Cabine du Jardin deux: Gravity and Gravitas in Norfolk

Tuesday, 23 July 2013

Gravity and Gravitas in Norfolk

A Descendant of Sir Isaac Newton's Apple Tree
in the gardens at Houghton Hall

Toot and I visited Houghton Hall in Norfolk. Houghton Hall was the home of Sir Robert Walpole, the first De Facto Prime Minister of Great Britain.

Sir Robert was a great collector of Fine Art and his collection of paintings was for a 'commoner' astounding in its size and quality.

Unfortunately Sir Robert, later Lord Orford, had a profligate grandson who laid waste to the family fortune. As a result the art collection, 204 pieces in all, was sold to Catherine the Great of Russia for the princely sum of £40,555.

The majority of these works are held by the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburgh and Toot and I were able seen some of them when we visited the Hermitage in 2011.

Thanks to a wonderful collaboration between the Hermitage Museum and Houghton Hall, the house is currently showing some 70 paintings hung in their original locations amongst the furnishings and decor that date back to Sir Robert's occupation of the Hall. Toot and I were lucky enough to obtain tickets for this exhibition and for two hours were able to time travel back to the eighteenth century to enjoy the the works of Rembrandt, Hals, Rubens,Velasquez and Poussin. The experience was sublime!

Toot and I would recommend a trip to Houghton Hall its a wonderful place to visit. Toot was particularly impressed by the current Lord's collection of army memorabilia and model soldiers. For more information follow the link:

http://www.houghtonhall.com/

The Bengal Lancers- a skirmish on the North-West Frontier
(one of my ancestors was in this regiment)

Outside the Hall there are: extensive landscape works, lovely gardens and more modern art installations. Bearing in mind my interest in 'Astronomy and Mathematics', I was very much intrigued to find an apple tree sapling alleged to descend from 'Sir Isaac Newton's Apple Tree'.

" We went into the garden, & drank tea under the shade of some apple trees, only he, & myself. amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. "why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground," thought he to himself occasioned by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood: "why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earth's centre? assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. there must be a drawing power in matter. & the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earth's centre, not in any side of the earth. therefore dos this apple fall perpendicularly, or toward the centre. if matter thus draws matter; it must be in proportion of its quantity. therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple."

William Stukeley recorded in his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life a conversation with Newton in Kensington on 15 April 1726.