Ickworth House

Ickworth looks like a giant oval drum set down in the Suffolk parkland, with a long curving wing on either side. It was the idea of Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry in Ireland, a restless traveller known as the Earl-Bishop. He began it in 1795, to a design by the Roman architect Mario Asprucci, largely as a place to show the paintings and sculpture he was buying in Italy.

Things went wrong quickly. In 1798 French troops in Rome confiscated the collection he had gathered for the house, and he died in Italy in 1803 with Ickworth still a shell. His son, later the 1st Marquess of Bristol, finished it, settled the family in the east wing and made the Rotunda a gallery and a space for entertaining. From his father's lost hoard he managed to buy back one major piece, John Flaxman's marble group The Fury of Athamas, which stands in the entrance hall.

In 1956 the house passed to the Treasury in lieu of death duties and on to the National Trust. Its rooms hold paintings by Velázquez, Gainsborough and Hogarth, one of the Trust's two finest collections of Georgian silver, and a portrait of an unknown man that the Trust gives to Titian, painted around 1512 and once thought to be the artist's self-portrait.