I love Kenwood House and have been coming here since I was a very small child. My father was a portrait painter and I was tested on my art history every Sunday from the age of five. At Kenwood it was all about Thomas Lawrence, Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, especially their portraits of children, like this one,

Miss Murray by Lawrence.
On a recent visit I got chatting to one of the knowledgeable volunteer guides and he suggested that I meet Kenwood’s head hooter, ‘he’s a wonderful man – a stereotypical curator’. I asked what a stereotypical curator looked like in his mind. He described this man:


Subscribe to our blog