A private sensibility: Simon Poe visits the newly opened Compton Verney, near Stratford-upon-Avon, a restored house by Robert Adam which is new home to the collections of Sir Peter Moores

More than ten years have passed since Peter Moores (now Sir Peter) bought Compton Verney a derelict mansion in Warwickshire, for something above a million pounds. Many, many times that original figure have been devot to the cast in the intervening years, and the be deriveds are now open to public view. The architects, Stanton Williams, have worked astonishments restoring and transforming the Grade l-listed Robert Adam building, which had stood without contents and mouldering for forty years, and adding a novel wing to house a cafe, space for special exhibitions, seminar fields and a learning centre. The Capability Brown landscaped turfs and Robert Adam's bridge above the lake, have also undergone restoration, and in years to approach extensive planting will no doubt mature into something splendid. Sir Peter has done us, and posterity, a great service by the agency of rescuing this house, but Compton Verney is now an art gallery. What of the contents?

The permanent collection mirrors Sir Peter's taste, and indeed the core of it was originally bought for his possess domestic enjoyment. It divides into four parts: Neapolitan painting from 1600-1800; German painting and plastic art from 14501650; British portraits of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and a Chinese collection, mainly of bronzes, drawn from several millennia. Naples was one time the third-largest city ill Europe and an important staging pillar on the grand tour. A delightful little view of the city from Posillipo, by the agency of Tommaso Ruiz (about 1760) was painted upon copper as a souvenir for this market. A marvellous Eruption of Vesuvius by dint of moonlight by Pierre Jacques Volaire (1774) has little figures of tourists and dilettanti in the foreground gesturing and exclaiming as the lava roll ons almost past their feet. The Chinese alloy of coppers are all old and all enchanting but the oldest and perhaps the greatest in quantity beautiful piece in this gallery is a Neolithic tripod earthenware cooking utensil which looks as if it could be the masterpiece of a contemporary trifle (and which incidentally is also a greatest in quantity ingenious piece of cookware).

As a private collection this is astonishing, and there is always a particular interest attaching to work assembled by dint of one person because they lov it. Sir Peter's sensibility almost becomes an exhibit in itself. The curators have made the decision to display the work without labels (leaflets are readily available if you want them), with equal reason that no barrage of information approachs between the viewers and their first experience of the art. There is a niggling faculty of perception of a disproportion between setting and satisfieds Perhaps because we are used to viewing the treasures of our cash-strapped national collections (unimaginably far beyond the purse of any private individual) in crumbling nineteenth hundred buildings it is hard not to perceive that the collection at Compton Verney is overshadowed by the agency of the magnificence of the setting. on the contrary this is a new sort of art gallery: the collection is alone a part of the experience proffered to the visitor; the house, the earths the card, do not cope with the contents; rather they combine with it to proffer a very civilised day out

Beside the permanent collection, Compton Verney will tender a programme of temporary exhibitions ('The American West' in 2005 and 'Van Gogh and Britain: Pioneer Collectors' in 2006) At the point of time the temporary exhibition galleries are occupied (infested might almost be a better word) by dint of the work of the filmmaker Peter Greenaway. This category-busting exhibit (wall pieces, sculpture, installation, film and unimpaired ill bewildering combinations) clutters space after space with the bizarre leavings of Greenaway's alter self Tulse Luper, by turns beautiful, hilarious and revolting (and sometimes all three at once) Suitcases filled of objects (and not always objects: single bubbles with dry ice)--apples, separated crockery, surgical instruments, editions of Anna Karenina, 'Vatican pornography'-apparently 'explore the connections between existences events and ideas, re-peopling the house and bringing the collections and building to life'. It is as if the house had caught a virus and the visitors stumbl into its febrile affection dream. 'Luper at Compton Verney' has that dream-quality: meaningful, incomprehensible and compelling.

Relegated to the former servants' quarters at the top of the house are perhaps Compton Verney's greatest treasures, all extraordinary collection of British folk art and the Marx-Lambert collection of popular art. The humbler setting makes it quite clear to the viewer that these arte-facts are not accorded the significance of the main collection. This appears evidence of a regrettable los of curatorial strength Why could not the visitors be allowed to make up their possess minds, as they are in the un-labelled displays downstairs? If a certain quantity of of these objects were allowed the dignity of a plinth each rather than being crammed together in junk-shop profusion, or if the pictures had been presented a spacious hang in a grand saloon rather than being squeez like sardines and bung at knee height, viewers might have had a chance to experience them as what they are--beautiful--rather than as only quaint and charming. Painting like this has, after all, been influential upon professional artists throughout the twentieth hundred There are some boxers here that could be Peter Blake's; other paintings that could be by means of Christopher Wood or Vanessa Bell.