A LIFESIZE portrait of the creator of one of the area's most magnificent parklands and mansions is back home after being lost for more than a century.

John Burdon is now back at Hardwick Hall, which he created in the 18th Century, after his portrait spent decades in Tangier, North Africa, and being rediscovered wrongly named in an apartment in Paris.

Burdon was the 17th child of a wealthy Tyneside merchant, but as he was the only surviving son, in 1748, he inherited his father’s £40,000 fortune. With it, he bought 200 acres and an old manor house at Hardwick, near Sedgefield, and employed James Paine, the most fashionable architect of the day, to create a pleasureground.

Skilfully using natural water, Paine created a large lake which was fed by a cascading, serpentine river. A circular walk of more than a mile took the visitor around the lake and across river bridges, calling in at various Gothic fantasies as they went, until they climbed up to the Banqueting House, where drinks and ice fruit desserts were served at the end of the tour on a summer evening. The view across the winding river was spellbinding, while the inside was elaborately decorated with busts of Greek gods, marble ornamentation, rich mouldings and a magnificent scene of feasting gods painted on the ceiling.

But the centrepiece, hanging above the jasper chimneypiece, was the lifesize portrait of the host, Mr Burdon.

The painting was completed in 1779 by Martin Ferdinand Quadal, a Moravian artist who worked throughout Europe. It shows Mr Burdon in his fashionable country clothing looking over his parkland with a spaniel at his heel and, in the background, a curious archway with a smeary mark in the middle.

Burdon died in 1792. Even after 40 years of work, several aspects of his masterplan for the parkland – he wanted to rebuild the hall and had hoped to create a grand gatehouse – had not even been begun.

Hardwick was sold to William Russell MP, of Brancepeth Castle. His sister married the 7th Viscount Boyne, who took ownership of the hall, letting it out to country gentlemen. Unloved, the estate deteriorated, the Boynes removing items that took their fancy for their other favourite mansions – the oak floor was taken from the Banqueting House leaving it in such a state that it was demolished in 1951.

The portrait was removed first to Brancepeth Castle and then to the Boynes’ main seat, Burwarton House in Shropshire. In 1958, the 10th Viscount put it up for sale at Sotheby’s. He couldn’t remember who the gent in the waistcoat with the dog was, so it was called “?William Russell” in the sale catalogue.

Lord Digby of Dorset, a soldier and politician, bid £12 and took it to his family seat, Minterne House, near Dorchester.

When he died in 1964, a director of Sotheby’s, Richard Timewell, took the painting to his North African home, Villa Leon l’Africain, at Tangier in Morocco. On his death in 2005, the painting, now uncertainly known as “?The Duke of Newcastle”, was put on the Paris art market where it was acquired by artist and author Marc Boisseuil. He had his main residence in Geneva and a country estate near Limoges, but he hung the huge portrait in his Paris apartment.

Meanwhile, there had been developments in Sedgefield. In the middle of the 20th Century, Hardwick Hall had reached its nadir. Its lake had silted up, its Banqueting House was gone, its follies were in ruins, the military had put the hall to war uses.

After the war, the hall was turned into a maternity hospital, but in 1967, it was bought for £27,500 by Ramside Estates, the owner of Ramside Hall Hotel near Durham City, and enlarged into the country hotel we see today. The hotel group was headed by Michael Adamson, who had started as a chef at the Ramside and worked his way up.

In the 1990s, Durham County Council, under the leadership of Sedgefield councillor Ken Manton, received Heritage Lottery Fund money to restore the parkland into the beautiful, tranquil landscape that now attracts half-a-million visitors a year.

As historical research unfolded, people began wondering where the portrait had ended up – all they had seen of it was a poor copy. The Friends of Hardwick was formed in 1998 and Michael Rudd, Tom Stubbs and Jack Glendinning, with the help of architectural historian Steven Desmond, began to piece together the portrait's movements.

But the wrong names and the foreign maze made it elusive. Spurred on by John Adamson, the son of Michael, Tony Smith took up the cudgels. Tony had been the council’s head of countryside services, overseeing the £10m restoration of the park until his retirement in 2008 and is now chairman of the Friends.

In December 2014, he tracked the painting down to Boisseuil's apartment, and the negotiations began. Eventually, in April 2016, he came face-to-face with it in Paris.

“It was quite a wow moment,” he says. “For a long time we thought we would never find it, and it wasn’t until I looked at the archway in the background that I knew we really had the right painting.”

Because what had appeared on all the poor copies to be a smeary mark in the middle of the archway was in fact clearly a flag flying from the unmistakeable roof of St Edmund’s Church in Sedgefield.

Everything then fell into place. The archway is at the end of the Grand Terrace and was the grand gatehouse that Burdon had planned but never built – in fact, it is very similar to one that Paine designed in 1761 for Worksop Manor. In fact, if you stand today in the centre of the Grand Terrace and look towards Sedgefield, you would see exactly that view to the church that Quadal imagined in 1779 – if the gatehouse had been built.

But it wasn’t, and today all you see is trees.

Last Thursday, after more than 125 years away, Burdon was back – unveiled in lifesize glory behind the hotel's reception and once more overlooking his lake and parkland.