In praise of … the Iveagh bequest

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/27/iveagh-bequest

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It sounds like a Victorian novel. In fact, it's Kenwood, an Adam house of perfect proportions built in the late 18th century on the edge of Hampstead Heath in north London, together with its contents, which include some of the world's finest paintings, among them probably the greatest of Rembrandt's self-portraits. It was left to the nation by the eponymous 1st Earl of Iveagh, who had snatched the house from under the noses of the developers a few years before his death in 1927. On Thursday it reopens after a major restoration intended to bring it closer to the earl's original stipulation of making the home of an 18th-century artistic gentleman open to everyone. As the backdrop to some of the agonising encounters between Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant in Notting Hill, it became globally famous. But thousands of Londoners already knew it as the setting for annual outdoor concerts. Iveagh's fortune came from Guinness. Buy that man a pint.

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