The story
The room was built for one painting. At Wilton House, the country seat of the Earls of Pembroke near Salisbury, the Double Cube Room is 60 feet long and 30 feet high, designed in the 1650s by Inigo Jones and his assistant John Webb, its white walls carved with gilded fruit and flowers. It was shaped around a huge group portrait by Anthony van Dyck of the 4th Earl of Pembroke and his family, some 17 feet across, the largest Van Dyck in England.
Other Van Dyck portraits of the family and of the court of Charles I hang around it, still in the setting made for them nearly 400 years ago. Wilton is a working house, home to the same family for centuries and built on the site of a dissolved medieval abbey, and its state rooms are one reason film and television crews keep returning. The Double Cube has stood in for palaces and ballrooms on screen many times over.
