The dome that was rebuilt from a photograph

On the night of 9 November 1940, a chimney fire got out of hand while Castle Howard was being used as a girls' boarding school, and it brought the great dome down completely, along with Pellegrini's ceiling painting of the Fall of Phaeton. For over twenty years afterwards, the dome just sat there open to the sky.

When it was finally rebuilt in the early 1960s, there was no way to simply restore the original painting. It was gone. So a Canadian artist called Scott Medd repainted the whole thing from a single surviving black and white photograph, working out the colours by studying Pellegrini's other paintings elsewhere in the house. Everything you see up there now is essentially an educated guess, made with real care, hanging above one of England's grandest halls.

I painted the circular walk at the house in watercolour and ink. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: Castle Howard, Yorkshire · Travel Poster