We have grown used to the purpose-built modern show space and the urban gallery’s stark cube. However, a far more evocative encounter with our cultural heritage can often be found in a private (or, at least, National Trust) residence. Pop into any one of Britain’s historic houses and you can see artworks in their natural habitat.
If you haven’t visited a “stately” for a while, you might be surprised. Things have changed. The era of fierce tweed-clad wardens, presiding like fire-breathing dragons over dusty corridors of portraits and cabinets of dull china has long vanished. A moth-eaten four-poster, a grande dame by Gainsborough or a bit of Grinling Gibbons around the drawing room mantel are on their own no longer enough. Most of our grand houses are staging some sort of special exhibition this summer. Many will be aesthetically highbrow, historically fascinating, quirkily characterful or often just downright eccentric — whichever, they are mostly far too good to miss. So The Times is pointing you in the direction of a few exhibitions that are worth a detour from the motorway.
1 Houghton Hall, Norfolk
Earth Sky: Richard Long at Houghton
Britain’s finest Palladian mansion has become an eloquent setting for a show of sculptural pieces by the land artist Richard Long. Outside, in a gentle declivity inhabited by a herd of ghostly pale deer, a circular “henge” of upturned tree stumps plays Tolkienish trips with the human imagination and serves, for the deer, as a convenient scratching post. Inside, echoing stone expanses are articulated by constructions of knobbled flintstones. Houghton stands as a lofty monument to the social ambition of our first prime minister, Robert Walpole. Long’s simple constructions speak just as clearly — and decidedly more democratically — about our place in the world.
Houghton Hall (01485 528569), to October 26
2 Wollaton Hall, Nottingham
Dinosaurs of China: Ground Shakers to Feathered Flyers
An Elizabethan mansion is the new Jurassic Park. Wollaton Hall becomes the stomping ground of such earth-shaking guests as a mamenchisaurus, whose towering 13m skeleton provides a spectacular centrepiece for a sure-fire hit summer exhibition. Specimens unearthed in China are brought to Europe for the first time in a show that should prove as riveting to the adult who can find out about a feathery revolution that took place amid prehistoric reptiles as it is to the child who just wants to gawp and imagine — before buying a load of cool gimmicks in the shop.
Wollaton Hall (0115 876 3100), to October 29
3 Chatsworth, Derbyshire
House Style: Five Centuries of Fashion at Chatsworth
This summer, this stateliest of British piles pays homage to its most fashionable guests. Its magnificent rooms were once graced by the “empress of fashion”, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. They provided a backdrop to, among others, Adele Astaire (sister of Fred), the rebellious socialite “Kick” (Kathleen) Kennedy and an assortment of Mitfords — as well as a throng of liveried staff. House Style, an ambitiously lavish and delightfully vivid exhibition, celebrates the fashions of Chatsworth over 500 years. The cache from wardrobes, closets and attics includes family wedding gowns, coronation togs, fancy dress confections, chicken-feeding tweeds and the 11th Duke’s collection of comedy jumpers.
Chatsworth (01246 565300), to October 22
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4 Kensington Palace, London W8
Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte and the Shaping of the Modern World
A trio of mould-breaking Hanoverian princesses are plucked from obscurity to be fêted in this show. Paintings, clothes, toys, botanical illustrations, pieces of porcelain and period prints are pulled out of the royal collection and put on display to introduce the myriad enthusiasms of Caroline, Augusta and Charlotte: grandmother, mother and wife respectively of King George III. Once these royal consorts had fulfilled their dynastic duties and produced their clutches of possible heirs (they had 30 children between them), they went on to pursue a host of fascinations. They presided over philosophical rows, founded hospitals and orphanages, fostered scientists, promoted British manufacture, invented the royal walkabout and made it possible for us to go boating on the Serpentine.
Kensington Palace (020 3166 6000), to November 12
5 Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire
Creatures & Creations
The Buckinghamshire home of Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild is an extravagant confection of French architecture and fairytale fantasy. What more evocative backdrop for an exhibition in which the contemporary imagination and a host of natural marvels meet? Finding their inspiration in a famous collection of animal specimens amassed by Walter Rothschild (who rode round his grounds on the back of a tortoise and harnessed African zebras, four-in-hand, to his carriage), a pair of artists design digital collages and dramatic clothes. Peacocks and pixels, cassowaries and high couture meet in this eccentric celebration of pattern, texture and shape.
Waddesdon Manor (01296 820414), to October 29
6 Harewood House, Leeds
Frank Walter: Flamboyant Trees
Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter, the self-styled 7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a-Ding Nook, pays a summer call on Harewood House. An eccentric of slave ancestry who, until his death a few years ago, lived in an isolated mountain shack in Antigua might not seem to fit with a splendid Yorkshire mansion. The more you discover, however, the more resonances you find. And Walter’s wonderfully inventive and often visionary paintings with their sometimes bizarrely British subject matter (Hitler playing a game of village cricket) open on to vistas far wider than those offered by an Antiguan hilltop.
Harewood House (0113 218 1010), to October 29
7 Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh
New commissions and exhibitions
Bonnington House was built in 1622 but remodelled in the Jacobean style in 1858. It remains private to the family except the ballroom, which this year houses an installation by Michael Sailstorfer, steadily filling it up with popcorn. However, the owners Nicky and Robert Wilson have thrown open their 100-acre estate, creating an extraordinary public sculpture park with their permanent collection of outdoor art by Cornelia Parker, Anish Kapoor, Nathan Coley, James Turrell and others. This year’s new exhibitions and commissions include work by Pablo Bronstein and Liz Magic Laser. It’s a magical place.
Bonnington House Steadings, Edinburgh (01506 889900), Thursday to Sunday, to October 1
8 Ightham Mote, Kent
Queen of Ightham Mote: An American Interlude
Queen Palmer was not in any way royal. In fact, she was the wife of an American railroad engineer, but she proved an alluring hostess when in 1887 she came to stay with her daughters in the medieval manor house of Ightham Mote. She entertained, among others, the painter John Singer Sargent, the novelist Henry James, the actress Ellen Terry and the costume designer Alice Comyns-Carr. And it is a portrait by Sargent — his demurely engaging Young Lady in White, on loan from a museum in Colorado, but painted a hundred years ago in Ightham — that forms the centrepiece of a small but wonderfully vivid little show that brings a moment of the aesthetic movement to fresh life.
Ightham Mote (01732 810378), to December 23
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9 Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute
Steven Claydon: The Archipelago of Contented Peoples
As key paintings from its celebrated collection move to the mainland for a show in Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum, Mount Stuart puts on a summer exhibition of the sculptural work of Steven Claydon. Pointing out curious parallels and equivalences between tropical islands and the Hebridean outposts of western Scotland, Claydon introduces the South Pacific to the Victorian neo-gothic, the totemically simplistic to the deliberately overwrought — sometimes to mischievously playful effect.
Mount Stuart (01700 503877), to October 29
10 Knebworth House, Hertfordshire
Garden sculpture
Knebworth has scattered the artworks of more than 40 Zimbabwean sculptors across its 28 acres of formal gardens. They may not prove the most cutting-edge pieces, but sourced from small workshops and co-operatives they offer a vivid insight into traditions that — much like those of Knebworth — have been passed down through generations.
Knebworth House (01438 810931), to August 31
