Compton Verney

Compton Verney is an 18th-century country mansion near Kineton in Warwickshire, England. In the 1990s it was converted to house the Compton Verney Art Gallery and was fully opened to the public as a major, nationally accredited art gallery in March 2004.

The six permanent collections at the gallery, owned by the Compton Verney Collections Settlement, are focused on areas currently under-represented in British museums and galleries. They include Neapolitan art from 1600 to 1800; Northern European medieval art from 1450–1650; British portraits; Chinese bronzes including objects from the Neolithic and Shang periods; British folk art; and the Enid Marx / Margaret Lambert Collection of folk art from around the world which inspired the textile designs of 20th century artist Enid Marx. The special exhibitions program presents both historic and contemporary exhibitions for a wide audience.

The building, a Grade I listed house built in 1714, is set in more than 120 acres of parkland landscaped in 1769 by Lancelot “Capability” Brown, the most eminent landscape architect of the eighteenth-century. The Park today remains as Brown’s artistic vision with restoration continuing with an extensive replanting and maintenance programme, designed to enhance Brown’s grassland, planting, ornamental lake, chapel – and the Cedars of Lebanon for which Brown is famous.

Brown’s design was created around a series of viewpoints from which the mansion could be viewed to best effect. These sightlines also work in reverse and have been used to display a wide range of works of art since Compton Verney’s inception.

Between 1993 and 2004, whilst the mansion was being redeveloped, the Park was used as a space to host artworks by a number of contemporary artists. Some of these works have been transitory but others such as Untitled Boulder by John Frankland and Drift by Laura Ellen Bacon remain installed today.

There are ambitious plans to work with more artists in the Park to reflect on and to make responses to its historic and natural setting. These plans are underpinned by the idea of Brown’s methodology of creating new eye-catchers for the Park to draw attention to his vistas whilst discovering different and sometimes undiscovered parts of the Park.

In 2018 Tamsin Dillon was invited to work with the team at Compton Verney to work on a strategy to commission a series of new works for the park. She worked as the curator on the first commission of this series, a new work by Ariel Schlesinger, Ways to Say Goodbye, which was launched alongside a solo exhibition of the artist’s work in the gallery in October 2019.