Paintings of Hartwell House gardens by Balthasar Nebot

This series of eight paintings by Balthasar Nebot shows the spectacular garden landscape of Hartwell House, just outside Aylesbury, in 1738. The formal green architecture of topiary hedges, with classical stone temples and statues of gods and goddesses, was balanced by informal views towards the town.

Sir Thomas Lee (1687-1749) of Hartwell commissioned them from Balthasar Nebot, a little-known Spanish painter based in Covent Garden. They are a unique record of a country estate and garden at this time. The people of Hartwell; family, visitors, household, estate staff and gardeners are portrayed in great detail.

The paintings may have hung in one room in Lee's London house. Similar sets of views of country houses were a standard artistic commission in the 1700s, but this set is especially interesting, as the Hartwell they show lasted only a few years. In the 1750s Sir William Lee remodelled Hartwell House and its garden in the more 'natural' style of Capability Brown.

The Lees were an old Buckinghamshire family, who had acquired Hartwell a hundred years earlier by marriage into the family of John Hampden. Hampden, a local landowner and MP, had opposed Charles I in the Civil War of the 1640s. The Lees were Whig landowners; part of a grouping of opposition MPs centred in the 1730s around Frederick, Prince of Wales. In the early 1700s the Whig connection in Buckinghamshire included Lee of Hartwell, Lord Wharton of Winchendon House, the neighbouring estate, and Viscount Cobham of Stowe.