Petworth House West Sussex
Petworth House in West Sussex is one of the finest and most important country houses in England, a late seventeenth-century mansion in a great deer park whose collection of paintings, sculpture and decorative arts is of national importance and includes one of the finest groups of works by J M W Turner in the world. The National Trust manages the house and park, and the combination of the extraordinary art collection, the atmospheric house interiors and Capability Brown's park landscape makes Petworth one of the most rewarding country house visits in southern England. The house was rebuilt in its current form between 1688 and 1696 by the sixth Duke of Somerset, the west front's long facade of Caen and Petworth stone among the most distinguished seventeenth-century domestic elevations in the country. The interior was progressively enriched by successive owners, reaching its greatest elaboration under the third Earl of Egremont in the early nineteenth century, who transformed Petworth into one of the great artistic households of the Regency period and whose patronage of Turner produced the series of paintings depicting the park, the house and the interior rooms that are the crown of the collection. Turner stayed at Petworth repeatedly between 1809 and 1837 as the guest of Lord Egremont and the nineteen oil paintings and over one hundred sketches he made there constitute the most concentrated body of his work associated with any single place. The paintings range from the grand landscape compositions depicting the park at sunrise and sunset to the intimate interior views of rooms and figures, including the luminous sketches of the library and the great staircase, that are among the most free and personal works Turner produced. The deer park, landscaped by Capability Brown, is one of the finest of his surviving works and the view of the house across the lake is one of the defining images of the English landscape garden tradition.