(5 May 2016) FOR CLEAN VERSION SEE STORY NUMBER: 4034277
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Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, has been touring the gardens of Hampton Court .
The grounds of the Palace have a connection to another Catherine, Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia.
She was so inspired by what she saw that she acquired a series of paintings of the gardens, with the intention of inspiring her gardeners in Russia.
Now a selection of those artworks have been returned to Hampton Court where they were created.
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The great gardens of Hampton Court Palace were once playgrounds to princes and kings.
Now gardeners tend the formal beds where time seems to have stayed still.
Today's views are similar to how the gardens looked when the famed gardener Lancelot "Capability" Brown was in charge of the estate in the 18th Century.
To celebrate Capability Brown's 300th anniversary a rare collection of drawings and landscapes have been returned to Hampton Court, after being discovered in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
But Russian experts were unsure of the identity of the artist says Prof. Dr. Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage Museum.
"These drawings they had the title which had the name of the artist but it disappeared. Maybe some of the drawings disappeared because somebody wanted to build using the existing drawings and has done a design and so on. So then have been there for a long time just as part of the collection of Catherine the Great in an inventory but without the name of the author. Then it was rediscovered by Mikhail Dedinkin and then the real story of collaboration, co-operation begins. Because we needed very much to see the collections in Britain to recognise the places"
Mikhail Dedinkin, Deputy head of Western European Art at The Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg explains how he chanced upon this artistic detective story
" When I started to look at the hermitage drawing collection I found two albums of drawings and watercolours. There were 150 mostly views of Hampton Court Palace and gardens. They were all by the same hand and dated 1777. My task was to discover who the artist was and to find out why and how they came to be here in St Petersburg".
The Hampton Court views show the English landscape style at its best - always including a water feature at its centre.
Empress Catherine the Great of Russia was a keen consumer of foreign culture and especially an admirer of English gardens.
She commissioned the English pottery masters Wedgwood to create a tea set for fifty people known as the Frog Service, painted to depict some of the most famous English landscapes.
Now the tea service and sixty paintings from the collection have been brought back to where they were first created - Hampton Court.
The mystery painter was John Spyers, assistant to Lancelot "Capability" Brown when he was head gardener at Hampton Court.
An ambitious and competent draughtsman Spyers sold the drawings to the Empress for a small fortune to assist her gardeners recreate a similar style.
Experts know little of Spyers, and a image of him is not known to exist.
Sebastian Edwards, Deputy Chief Curator and Head of Collections, Historic Royal Palaces says that Spyers' watercolours and sketches are like photographs of the Hampton Court gardens at the time of George III.
The gardens were originally created by King William and Queen Mary when they lived here in the 17th Century, with formal landscaping and clipped yews.
In the 18th century, royal garden director Capability Brown loosened the formal style.
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