Neptune Papers Issue Ten

468 PAGES 

Introducing The Icons Issue.

The Oxford dictionary defines an icon as ‘a person or thing that people admire and see as a symbol of a particular idea or way of life’. At Neptune, we chose to look at it in the idea of a person leading life with a singular point of view. 

François Halard arrived at Chatsworth after dusk had fallen. The house, in the ownership of the  Cavendishes for over 450 years and the long-held ancestral seat of the family’s dukes of Devonshire, was lit up that evening, bathed in the golden hue of floodlights that seemed to magnify the grandness of the property, a gem of the English Baroque style. The year was 2005, and Halard, a master of the architectural image, was on assignment to photograph the interiors of the home, and its primary custodian: Deborah ‘Debo’ Cavendish, née Mitford, the eleventh Duchess of Devonshire. The resulting portraits capture a chatelaine equally at ease in the estate’s farm shop, from which wicker baskets abundant with eggs lie at her feet in one photo taken inside the house, as she is donning the jewels once worn for the Queen’s coronation in 1953: the seven-piece Devonshire parure originally commissioned in 1856 by the sixth duke for his niece, the Countess Granville, to be worn at Tsar Alexander II’s coronation in Moscow. Behind her, a painting done by Lucian Freud in his signature irreverent style hangs on the wall. 

Freud was the duchess’s first guest at Chatsworth. “He seems very nice and not at all wicked but I’m always wrong about that kind of thing,” she wrote to her sister Diana. He came to paint a bathroom next to the Sabine bedroom, which is in the house’s west wing and is covered in paintings of Sabine women  made by the 18th century painter Sir James Thornhill. Freud never finished the bathroom; the pull of London, the duchess wrote, was too strong. A reckless driver, he often borrowed her black Mini, returning one day to the Cavendishes’ London townhouse on Chesterfield Street with the key swinging around his finger. “This is all that’s left of your car,” he told her.

Pictured: The Duchess of Devonshire’s ‘Four Eggs on a Plate’ by Lucien Freud photographed by François Halard

This issue features: Angela Westwater, Boucheron, Caroline Belhumeur, Celine, Donald Judd Foundation, Dries Van Noten, Emmanuel de Bayser, François Halard, Galerie Chastel-Maréchal, Galerie Wittmann, Hauser & Wirth, Husband Wife, Jacques Garcia, Jacques Lacoste, Joseph Dirand, Lauren Hutton, Le Sirenuse, Malgosia Bela, Martin Brûlé, Max Rocha, New York Now, Rajan Bijlani, Saint Laurent, Saman Amel, Somerset House, Sophie Carbonari, Studio Ebur, The Row, Urban Jürgensen and more!

Cover variant will be chosen at random.