| Product: |
Petworth House & Park |
| Date: |
14/03/06 (1456 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Superb Landscaped Gardens & Park. Old Master Paintings. The Deer. Free Admission to the Park.
Disadvantages: Costly Admission to the House. Pricy Gift Shop and Cafe.
Firstly a thank you to Dooyoo for actually topping this category with a lovely view of Petworth House!......
......Now struck me as a timely point at which to write this particular review, as this year Petworth House - along with many other E.H. and N.T. properties - opens its doors for a new season on 1st April.
Petworth House is one of those places, no further than a thirty minute drive from where I have lived all my life, that had never been visited. On Sunday, 23rd October, my wife and I finally put that to rights.
Petworth "House" is in fact a rather narrow definition of this particular attraction. Yes, the building itself is one of the so-called "Treasure Houses of England" but there is far more to do at this National Trust site than to admire the large house and art gallery therein contained.
Yes, a large house it is! Not the most inspiring, architecturally, of large houses either, set grandly on top of a small hill it is highly visible from miles away. A great big four square stone coloured three storey pile of a place. An important "Manor House" it towers over the ancient and pretty town of Petworth from which it gains its' name.
We approached Petworth House by car from the east on the A283, but from whichever direction you come (Petworth forms a main cross roads of ancient routes) the House and car park are very clearly sign-posted. The car park itself is situated off of the A29, just to the north of the house, it appears rather small when you first drive in, this is not actually the case. The parking area has been extraordinarily well integrated in the woods. For me this is always a good starting point, I think of Chatsworth or Blenheim where whole views and vistas are spoilt by hundreds of parked cars - entirely alien to the surroundings.
On foot you can enter the house through a gate next to the church in the town, or (a longer walk!) from the Estate gate to the west of the Park.
On a wet day, or even if recent rain has fallen, I would advise the wearing of boots, there is a lot of walking here and even the car park itself is not "hard surfaced" and would become rather slippery and muddy. On the edge of the car park is a wooden chalet, again integrating well with the woody surroundings. This is the Visitor Reception building, behind which you will find an excellent, modern and spotlessly clean brick built toilet block.
The reception staff we found to be extraordinarily helpful, friendly and knowledgeable, both about Petworth House and the National Trust in general. But then I guess so they should be, Petworth is, in several respects, THE flagship national trust site!
From the visitor reception you have a 700 metre walk along a smoothly surfaced, if undulating, path to the house entrance. The area that you are walking through to arrive at the house from the car park is known as the "Pleasure Ground". This is accessible for wheelchair users, as is the house and various services (toilets, café etc) in the Servant's Quarters opposite the visitor entrance to the main house.
The Pleasure Ground is an area of formal landscaped gardens to the north of the house containing many stunning trees and shrubs. On that beautiful autumn Sunday afternoon the colours here were breathtaking reds and golds. In the spring, according to the guide book, this area of woodland garden is a riot of daffodils, bluebells and wild flowers. The original design and layout dates from the 18th Century, as do the two buildings here, the Ionic Rotunda and Doric Temple. The Rotunda is a folly, built in the style of a Greek Ionic Temple. It marks the highest point on the Estate, overlooking not only the Pleasure Ground to the east but also the huge expanse of Petworth Park to the west.
In total there are 700 acres of park land attached to Petworth House. Landscaped by "Capability" Brown between 1751 and 1765, this was a huge project by any standards, even going to the extent of moving the main (now A272) road away from the house. Once the landscaping was finished a 14 mile long estate wall, encircling the entire park, was built. This took over 23 years to build.
Along with the landscaping, which included the digging of two beautiful lakes, went a huge planting programme, naturally supervised by Brown, the great man himself! Thanks to the hurricane of 1987 and a violent storm two years later, both of which hit Petworth very badly, it is thought that none of the trees that you see today were planted by Capability Brown.
So, what exactly is there here to see now? The park is undeniably beautiful, mostly thanks to the master of landscaping, but also due to the tree planting that has continued to this day. The younger trees survived the devastating storms.
We have driven past Petworth on many occasions on the A272 which runs alongside the estate wall. Often we have spotted deer grazing on the grassy slopes visible from the road. What I did not know was that within Petworth Park is to be found the largest herd of fallow deer in the country. Everywhere that you look across the sweeping vistas of the park you will see large groups of these beautiful animals grazing. In fact, for my wife and I, being able to spend so much time close to the deer, this was the highlight of our visit. It would be unfair to lead you to believe that they are tame enough to approach, but being thoroughly used to people walking through their park, they are not inclined to run away and hide either!
Well, well, yet again Richada has let the cat out of the bag, here, come to see a Treasure House of England and he has already stated that the deer in the park were the hilight of the day!
Yes they were, please bear with me whilst I explain why, for my wife and I at least, the house itself, beyond the Grand Staircase failed to find any great favour.
Regrettably, we are not great art connoisseurs. We enjoy a good picture as much as the next man, trouble is that here, in Petworth House, you are literally swamped with over 300 "Old Master" paintings, not to mention 100 pieces of (rather more interesting!) sculptures.
Our taste is more for country houses with furniture and an ambience of family history, where art is for decoration rather than purely for acquisition. We like to enjoy a social history lesson from our visits, and here at Petworth House unfortunately, that was largely missing.
There is a family history attached to the estate going back to the twelfth century, stemming from the Percy family right down to the current occupants Max Wyndham Second Lord Egremont and his wife Lady Caroline. When he died in 1952, Charles Third Lord Leconfield was the last owner of the estate. His nephew John Wyndham was faced with crippling death duties upon the inheritance of Petworth. The House and Park had been signed over to the National Trust in 1947, but that still left some 700 pictures in total, many of which were priceless masterpieces. The authorities of the day settled on a valuation of just over £500,000 for the most valuable part of the collection. This outraged the art world who knew, even at that time, that this collection was worth well in excess of £1M. Wyndham was disappointed but had the burden of inheritance tax taken from his shoulders. The Park, House and Estate had passed into the ownership of the nation, albeit under the management of the National Trust.
In 2006, that is very much where things stand at Petworth. The family remain in residence - more than spacious accommodation in the upper two storeys - and also managing the agricultural and building maintenance side of the estate on a daily basis.
What then, as briefly as possible, does the £8.00 admission ticket let you see? In short, a unique art collection, of the very finest painters works, collected during the course of several centuries. Many of these works, particularly the Turners, were actually painted right here at Petworth. Others were commissioned from up and coming artists of their time who went on to become household names.
If I wanted to, I would be unable to list the fine art on display here, of the dozen or so "State Rooms" open to the public, I am going to describe the three areas that most interested me here. If you wish to know more, and are more enamoured with Old Masters than I, then there is plenty of information available right here on the net.
My eclectic choice of "The Best of Petworth" is; the Grand Staircase, the Chapel and the Carved Room.
On the tour the first of these is the Carved Room. By the time that you arrive here you will have seen walls and walls hung top to bottom (literally!) with paintings, at last here is something else to feast your eyes upon! Well yes, there are yet more paintings of course, superb ones at that, my favourites in the whole house, but it is the highly imaginative way in which they are displayed that makes this room such a pleasure.
The carved room acquires its name from the wood panelling, floor to ceiling, most of which is stunningly carved above eye level. The origins of this room lay in 1690 with the famous Grinling Gibbons, master carver. One hundred years later the room was doubled in size by the removal of a partition wall in the centre. Everything in this room draws the eye, from the superb portrait of Henry VIII (a Holbein copy) over the fireplace, to a set of four J.M.W. Turner paintings. For me, as a Brightonion, here of particular interest was Turner's painting of the Chain Pier, predecessor to the current Brighton Pier.
The magic of this whole room though, comes from the way in which the paintings are integrated into the walls, using the carvings themselves as frames. Never, anywhere, have I seen art so attractively and unusually presented.
My next highlight is the oldest part of the existing building, the Chapel. This originates from the fourteenth century, although has been much altered since. It is situated at a lower level than the rest of the house, approached by a flight of seven stairs and is therefore the only part of the house open to visitors not accessible to wheelchair users.
As you enter the Chapel, above your head is the family pew, on a gallery over which hangs extraordinary wooden carved and painted "festoon curtains". On the opposite wall are stained glass windows dating from 1600 showing the Coat of Arms of the Percy family. This is not a richly, over-decorated chapel. The simple, but beautiful, vaulted, late seventeenth century plaster ceiling and plain wood box pews somehow mark this out as a place of genuine worship, rather than an area with which to impress visitors to the house.
What cannot fail to impress visitors however is the magnificent Grand Staircase. Arguably worth the admission charge to see on its own, this is the very grandest of grand staircases and is in a way rather a surprise in this particular house. In fact the staircase itself is nothing out of the ordinary, large of proportion yes, with an attractive balustrade, topped with impressive brass standard lamps on its corners. It is the large space, the stairwell surrounding it that is so magnificent.
So impressive do the national Trust think this area that that they featured it on the cover of their highly detailed (at £5.00 so it should be!) Petworth House guide book. The murals here, which cover not only the large walls, huge expanse of ceiling and even underside of the staircase itself, were painted by Louis Laguerre. He completed this colossal task in 1720, a year before he died. Interestingly for the two years that this task took, he was simultaneously carrying out the painting of the Grand Saloon at Blenheim Palace, over 100 miles away - an equally grand project at that!
To my eyes at least, these paintings are just incredible. It is not the pictures themselves that draw my eye, but the superbly rendered architectural details surrounding them. You have an overwhelming desire to actually touch the walls to reassure yourself that they are indeed flat and that the huge pillars, heraldic crests, plinths and stonework have indeed all been painted on. The effects of light and shadow that Laguerre rendered on these walls, marks him out as a true master in my eyes at least.
Leaving the house, via the door where we came in, opposite, on the other side of the courtyard are to be found the Servants Quarters. Linked to the main house by a wing (not open to the public) the house kitchens are on view here, what you now see is a mid-Victorian kitchen along with its associated pantries and meat stores. Also housed in this building is the café, where good quality, but we thought rather expensive, food is served. On the day we had a bowl of soup each, with a small roll of bread - no drinks and that set us back £7.00.
Close to the café is the national Trust Shop. Here we were shocked at the price of the items on sale, certainly English Heritage offer most of the same merchandise for considerably less. Even small post cards at 50p each struck me as rather expensive.
Yes, there is much to see at Petworth House, especially if your pleasure is fine art. If, like me, it is not, then your admission charge is probably still well spent. It is worth remembering though that admission to the 700 acre deer park, highlight of our visit is free, something that I note the National Trust is not advertising in their hand book!
We actually had our admission charge to Petworth re-funded on the way out, as we had been sufficiently impressed to take out a years' subscription to the National Trust as we left. Depending on your likely enjoyment of our "days out" reviews, that may or may not be good news over the course of the coming "season"!
Petworth House and Park
Petworth
West Sussex
GU28 0AE
Infoline 01798 342207
Opening times vary according to times of the year and I would advise you to consult the National Trust website for details of this.
Admission Charges for this year (2006) are:
Adult £8.00
Child £4.00
Family £20.00
Admission to Pleasure Ground (landscape garden) only:
£3.00 / £1.50 (Children)
Guide book - (a very good one) £5.00
Summary: The best part of this attraction - the deer park - is entirely free of charge!
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