Petworth House

Listen first. Out on the lawns, the gravel crunches under your shoes, and somewhere in the long grass a deer coughs. Then the house comes into view. It is a long, pale front of stone and tall windows, stretching along the edge of the park like a wall built to hold back the countryside. On a grey day it looks calm and severe. In low evening sun the stone turns the colour of honey. Either way, it is wider than you expect.

Petworth House sits in an unusual place. Most English country houses keep their distance from ordinary life, behind long drives and gatehouses. This one does not. Its back presses almost directly against the small market town of Petworth. Its front opens onto rolling parkland. If you walked here from the town, you came through narrow lanes and old shopfronts, then suddenly found yourself facing open grass and ancient trees. That sharp contrast is part of the place.

The story of this estate runs through two great families. For centuries the land belonged to the Percys, the powerful Earls of Northumberland, a northern family with a southern foothold here. In the late seventeenth century, the Percy heiress Elizabeth married Charles Seymour, the sixth Duke of Somerset. He was known, even in his own time, as the Proud Duke. Using her fortune, he rebuilt the house in the grand new style of the 1680s and 1690s.

His rebuilding gave Petworth the long west front you see today. Its design looks more towards France than towards older English traditions. Here is the first surprise. The Duke did not tear everything down. Inside the house, an older chapel survives from the medieval Percy residence, with parts dating back to the thirteenth century. So behind this tidy baroque face, a much older building still stands. Keep that in mind as you move through the rooms.

Once inside, climb, or simply stand at the foot of, the Grand Staircase. The walls and ceiling are covered in painted figures, gods and allegories moving across the plaster. This decoration is generally attributed to Louis Laguerre, a French-born painter who worked on several great English houses. The effect is theatrical. A visitor in the eighteenth century would have climbed these stairs and understood, without a word, how important the family wanted to appear.

Then comes the Carved Room, and here you should slow down. Along the walls, garlands of fruit, flowers, birds and musical instruments hang in pale wood. Much of this carving is the work of Grinling Gibbons, the master woodcarver of late seventeenth-century England, and his workshop. The wood is limewood, soft enough to cut into petals as thin as paper. Lean close, carefully. You can find tiny details that most people walk straight past.

Now the second great chapter. In the early nineteenth century, the house belonged to George Wyndham, the third Earl of Egremont. He was a generous and rather unconventional host. He filled the house with artists, and he bought contemporary English painting at a time when many collectors still preferred old masters from Italy. Among his guests was Joseph Mallord William Turner, the painter of light and storms. Turner came to Petworth again and again.

Turner did not just visit. He worked here. He painted the park, the lake and the sunsets over these same fields. Some of his Petworth landscapes were made to hang in the Carved Room itself, set among the older carvings. He also made loose, bright sketches of life inside the house: guests, music, rooms filled with colour. Seeing his paintings here, a short walk from the views they show, is something no gallery in London can offer.

The Earl also collected sculpture, and he built the North Gallery to show it. This is a long, top-lit space filled with marble figures, both ancient and modern. Light falls from above, so the stone looks soft and almost warm. Among the classical pieces is a famous marble head of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. Scholars have linked its style to the circle of the great Greek sculptor Praxiteles. Stand still for a moment. The gallery is often quiet.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. Petworth holds the Molyneux Globe, made in the late sixteenth century. It is one of the earliest surviving globes made in England, and it shows the world as Elizabethan sailors understood it. Look for the routes of English voyages traced across its oceans. It is a small object in a large house, but it carries a whole age of exploration on its curved surface.

Not all of Petworth is gilded. The servants worked in a separate block, away from the main rooms, and they reached the house by passages that kept them out of sight. The historic kitchens are a highlight. Rows of polished copper pans line the walls, catching the light from high windows. You get a real sense of the heat, the noise and the labour that fed the family and their many guests.

Then step back outside into the park. The landscape you see was reshaped in the eighteenth century by Lancelot Brown, better known as Capability Brown, the most famous English landscape designer of his time. He liked open grass, scattered trees and water that looks natural, even when it was planned. A herd of fallow deer still lives here, one of the largest in England. They are wild animals, so watch them from a distance.

The estate passed to the National Trust in the middle of the twentieth century, but the family connection did not end. Descendants of the Wyndhams still live in part of the house. So Petworth is both a museum and a home. The paintings on these walls are not frozen in a vault. They hang where collectors chose to hang them, in rooms people have lived in for centuries.

Before you leave, find a spot on the grass and turn back towards the house. Look at the long row of windows and the stone front. Then look the other way, at the lake and the trees, and try to see them as Turner did, as moving light rather than solid things. Listen again for the crunch of gravel, the wind in the old oaks, a deer somewhere out of sight. The view has barely changed since he stood here.