Moor Park (house)

Moor Park is a Grade I listed Palladian mansion set within several hundred acres of parkland to the south-east of Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire, England. It is called Moor Park Mansion because it is in the old park of the Manor of More.

After The More became a ruin, in about 1617 the 3rd Earl of Bedford built a new house on the hill to the southwest of the old palace, within the deer park.

The house was rebuilt in 1678–9 for James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, and inherited by his wife, Anne Scott, 1st Duchess of Buccleuch after he was beheaded. Before her death in 1732, Benjamin Hoskins Styles, who had made a fortune in the South Sea Company before the notorious bubble burst, purchased it, and the current appearance of the mansion can be traced to him.

Styles had the house remodelled in the 1720s. The principal architect was Giacomo Leoni, initially assisted by the painter Sir James Thornhill. Leoni refaced the house with Portland stone and added a great Corinthian portico on the south front and Tuscan colonnades (since removed). Inside, Thornhill was commissioned to paint the Great Hall and the Grand Stair, complete with a dome in imitation of St. Peters, Rome. However, Thornhill quarrelled with Styles and left the project before its completion. The paintings on the Grand Stair date from 1732 and depict the Origin of the Seasons from Ovid's Metamorphoses by Francesco Sleter, a Venetian artist who studied under Jacopo Amigoni. All that remains of Styles' work on the Grand Stair is a single panel over a doorway, uncovered during restoration work in 2002. After Styles' falling-out with Thornhill, Amigoni was commissioned to paint the four pictures in the Great Hall—the story of Jupiter and Io, again from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The wall paintings in the erroneously named Thornhill Room are probably by Sleter and Amigoni, while the ceiling was painted somewhat earlier by Antonio Verrio, and depicts Aurora and the Dawn.

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