It's beginning lies back in the ages, but it was the proud Duke of Somerset who transformed it in the 17th century, he who was so high and mighty that no servant must speak to him.

Turner saw it on a dewy morning with the lake between him and the long west front and invested it in his painting with a rare serenity. But that tremendous massive front, as we approach it through the gates where it stands with one elbow in the village, seems to impose on us something of the awe that the duke sought to create in his dependents.

It is so imposing, so massive, that all its length of 300 feet is needed to give it elegance. Yet dignity it has in spite of itself, and it is a casket enshrining great beauties and much history. To visit this great house, to see it in all its summer glory out of doors or its magnificence indoors at any time, is an unforgettable experience, for Sussex has no splendour to surpass it.

Long before the Duke of Somerset came to own it by marriage it had belonged to the Percys of Northumberland. Here since the 12th century they had retired from the turmoil of northern marches and the intrigues of courts. The ancient house that stood here came to the orphan Elizabeth Percy, last of her line, after a youth occupied by unhappy marriages and flights from them, and here we may hope she found some measure of peace and decorous happiness with a husband whom everyone else disliked.

He began by pulling down most of the old house and its dependent buildings and encased the rest in the stony magnificence which is his monument. It is rather characteristic of him that the name of his architect remains unknown; but we have to thank him for leaving the old 13th-century chapel, though it was most elaborately refitted, and for having given to the rest of the house the scheme of sumptuous decoration in which there is one superb example of unequalled art and skill.

This is the great carved room where Grinling Gibbons, given a free hand, created his masterpiece. No words of description can convey the overwhelming effect of this lavish decoration, where every form of conventional art, together with the forms of bird and beast and fruit and flower, of musical instrument, of vase and coronet, shield and noble order, are joined together in the scheme of decoration. To speak of all this as a wealth of carving is to use a phrase absurdly unequal to the event. It is the disposition of the whole no less than its exquisite detail which charms the eye.

The decorative scheme consists in three chief masses of enrichment on the east wall and the two slighter end walls. In the middle of the main wall is a full-length portrait of Henry the Eighth, probably an early copy of a Holbein. Above this Gibbons set an eagle with outstretched wings perched on the ends of scrolls, holding bouquets entwined with sprigs of British oak.

This is the tallest but by no means the richest composition. There are a number of other panels for portraits each framed by their lavish carving, but the most breathless achievement is reserved for those containing the portraits of the duke's grandfather and grandmother, the first Lord and Lady Seymour of Trowbridge. In the middle is a miraculous basket of Bowers with an imperial crown and winged cupids. The cupids hold up wreaths of roses or bay linked by festoons of ivy. There are doves beneath the roses.

A catalogue would be required for the description of all of these exquisite productions of Gibbons's chisel, which are so fine that a breath might seem to stir them. Needless to say the greatest effect is reserved for the portraits of the superb Duke of Somerset, a plain man and his plainer wife. About the duke are the pinions and trumps of fame, the victor's palm, the conqueror's spoil, garters and stars, jewels and coronets. The carving about the portraits is completed by a wondrous cornice.

To Somerset's reign Petworth owes also the Hall of State or Marble Hall, the Vandyck Room, the Beauty Room, and the grand staircase to the south-east. Beautiful things all, and made more beautiful by the wealth of paintings which adorn them.

The floor of the Marble Hall is partly covered by an exceptionally interesting carpet woven at Exeter in 1758. Somerset's Duchess Elizabeth was left in possession of the inheritance which her money had so altered and adorned, and it went back after much litigation to the Northumberland line and came at last to the Earl of Egremont.

The Golden Age of Petworth was the last 30 years of the third Lord Egremont's reign, from about 1800 till his death in 1837. Like Lord Leconfield, who owns the house in our own day, he was a great gentleman and a model landlord.

His chief pleasure, it was said, was sharing with the highest and humblest the luxuries of his vast income. He laid the foundation of the magnificent collection of pictures which is one of the glories of the house. Among them are masterpieces by Turner, some of them paintings of Petworth itself and its park, Romney's portrait of the Egremont family, and others of the English school from Lely to Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Hoppner.

The foreign masters include some superb Vandycks, Holbein, Frank Hals, Rembrandt, Claude Lorraine, as well as earlier and more primitive masters. See the 'Petworth House' pages

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