The story
On the high edge of Hampstead Heath, a white neoclassical villa looks south over its own lawns toward London. Kenwood House was remodelled in the 1760s by Robert Adam, whose pale, delicately plastered library survives as one of his finest interiors, and it might have been broken up and sold for building land in 1925.
It was saved by beer. Edward Cecil Guinness, first Earl of Iveagh, head of the Dublin brewing family, bought the house, hung it with the best of his paintings, and left the whole thing to the nation on his death to be kept open and free.
So a walk up the Heath ends in front of some remarkable pictures at no charge. There is a late Rembrandt self-portrait, the painter old and unflinching with his brushes in hand. There is a Vermeer of a young woman playing a guitar, one of only a handful of Vermeers in Britain. And along the walls hang Gainsboroughs and Reynolds, in a house that still feels lived in rather than hung.
