Osborne House

 Osborne House is another place on the Isle of Wight which deserves revisiting because there's so much to see. It's almost like an island within an island created by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert after they bought it in 1845, knocking down the house that was already there and creating their own house with extra rooms being built as they needed them. I visited first in 2019 when I wrote comprehensively about the history, and in 2021 when I admired the same paintings and artefacts as this time and took many of the same photos inside the house. This post will overlap a bit with the 2021 post, but I'll try not to write about the same things.

This magnificent clock can be seen in a corner of the Council Room where the queen's privy council of minsters met several times a year. It's the most elaborately decorated room at Osborne according to the guide; that seems like a grand claim because almost every downstairs room is extremely elaborately decorated. It's just off the Grand Corridor.

The garden glimpsed from the house is enticing

and from the first floor windows even more so

Queen Victoria commissioned Austrian artist Rudolf Swoboda (1859-1914) to go to India and sketch people he met there. He went from 1886-1888 and produced 43 closely observed studies from life. They were hung in the Durbar Corridor where they can still be seen.

The Durbar Room looks like it has been decorated with icing sugar, so ornate is the plaster. Some of htis can be seen belwo

Having 'done' the house, the rest of the post is a record of time spent outside in the garden

The displays including this one with a centrepiece Agave were fresh and didn't look as though they had survived the summer

Beautiful displays

Above a close up of a magnificent display in a beautiful planter

Looking down on the fountain with sculptures around

and down to the beach where there were people enjoying the sea

I had missed the Walled Garden on previous visits so it was lovely to walk round and find even more horticultural wonders including this perennial border with the arch added by Rupert Goldby in 2000

Here's the greenhouse, part of the revamping that took place in the year 2000, before then the walled garden had fallen into disrepair and wasn't open to the public.