Theatre of Tradition: Jack Penny's Old Country at Elveden Hall
Elveden Hall is a house of layered identities. Built around 1760 for Admiral Augustus Keppel, the Georgian mansion was dramatically transformed a century later when it became the home of Maharaja Duleep Singh, the last sovereign ruler of the Sikh Empire. Forced into exile as a child after the British annexation of Punjab, separated from his mother, and pressured to convert to Christianity, Duleep Singh - godson to Queen Victoria - found himself caught between two worlds. At Elveden, he created something unprecedented: interiors adorned with intricate designs inspired by Punjab, with ornate gilded ceilings and walls featuring elaborate plasterwork and wood carving.
After his death, the estate passed to Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh, who undertook a vast reconstruction between 1899 and 1903. The centrepiece of this transformation, the Marble Hall, soars beneath a domed ceiling of carved Carrara marble, created by 700 craftsmen under the direction of architect William Young and designed by Caspar Purdon Clarke of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Elveden remains a house where contested histories sit in uneasy, extraordinary conversation - British refinement layered over Indian magnificence, each speaking to different dreams of belonging and power.
During the Second World War, Elveden Hall served as a headquarters for the U.S. Army Air Forces, and decades later, in 1984, it witnessed one of the most significant stately-home auctions of its time. Though the house had been closed to the public for years during ongoing restoration, it remains a place of enduring fascination.
Having been long closed to the public, Elveden Hall is once again opening its doors. The collaboration pairs contemporary artists with sites of deep heritage, transforming historic architecture into a living studio where history is not simply preserved but reimagined. Between the 8th and 11th of October, the artist-in-residency programme brought new life to Elveden's grand halls, filling them with visitors as they had been in the house's heyday. The draw was acclaimed British contemporary artist Jack Penny, whose work brought fresh creative energy to the historic estate. Conceived in dialogue with Elveden's landscape and history, the eagerly awaited series Old Country proved every bit as captivating as the art world predicted it would be
The collection explored the rituals that have long defined the country house - hunts, black-tie dinners - and reimagined them as vivid, uneasy tableaux. In On the Hunt, for instance, a group of figures appears poised mid-chase, their rifles raised inside a room that feels both familiar and surreal, transforming the act of hunting into a metaphor for the pursuit of identity and power. In A Very Long but Short Story, dinner guests sit frozen in the half-light of conversation, their gestures tense and exaggerated, as if the civility of the scene might unravel at any moment. Elsewhere, waiters move in perfect formation, carrying trays of wine like props in a quiet satire of service and hierarchy. A recurring image, the swan, glides through these works as both observer and omen, a symbol of grace and detachment amid the performance of human ritual.
Across Old Country, Penny examines how traditions are enacted, inherited, and reinterpreted. The series transforms the language of privilege and ceremony into a meditation on power, memory, and the desire to belong. Painted over the summer months of his residency, the works are as bold as they are introspective: charged with colour, irony, and movement. In re-animating Elveden's grand interiors, Penny invites the viewer to reflect on what endures when splendour fades and what stories remain written in the fabric of a place.
Penny's paintings inhabit the house much as its history does - elegantly, uneasily, asking who belongs within its walls and who merely performs belonging. Rather than renewing the estate's former glory, Old Country unsettles it, exposing the fragile theatre of tradition that still flickers beneath the surface. In this way, the exhibition transforms Elveden from a monument of the past into a mirror, reflecting the quiet tensions of identity, privilege and place that continue to shape the present.
