The story
In the Red Drawing Room at Blenheim Palace two family portraits face each other across 127 years. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the leading London portraitist of his day, painted the 4th Duke of Marlborough with his duchess and six of their children around 1778, one small daughter shrinking back from the mask her sister holds up. Opposite hangs John Singer Sargent's portrait of the 9th Duke with his American wife Consuelo Vanderbilt and their two sons, signed in 1905 and made as a partner to the older picture. In the same room is Anthony van Dyck's portrait of his mistress Margaret Lemon, cast as Erminia, the princess of Tasso's poem Jerusalem Delivered.
The palace was a reward from Queen Anne and Parliament to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, after his victory over the French at Blenheim, in Bavaria, in 1704. The architect John Vanbrugh built it on the scale of a national monument, and Winston Churchill, a grandson of the 7th Duke, was born here in 1874.
Some of its most famous pictures now hang elsewhere. Short of money, the 8th Duke sold much of the collection in the 1880s, and in 1885 the National Gallery in London bought Raphael's Ansidei Madonna and van Dyck's equestrian portrait of Charles I. What remains is a family collection seen in family rooms, with more van Dyck portraits of Charles I's court, the Long Library, and the tapestries woven in Brussels for the 1st Duke that show his own campaigns.
