'A celebration of connoisseurship and the sheer enjoyment of art and history': The extraordinary treasures of Ampthill Park House

Ampthill Park House has always been a home of outstanding collections and the tradition continues to the present. Inspired by their shared love of art, Sir Timothy and Jane, Lady Clifford have filled their home with paintings, sculpture, furniture and ceramics. The Cliffords met when studying at the Courtauld Institute in London, nearly 60 years ago, and Ampthill is a fulsome expression of their lifetime interest in the promotion and appreciation of art. The photography in this article illustrates the remarkable series of interiors they have created.

A 1737 inventory shows the house was already sumptuously furnished and its remodelling by Sir William Chambers during the 1770s — described last week — was partly for the display of art and antiquities collected by the 2nd Earl of Upper Ossory, on his 1763–64 Grand Tour. In Italy, he travelled with, among others, Topham Beauclerk and was painted in the company of the Duke of York in Venice by Richard Brompton, a piece now in the Royal Collection. In Florence, Lord Ossory met the historian Edward Gibbon, who did not warm to him, but noted his keen interest in paintings. Horace Walpole, by contrast, thought him ‘one of the most sensible amiable young men I ever saw’.

During his travels, Lord Ossory bought Old Masters, including Pietro da Cortona’s David and Goliath, and commissioned copies, such as Angelica Kauffman’s copy of Titian’s portrait of Clarissa Strozzi. After his return, the dealer, archaeologist and painter Gavin Hamilton advised him in a letter to build up his collection by buying ‘an agreeable picture of each good master’. He sent him several pictures in January 1769, including an enchanting portrait of Lord Ossory’s sister by Pompeo Batoni, and offered him further works of art including, in 1770, marbles from the excavation of Hadrian’s Villa.

Part of this collection was inherited by the 3rd Lord Holland and was described at Ampthill in 1827, by the Revd I. D. Parry, in Select illustrations Historical and Topographical of Bedfordshire. This notes busts in the entrance hall, including of Homer, Caesar, Meleager, Mercury and David Garrick, the latter a close friend of the family. There were many portraits throughout the main rooms, as well as a landscape by Poussin, Brompton’s piece with Lord Ossory, works by Cagnacci, Cantarini, Barotti and several Canalettos. The Canopy Bedroom was decorated with four female portraits in pastel, called ‘very beautiful, very delicate in colouring and contours’, by Rosalba Carriera. The Revd Parry also noted ‘a very fine collection of ‘stuffed birds, British and Foreign’.

This collection was partly dispersed after Lord Holland’s death in 1840, when the estate was sold to the Duke of Bedford. His nephew, 1st Lord Ampthill, who subsequently leased the house, developed a collection that reflected his career as ambassador to the imperial court in Germany. At his death in 1884, it included a marble bust of Emperor Wilhelm I of Germany, as well as a magnificent vase from Berlin’s imperial porcelain factory (now at Woburn) in the entrance hall. The drawing room showed a portrait of the 1st Lord Ampthill and a ‘richly gilded’ screen, with ‘portraits of the German Royal Family, the English Embassy’ and others at an ambassadorial fancy-dress ball.

There was also a pair of royal-blue curtains with dragons and birds, a gift from the Emperor of China. The boudoir featured a mirror with flowers painted by the Empress Frederick of Germany and given as a present, as were the portraits of the Emperor and Empress Frederick of Germany, by Heinrich von Angeli, hanging in the dining room, together with a Pope Pius IX by Wilhelm Wider.

Thus, we can see how the fine rooms in Ampthill Park House have always been spaces for display and historical reference, which has informed the Cliffords’ use of art and artefacts to create a varied visual scenography that responds to this history and to the architectural character of the rooms. Each principal space also features works that the Cliffords have acquired because they were associated with the house historically. In the drawing room is a Garofalo of The Circumcision of Christ, formerly owned by Lord Ossory and bought for him by Hamilton, whereas the entrance hall has Henri Gascars’s portrait of Lady Ailesbury (who commissioned the 1680s rebuilding of Ampthill Park), which had long been at Tottenham House in Wiltshire.

Sir Timothy has enjoyed a long career in UK art institutions. He was assistant keeper at Manchester City Art Gallery (1968–76); assistant keeper, ceramics, V&A Museum; then assistant keeper, prints and drawings, at the British Museum. In 1978, he was appointed director of all Manchester City Art Galleries and, in 1984–2006, director of the National Galleries of Scotland. He was knighted in 2002. He and Lady Clifford have always created fine interiors in their various homes in London, Cheshire and Scotland, memorably renting part of a converted 18th-century coach house with an enormous drawing room at Peover Hall in Cheshire; and, when at Edinburgh, they owned the west wing of Tyninghame House in East Lothian. Lady Clifford, daughter of Sir George Paterson KC, was a lecturer in art history and an art critic for The Daily Telegraph. She also worked with Laura Ashley, finding and copying antique wallpaper and textile designs, and writing books about furnishing and decorating. After Ashley’s death, she moved to work at Zoffany.

Sir Timothy is well known as a champion of traditional connoisseurship — the visual knowledge developed from looking at works of art, supported by documentary and pictorial evidence. He thrived in opposition to prevailing museum orthodoxies of the 1960s and 1970s and, in the following decades especially, championed the historically sympathetic presentation of art. He famously reinstituted the traditional style of hanging paintings from dado to cornice and restoring historic decorative schemes. He argued that art, architecture and furniture were designed to be seen and enjoyed together, not as isolated, clinical specimens, and felt that the galleries of which he was director should be displayed to give context and colour to the pictures; to feel like palaces of art for the pleasure of the public, which is what they were designed for. Bringing an impresario’s enthusiasm to his roles, Sir Timothy encouraged people to enjoy looking, to respond to the beauty of works of art, rather than seeing them as arcane items of art history.

Excitement about art was also stimulated by his campaigning to acquire significant works for the institutions he served. At the National Galleries of Scotland, he acquired the Bernini bust of Carlo Antonio dal Pozzo from Castle Howard in North Yorkshire; Botticelli’s Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child; Titian’s Venus and Anadyomene, Benjamin West’s vast Alexander III Saved from the Fury of the Stag and, with the V&A, Canova’s Three Graces. On his retirement in 2006, the exhibition ‘Choice’ — based on 500 purchases made by the National Galleries of Scotland during his time there — was held at the Royal Scottish Academy next door.

A lifelong collector, buying for pleasure and to extend his knowledge, Sir Timothy inherited a significant number of works from his father Derek Clifford, wartime army officer, author, avid collector and writer of books including Art and Understanding: Towards a Humanist Aesthetic (1968) and Collecting English Watercolours (1970 and 1976). Together, father and son formed a significant collection of paintings by John Crome, publishing a 1968 book about the artist when Sir Timothy was only 22. At Ampthill Park House, Crome’s paintings have been hung principally on two walls in the dining room, together with a series of interesting portraits, including one by John Opie of Thomas Harvey of Catton, Norfolk, a significant patron of Crome and friend of Gainsborough.

The entrance hall at Ampthill is painted in cool buff-greys and white and showcases sculpture and paintings in the Grand Tour spirit. Either side of the door into the main drawing room are two large landscapes painted by the Scottish landscape artist Jacob More in Rome. One is a view of Rome, where he then lived, the other of Tivoli; both were commissioned by Jonas Langford Brooke of Mere Hall, Cheshire. Above are two paintings by Robert Smirke depicting the legend of Ossian from Kinmount, Dumfries & Galloway, of 1812. Sculptures range from a fragment of a 5th century Ancient Greek sculpture found in the rubble at Belsay Castle, Northumberland, to portrait busts by Rysbrack and Thorvaldsen — the latter, of George Agar Ellis, from the Castle Howard sale in 2015. The stuffed swan, commissioned by the Cliffords, is in the pose of The Threatened Swan in a painting of about 1650 by Jan Asselijn in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The light-filled drawing room has blue damask patterned wallpaper, produced by Laura Ashley and based on historic wool damask curtains found by Lady Clifford years before (Fig 1). The wallpaper was introduced by previous owners, the Millers, and is an excellent backdrop to the 68 pictures that hang here. The north wall has two full-length portraits: one of Sir William and Lady Lowther, by Philip Mercier, dated 1742; the other is The 1st Duke of Newcastle, by Carle Van Loo. The chimneypiece wall has works by the Scottish and English masters Ramsay, Reynolds and Gainsborough, with Ramsay’s portrait of Dr David Clark being of especial note. The west wall has largely Italian works, including Florentine Francesco Curradi’s lively Tobias and the Angel, 1612; and a fine altarpiece, Madonna and the infant Christ with saints, by Girolamo Giovenoni; a study by Alessandro Magnasco for The Nuns’ Choir; and Francesco de Mura’s The Annunciation (from the collection of Sacheverell Sitwell). The adjoining dining room (Fig 5) is hung with works by Crome and over the chimneypiece is a fine unfinished portrait of the highest quality, of an unknown lady, in the manner of Hogarth (Fig 2).

The top-lit staircase hall is a warren of engraved portraits of people associated with the house; both earlier owners and several famous visitors, including an imagined view of Walpole visiting Ampthill, drawn by Sir Albert Richardson, president of the Royal Academy. The small vestibule that leads back into the entrance hall is densely hung with watercolours, drawings and engraved views of the house. The bedrooms are also crammed with art (Fig 7) and one dressing room is fitted out as an elaborate cabinet of curiosities, with shells, stuffed birds, exotic fish and fossils (Fig 6) in the manner of 16th-century Wunderkammers.

A series of libraries occupies two rooms on the north front, with fine fitted shelves designed by the Cliffords’ son-in-law Ivo Curwen, an architect who is married to their daughter, actress Pandora Clifford. The first library (Fig 4) is arranged as something of a homage to Sir Timothy’s writer-father and contains his father’s desk and portrait bust. One study has a cabinet kept purely for albums of visual research on the relationship between the fine and applied arts, which Sir Timothy has been compiling all his working life. The handsome vaulted stone hall (Fig 3), under the entrance hall, is a library devoted to Italian art and a place to display studio pottery, ancient Chinese pots and antlers. Yet another room is lined with files filled with research on every work of art in the house.

The Cliffords also have a rustic home in Castel-di-Lago in Umbria in Italy, where they maintain a major library, on Italian ceramics and the history of Umbria, and a separate museum devoted to maiolica. The collections at Ampthill Park House spring from a deep love of the Arts, but also form a kind of biography of two people who have devoted their lives to the celebration of connoisseurship and the sheer enjoyment of art and history.

This feature originally appeared in the February 11, 2026 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.