Contemporary Art Finds a Perfect Home in a Beautifully Restored English Country Mansion

To drive up the half mile, tree-lined avenue that leads to Wolterton Hall in Norfolk is to arrive in style at one of the county’s most beautifully restored stately homes. Set in 500 acres of parkland, it is a piece of 18th century Palladian perfection, built between 1727 and 1742 for Horace Walpole by the architect Thomas Ripley. His brother, Britain’s first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, was also having a home built nearby by Ripley—the beautiful Houghton Hall.

While Houghton has long showcased contemporary sculpture each summer (this year, it’s British artist Sebastian Cox), Wolterton is presenting a contemporary art show for the first time. “I wanted to inject some new life into the hall,” says Simon Oldfield, an art adviser and curator from London who has worked on the exhibition with co-curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley. “And to connect the past and present.”

Now, the Marble Hall is filled with the work of artist Ro Robertson—swirling paintings of the sea and steel sculptures like breaking waves. The Portrait Room has been stripped of all historic artworks and its panelling, and a moving new series of work by Maggi Hambling, made in the wake of the death of her partner of 40 years, is on view for the first time.

The two-part installation is called “Sea State,” an evocation of both the power of nature and a condition of continual transition. Both artists live by water—Robertson in Cornwall and Hambling in Suffolk—though they are at radically different stages in their careers. Hambling is 80, and Robertson, 30. “They both talked at great length about the importance of the sea,” says Oldfield. “For Ro, it is a non-gendered space. For Maggi it has an orgasmic quality.” Hambling, adds Oldfield wryly, can’t swim.

This new chapter comes thanks to new owners, the Ellis family, who purchased Wolterton in 2023 and opened the house to the public (the previous owners who so assiduously restored it utilized it as their private home). “Our family has lived in Norfolk for 300 years,” says James Ellis, son of patriarch Richard, who made his fortune in tourism and co-founded Kettle Chips. “Wolterton’s superpower is that it’s such a hidden gem. Even we didn’t know it was here.”

Wolterton, though stately, is not overwhelmingly grand. Inside, it has the feeling of a livable home. It now functions as a hotel, and can be hired in its entirety along with further rooms in a restored coach house and cottages. Day visitors can come for tea and a stroll in the naturalistic grounds created by Charles Bridgeman, who pioneered the vogue for naturalistic design in 18th-century England. All guests will find themselves surrounded by the Walpole collection.

“We inherited what was left of it, which includes all the incredible books in the library,” says James. “And we’re adding to it.” The family’s first acquisition was a 1763 Thomas Gainsborough portrait of Lady Maria Walpole from a private collection. (“Twice married, a bit rebellious, I think Maggi rather liked her spirit,” says Oldfield.) It now hangs in the sitting room known as the Boudoir.

In a bedroom Horace Nelson once slept in, there hangs a copy of a battle sketch that Nelson left behind after a stay. “We literally found it in a box, after we’d bought the hall,” says James. Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, also visited the Walpole family here after there had been a fire. “They had to serve her tea in the basement,” he says. When in 2016, the house was sold to Peter Sheppard and Keith Day, a couple renowned for reviving old properties, it had not been occupied for 30 years.

Simon Oldfield has known James Ellis since their late teens. “We met in South Africa on our gap year in 1998,” says Oldfield. While Ellis has gone on to work in the family business, Oldfield has made his mark in London running a gallery, publishing books, and curating artistic events. At the opening night of “Sea State,” actor Russell Tovey read a short story he had written, called The Kiss. (It had been commissioned by Simon Oldfield and published in a book of short stories called A Short Affair, in which it was illustrated by Tracy Emin.)

“Wolterton would have been at the heart of village life,” says Oldfield, who is Wolterton’s artistic director. “And we have tried to knit it back into the community with the contemporary art initiative too. Apart from Maggi and Ro, we invited local artists, the Clay Research Group, to come and work with the clay that was dredged from the lake.” The results—plates, vessels, and tiles—will be fired in a kiln newly installed in the Walled Garden and exhibited in the Billiards Room and then used on the estate.

It is, however, Hambling’s paintings that steal the show. There are roiling sea scapes of the ocean in flux, called Summer Wave Breaking and Wall of Water, in vivid blue and black oils on a white ground, new paintings made earlier this year. And then the series for Tory, her companion, which has at its heart an image of the subject being carried away by death. This is surrounded by 40 small and exquisitely detailed paintings of waves, in heavily layered oils, each one an act of grief and catharsis. To say they are moving is barely to suggest the emotion they evoke. And they are quite beautiful.

“After we’d installed them, friends were invited to the vernissage,” says Oldfield. “We all entered the room in silence, and Maggi said two words. ‘Oh, Tory.’ And then she told us that the paintings had quite simply painted themselves.”

“Sea State” is on view until December 2025.