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Since 1927, Kenwood, an eighteenth-century neoclassical villa in London, has been home to a small but internationally significant collection of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, originally assembled by Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh. Considered the most important group of old master paintings to be given to the British nation in the twentieth century, the collection of around 15 works includes marine subjects by Albert Cuyp and Willem van der Velde the younger, landscapes and genre scenes by Isaac van Ostade, Jan Baptist Weenix and Jan Wijnants, and portraits by Ferdinand Bol and Anthony van Dyck. The masterpieces of the collection are Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait with Two Circles (c.1665), The Guitar Player (c.1672) by Johannes Vermeer and Frans Hals Portrait of his friend Pieter van den Broecke (1633). In 2000, the Iveagh Bequest was joined at Kenwood by The Suffolk Collection. Amassed over a period of 400 years by generations of the earls of Suffolk and Berkshire, the collection includes portraits by Daniel Mijtens, Cornelius Johnson, Peter Lely and Willem Wissing, as well as works by Abraham Bloemaert, Ferdinand Bol and Hendrik de Cort.
Kenwood is managed by English Heritage
Louise Cooling, Acting Curator of Collections and Interiors (May 2021)