pair of symmetrical bronze fawns inspired by those at the ancient Villa dei Papyri in Herculaneum, and a bust of Antinous.
Marianne Cartwright-Hignett, 42, who runs the estate with her husband William, also 42, said: 'The policeman asked for a victim statement and I said, 'well, you know, it's not my statue'. And he said, 'oh, who owns it?' I said, 'no, no, no, this is everyone's loss'. This is a huge loss.'
The garden, which has been open to the public since about 1910, receives about 20,000 visitors during the six months of the year it is open.
Cartwright-Hignett said: 'It feels a million miles away from everywhere. When you go into the garden, you're not sure which country you're in, you're not sure which century you're in. There's a cloister at the back which has a line from a Tennyson poem. The inscribed line says 'a haunt of ancient peace'.
'It's a really tranquil, healing space … it feels like someone's just ripped the soul out of the garden.'
After she posted the news on Instagram, the BBC gardening presenter Monty Don replied to say he was 'very sorry and angry'.
Cartwright-Hignett, who lives on the estate with her husband and two sons, Horatio, six and Freddie, three, added: 'Gardeners' World have been here a couple of times in the past and Monty Don did a lovely episode of his series of Big Dreams, Small Spaces here.'
Wiltshire police are investigating, and asking antique dealers and auction houses to be on alert for the stolen pieces.
Cartwright-Hignett is particularly keen to see the Romulus and Remus statue returned. She said: 'That's kind of irreplaceable. The curator of the Capitoline at the time, in the late 1800s, let the estate owner take a direct copy from the original. We believe it's the last time a direct copy was allowed to be taken. Ironically, it was here for safe keeping in case the one in the Capitoline ever got lost or stolen.'
She added: 'My dearest hope is that no one's stupid enough to melt it down. I just hate the thought of this being in someone's private garden where one person gets to see it.'
In 2011 a Henry Moore sculpture worth £3 million was stolen from his foundation in Hertfordshire. It was later believed to have been melted down.
Earlier this year a bronze statue worth £60,000 was stolen from the home of the artist Anne Curry in Essex. A 17th-century 'Shepherd Boy' statue was stolen from an outbuilding in Pickering, Yorkshire, last year — it still hasn't been found — and in March two men were sentenced for damaging and stealing a Paddington Bear statue in Newbury in Berkshire.
