THE ESTATES OF THE ART OF STATELY HOMES

Imagine a lawn like green velvet, rolling beneath Arcadian trees and fading into a soft blue mist against the ruins of a classical temple. You ponder the scene--distorted by windows of yellow leaded glass in the room of the great house where you stand, sipping tea from a Sevres cup in blue and gold.

“Ah, my dear chap, there you are,” comes the grainy, cheerful voice of a man bearing a remarkable resemblance to Charles, Prince of Wales. “I’ve been searching everywhere. What do you want to do today? We’ve organized a bit of a hunt, but if that doesn’t suit, you can run off with Lady Diana, my wife.”

You stare at your benign and royal host, flanked on all sides by portraits of ancestors who look exactly like him, except for costume changes--from armor, to silk pantaloons, to a Savile Row white suit. As the room begins to slip softly out of focus, you wonder exactly where you are. In the fifth chapter of a Henry James novel? The eighth episode of something on “Masterpiece Theatre”?

Well, no, you are in the East Building of the National Gallery in Washington, in a period room especially concocted for an exhibition titled “The Treasure Houses of Britain” (on view to March 16). Your pastoral musings are about to be trampled by a human avalanche of tourists here to retrace the path of that royal pair who popped in recently. Better hurry on ahead and try to form some impression of it all before the space coagulates with a glut of visitors.

Seventeen galleries later, the mind spins with a kaleidoscope of marble busts, damask walls, gilt furniture, Faberge follies and stacks of paintings in ornate frames, but the principal sense of it all is not of history but of timeliness. How do museums do it? It takes several years to organize an exhibition of this magnitude, and yet they often arrive to sum up the spirit of the present with unsettling accuracy.

Nominally this extravaganza--sponsored by Ford Motor Co.--is about five centuries of British taste embodied in nearly 600 objects taken from those palatial estates known as English country houses. In practice, however, the show is about the current state of American politics, cultural predilections and museum practice. One prominently emphasized subtext is “private patronage.” That must please the White House. A less overt but inescapable theme is conspicuous consumption, on a scale that would make Thorstein Veblen gasp and yuppies weep with envy. This spectacular exercise includes such mind-bogglers as a silver wine tureen big enough to bathe in, Napoleonic tiaras with blinding clusters of emeralds and diamonds, plus enough gold plate to force Midas into retirement.

The exhibition arrives at a moment when upscale Yanks are more preoccupied with opulence, status and Post-Modernist historical consciousness than at any time since architects McKim, Mead and White built American Renaissance palaces on Long Island and our millionaires married their titles. That circumstance created anticipatory fears that the British show would be just a pop-up Architectural Digest or Sotheby’s auction catalogue, the ultimate mindless “treasures” blockbuster whose predictable success would further erode museum standards already excessively preoccupied with pandering to popular taste.

Well, so much for refined fears about tainted wine in the temple. “The Treasure Houses of Britain” is a superlative exhibition whose only threat to standards will come from any watered-down carbons that others may attempt in its wake. Well, let green-eyed exhibitions committees be warned: Like “Treasures of Tuthankamen,” the country house fanfarade cannot be repeated; unlike Tut, it will not travel.

In the near term, credit for this magnificent spread is due first to the loving taste exercised by British curator Gervase Jackson-Stops in selecting the objects, and National Gallery designers Gaillard Ravanel and Mark Leithauser for installing them in period rooms so true to the spirit of the original that some, in fact, were adapted from vintage pictures. In the long term, the exhibition comes off because British aristocrats were not just a bunch of arriviste lunkheads with nouveau-riche taste, but people of boundless curiosity, intelligence and cultivation. Their activity in fact set the prototype not only for our ideas of connoisseurship and traditional public museums but for a romanticized archetype of the wealthy, gentle-born scholar and amateur of the arts that has animated privileged Americans to emulation--sometimes with painfully humorous results, at other times with the inspired grace of an Anglophile like Paul Mellon. Surely there is some connection between this exhibition and Mellon’s long patronage of the gallery.

The English country house evolved from the feudal castle. During the reign of Elizabeth I houses changed from fortified bastions to magnificent palaces that never, however, quite gave up their function as centers clustered about with tenant farmers who paid the rents that kept their landlords in grand style. Today, of course, they are maintained by the government as immensely popular tourist attractions, or by aristocratic private owners clinging to them by financial threads fraying to filaments. Today there is no point in resenting whatever social inequity the houses may once have represented. These glorious behemoths are but the fossils of an extinct England, and there is pathos in that.

Part of the fun of this exhibition is the challenge it poses to anyone nurtured on the rather austere standards of modernist aesthetics, with its emphasis on painting and sculpture, and internal structure. Anybody who tries to measure the British show by that rule will blow his circuit boards in five minutes.

What’s required here is an aesthetic radar constantly changing wavelengths to the multiple levels of appreciation the British brought to their own collecting. It’s the kind of show you wish you could share with Mom and Dad--who would enthuse about the craftsmanship and theatrical savvy while musing on the poetics of history and personality. Would she ever love Jacob Huysman’s 1664 portrait of James Scott, Duke of Monmouth: He looks a right flaming twit gussied up as Saint John the Baptist in pink satin. Samuel Pepys saw him as a “Skittish, leaping gallant,” but the plot turns dark when we learn he was executed for high treason for his part in a scheme against his uncle, James II.

Meantime, Dad would be off in the Tudor gallery, mesmerized by the 16th-Century “Sea Dog Table.” This richly carved masterpiece will convince anyone requiring insight into the fact that decorative art can be great sculpture. Its supports of four chimerical dogs with breasts, wings and dolphin tails show how the Renaissance imagination was encrusted with secularized Medieval fantasy.

It is, of course, possible to trace British taste by interweaving the exhibition with the chunky catalogue weighing in like a concrete block, but even more striking are the insights available from pure observation.

One of the favorite spots in the country house was the “long gallery,” a huge picture room that also served as an exercise space in bad weather. The re-creation at the National begins with native portraits that look a lot like those carnival sets where visitors put their heads in a hole to have their pictures taken with the body of the Fat Lady or a cowboy. These portraits are stiff and ornate, like Byzantine icons. Then suddenly at the end, one encounters Anthony van Dyck’s double portrait of Lord John Stuart and his brother Lord Bernard. It is the very essence of cavalier bravura, both casual and imposing, and made all the more resonant by the knowledge that these vibrant young men would be killed fighting in the Civil War. A great picture by any measure, in this context it shows a revolution in perception that brought England from the Middle Ages fully into the modern world.

British curiosity was insatiable, absorbing and adapting everything from Dutch cabinet pictures to Chinese porcelain and the operatic elaboration of Italian sofas held up by golden mermaids. The visitor is delightfully benumbed long before it is possible to rectify a soulful Rembrandt with a Chinese bed of towering frivolity.

The essential symbol of the British sensibility was the Grand Tour, that Continental excursion taken by every proper British peer to cap his education. It usually wound up in Rome, where the young milord attempted to collect authentic examples of ancient Greek and Roman art. He would, however, rather have a good copy than a piece that did not suit him. That idea is heresy to present taste but deeply entrenched in the past, when it was thought that a fine copy of a great prototype was better than a pedestrian original.

At the National Gallery the re-created sculpture rotunda acts as something of a hub for the exhibition. It includes superb classic works, such as the Leconfield Aphrodite, and offbeat originals, like a Roman fragment of a colossal foot and celebrated, rare antique depictions of cats and dogs. English taste did not blink at combining high-minded Platonic philosophy with an attraction to oddities and an affection for small animals. When the display tapers into Neo-Classical “Roman” busts of 18th-Century Englishmen, there is no ugly seam. That was the way it was done.

The exhibition meanders on with seeming timelessness. The sporting life is examined in everything from pompous trophies, to breathtaking Chippendale furniture, to the paintings of George Stubbs, who has finally been recognized as far more than a mere animal painter. All those cricket bats, red riding coats and devoted doggies seem to exist in some forever.

When we arrive at the Wellington Gallery, however, something goes seriously awry. The art is as well made as ever, but an aura of weirdness hangs over the whole. It is fascinating to see how the British version of the Romantic was so caught up with the mystique of Scotland, but that furniture fashioned of deer antlers and Sir Edwin Landseer’s paintings of dogs playing cards are all the nuttier because it all wants to be Surrealistic, and won’t.

With eyes casting about the gallery, there comes a realization that England has reached another of those epochal crossroads, like that represented by the Van Dyck in the long gallery. All of the various schools of painting, from a salon artist like Alma-Tadema to the Pre-Raphaelites and narrative painters, are revealed to have a common look. Their forms are honed and simplified; their people sensitive and neurotic. This is art that desperately wants to become modern while passionately fleeing into the past.

At the end of the gallery there is a grudging Graham Sutherland painting and a small maquette for a Henry Moore sculpture, but the space is dominated by a case of exquisite Faberge trinkets and a huge portrait by John Singer Sargent. Painted in 1905, it depicts Charles, 9th Duke of Marlborough, with his American heiress wife, Consuelo Vanderbilt, and their two children. The setting is so grand and aristocratic, it almost hides the fact that the people are seen as rather cute.

A scene from “Brideshead Revisited” swims into memory. The hero, Charles Ryder, is talking art with the younger sister of his patrician lover. He is a traditional painter.

“Modern art’s all bosh, isn’t it?” she asks.

“Terrible bosh,” replies Ryder.

The final display in this great exhibition is a re-creation of an English country home. It has become a large and elaborate doll house.