Stowe House wedding map print

The Temple family bought the estate in 1589, and Richard Temple, 1st Viscount Cobham, who inherited it in 1697, turned the grounds into his life's work. Charles Bridgeman designed for him from 1711, William Kent joined in 1731, and in March 1741 a young Lancelot Brown became head gardener. The Grecian Valley, made between 1747 and 1749, is his first known landscape.

The house grew with the garden. Vanbrugh gave it a north portico in the 1720s, and a new south front, from a design by Robert Adam adapted by Thomas Pitt, was finished in 1779. Since 11 May 1923 it has been home to Stowe School, while the gardens and most of the park passed to the National Trust in 1989.

The artwork takes in a good deal of Cobham's world. The Octagon Lake lies south of the house, with the Palladian Bridge just to its east, and Kent's Elysian Fields and Brown's Grecian Valley are drawn too. The Corinthian Arch of 1765 stands further south on the avenue, just beyond the frame, but most of the walks your photographer took are somewhere on the sheet.