From the September 2025 issue of Apollo, out on Monday.

Alec Cobbe has extraordinary energy. On the hottest day of the year he leads me through the richly decorated rooms of Hatchlands Park, pausing to play his antique keyboard instruments, expounding the complicated restoration history of his Titians and then springing up the stairs to show me his own painting and design studios on the piano nobile. It’s as if he’s crammed the occupations of half a dozen lifetimes into rather less than one.

These virtuoso pursuits are carried out between two households. For about 40 years now, Cobbe and his family have lived at Hatchlands, a Robert Adam-designed Surrey villa, as tenants of the National Trust. It’s an estate with long links to his family from the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, when it was ceded to Sir Anthony Browne, Henry VIII’s Master of the Horse, and his wife Lady Elizabeth FitzGerald, Cobbe’s first cousin from 14 generations past. The old Tudor house here was taken down in the 1750s when a new owner, Admiral Edward Boscawen, opted to have it rebuilt by the architect Stiff Leadbetter and chose a young Robert Adam to execute the interiors with stuccoed ornament and robustly carved marble chimneypieces. Soon afterwards the unfortunate admiral caught typhoid fever and died, and in 1770 Hatchlands passed into the ownership of a prosperous East India Company official, William Brightwell Sumner, whose son employed Humphry Repton to remodel the grounds in around 1800. Four generations later, in 1888, it was sold again to Stuart (later Lord) Rendel, who added a music room designed by Reginald Blomfield. Further alterations were made during the last century, but Hatchlands’ parkland and Adam’s majestic interiors have survived.

Cobbe’s second sphere is Newbridge House, a slightly older Palladian villa by James Gibbs which stands in the purlieus of Dublin and in which Cobbe grew up. Newbridge was the wedding gift of Charles Cobbe, Archbishop of Dublin, to his son Thomas and his bride Lady Betty, the daughter of the Earl and Countess of Tyrone. They were a stylish couple, collecting fashionable Dutch and Italian Old Masters, building a picture gallery to house them and commissioning a superb 500-piece dessert and dinner service at the Worcester porcelain works in 1763. Three years later they assembled ‘ye Ark’, a cabinet of curiosities holding shells, specimens and curios. In 1949, when the four-year-old Alec joined his bachelor uncle Tommy, his father’s elder brother, there with his recently widowed mother and his six-year-old brother, it remained a house with no electricity or running water, its contents almost undisturbed.

Given the cards that fate and fortune have dealt out to him, it’s not so surprising that Cobbe has found his vocation in country-house collections, scholarship, painting, conservation and music. Having dropped his medical studies in 1968 to work as a painter and engraver, then to train as a picture restorer at the Tate Gallery and the Courtauld Institute of Art, he went on to work at the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery and at the Hamilton Kerr Institute in Cambridge, before setting up his own conservation practice. His eye was trained on paintings and conglomerations of objects, patinas, varnishes and old houses. Newbridge had left him with ‘a great feeling for the poignancy of the association that objects have – where they have been, who owned them – and a love for the forgotten parts of houses’. As a child he’d crept into the Red Drawing Room at Newbridge to copy the Old Masters (later, his uncle would permit him to rehang and even revarnish some of these). He had haunted ‘ye Ark’, too: ‘From the age of five we were let into it by our nannies; there was broken furniture piled up and broken glass in the cases but we played there for hours.’ 

When his uncle died in the 1980s, family trustees advised Cobbe and his brother to sell Newbridge. Martin Drury, director general of the National Trust at the time, had just offered to lease him Hatchlands, which was lying empty. Hatchlands had been given to the Trust in 1945 by its last owner Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel, but without any significant contents. Drury thought it might suit Cobbe, his family, his historic keyboard instruments and Newbridge’s superb Irish Georgian furniture and pictures, some of which had a connection with the first owners of Hatchlands; they were being packed to leave for England when a last-minute offer to negotiate a National Trust-style arrangement for Newbridge arrived from Dublin Council. The contents of the house would stay in situ and the family would retain the right of residence. 

While Hatchlands became a more settled home for his wife, Isabel Dillon, and their four children, Cobbe set out to collect furniture and paintings to clothe its early Adam-period public rooms. ‘It was great fun but absolutely chaotic,’ he says. ‘I had to do the whole house up in 12 weeks.’ The resulting impression is of an eclectic and long-established household with a charming mixture of the comfortable and the glamorous – Grand Tour plaster casts of famous antique sculptures to set off the entrance and staircase halls, a palazzo-style hang on crimson damask inspired by his visits to Italy in the Saloon and, in the Library, a scattering of family photographs and grandchildren’s toys, with deep armchairs covered in sun-bleached linen. In this pea-green room, blank roundels in Hatchlands’ finest Adam ceiling now contain copies, executed by Cobbe and the neoclassical architect Francis Terry, of the four Continents painted by Antonio Zucchi on a ceiling at Harewood House. Among the many pictures hanging on the walls is the putative Cobbe ‘lifetime’ portrait of William Shakespeare (once identified as Sir Walter Raleigh, and more recently identified by some scholars as the poet Sir Thomas Overbury). Its near-pendant is an effeminate, dandified portrait of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, the Bard’s close friend and only known literary patron, whom some scholars identify as the ‘fair youth’ with ‘a woman’s face’ of Shakespeare’s early sonnets. Both of these panel paintings, inherited by Archbishop Cobbe, have been in the family’s collection for 300 years.

Cobbe redecorated the grandest reception room at Hatchlands, known as the Saloon, with a scarlet damask on which his Old Masters are thickly hung in tiers and clusters. A 16th-century Madonna and Child with Saints Catherine of Alexandria and Francis of Assisi by Alessandro Allori, Bronzino’s adopted nephew, has an extraordinary provenance, having belonged in turn to Cardinal Valenti Gonzaga, the Colonnas, Lucien Bonaparte, Letizia Bonaparte (‘Madame Mère’) and the Earls of Shrewsbury. There is a superb three-quarter-length ‘swagger’ portrait of another Wriothesley, Rachel, wife of the 4th Earl of Southampton, from the studio of Anthony van Dyck, and the richly baroque narrative painting Semiranis Receiving the News of the Revolt of Babylon (1645) by Guercino, commissioned by Cardinal Federigo Cornaro and composed as an overdoor for his palazzo in Rome.

The enfilade continues to the Drawing Room, a cooler, calmer space for family portraits and others: an informal ad vivum study of George IV by Thomas Lawrence, a full-length painting from the studio of Joshua Reynolds of Edward Boscawen, builder of Hatchlands in its current incarnation, and two Grand Tour portraits by Pompeo Batoni, one of Irish politician Francis Hutchinson and another of an unknown sitter. Facing the window hangs a portrait of Catherine Cobbe, daughter of Thomas and Lady Betty Cobbe of Newbridge, by Jean-Laurent Mosnier, court painter to Marie Antoinette (he had fled to London from Revolutionary France in 1790). This canvas, together with the room’s white-and-gold decoration, complements the astonishing presence here of the French queen’s bronze-mounted pianoforte, made by Sébastien Erard. Repurchased from the Trianon post-Revolution by Erard, it was eventually sold in 1906 to William Waldorf Astor and housed at Hever Castle, then acquired by Alec Cobbe and Lady Iliffe in the 1980s and gifted to the Cobbe Trust.

Cobbe’s collection of keyboard instruments are ranged throughout Hatchlands’ public rooms. They are difficult to accommodate without it looking like a car showroom, he says, so ‘the art is of making them disappear’. He bought his first in 1968, ‘an 18th-century square piano by Longman & Broderip, a maker patronised by Haydn, which I thought was incredible. That’s what got me interested in what different pianos – and different composers – did, and that’s what started the collection.’ He has instruments owned or played by J.C. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Chopin, Purcell, Beethoven, Elgar, Mahler, Debussy and Vaughan Williams, and the loan of ones that belonged to Napoleon and George IV. ‘That virginal was in Whitehall Palace in Charles II’s era and the young Henry Purcell would have tuned it every week,’ he says. All are played regularly – by Cobbe himself and in the regular concerts he hosts. ‘It would be death to them, they would sink, if they ended up in museums.’

This summer the Dining Room at Hatchlands has become a temporary Kunstkammer for half a dozen works in Cobbe’s collection by Titian, or by his studio, hung on crimson-and-gold woven silk donated for the purpose by Watts of Westminster. A scholarly catalogue has been produced by the Colnaghi Foundation and edited by the exhibition’s curator, Paul Joannides. The first of these canvases Cobbe acquired is Salome Bearing the Head of Saint John the Baptist, received when he was in his twenties in payment for a mural painted for the owners of an Irish country house; it was only on closer examination and cleaning many years later that it has come to be identified as a work by Titian and his studio. 

Key to Cobbe’s understanding of Titian are the 14 years he spent painstakingly revealing from beneath its overpainting a superb portrait titled Lady with her Daughter (now in a private collection). Left unfinished by Titian at his death, it had subsequently been reworked as Tobias and the Angel. ‘What that gave me in terms of scraping awful, hardened 16th-century paint off slightly older 16th-century paint,’ he says, ‘was an instinct for whether the brushstroke was by Titian or by the over-painter.’ It led him to buy at auction in 2002 another of the paintings sumptuously displayed here – catalogued at the time as a 17th-century copy of Titian’s portrait of Pope Paul III in the collection of the Capodimonte museum in Naples. Cobbe went to see it three times at Christies’ South Kensington showroom to be sure of his hunch. ‘What was so wonderful about this,’ he explains, ‘was when we X-rayed it we found him moving things about.’ Vasari wrote that Titian painted another version of this portrait and the fact that many of the ‘solutions’ seen in these X-rays were adopted in the autograph version supports the hypothesis that this is a first draft for the Capodimonte canvas. 

Hanging next to it, centre-stage in the Dining Room, is Venus and Adonis, one of multiple versions made by the Venetian master or his workshop, the best-known being one of the six ‘poesie’ paintings sent to Philip II of Spain. Cobbe acquired his at the Rokeby Hall sale in 2003. It had been ‘horribly overpainted’, he says, probably by the Cromwellian soldier Captain Robert Mallory, who is documented as buying it in the revolutionary sale of Charles I’s collection in 1649. ‘I was working on it for 10 or 11 years,’ he says, ‘and we spent almost six months just studying the X-rays. They revealed that Titian was still fiddling with it when he died.’

Cobbe has spent his life curating other people’s pictures, too. He began with his friend Sir Tatton Sykes at Sledmere and, by 1983, was engaged on a much more ambitious project at Petworth House for Lord and Lady Egremont. Petworth had been gifted to the National Trust in 1947 and Anthony Blunt had created a reductive gallery hang, assembling all the 3rd Earl’s Turner landscapes in one room. Cobbe reclothed the state rooms in disregarded works from their 1830s heyday, when Turner recorded the Petworth interiors in numerous watercolours and the 3rd Earl was buying dozens of pictures and sculptures from contemporary artists. 

While he does consult historical inventories, Cobbe’s approach is not an exact and plodding following of them. At Hatfield House he advised the Marquess of Salisbury to purchase a miscellany of tapestry panels to line the walls of the stupendous King James Drawing Room, hanging paintings against the textiles in a decorative coup de maître. Most recently, aided by his longstanding assistant Alexey Moskvin, he has devised schemes for the Lake Sitting Room, Long Gallery, Stone Staircase, Museum Room and Tapestry Drawing Room at Castle Howard together with Francis Terry and interior designer Remy Renzullo. 

Partly prompted by the Regency-style museum that he devised for Robert Clive’s collection of South Asian objects at Powis Castle in 1986, three years later Cobbe moved Newbridge’s Museum Room to Hatchlands. The cabinets from ‘ye Ark’, specially made in 1762, are displayed in a room that Cobbe decorated with hand-painted 18th-century Chinese wallpaper, finished with a Brighton Pavilion-style faux-bamboo trellis (made by persuading friends to attend ‘bamboo-painting’ weekend house parties). The fossilised antlers of an extinct Irish deer, dug up in 1684, hang above the fireplace. They had been at Newbridge since 1762 until they were sold at auction and then resold by the dealer Christopher Gibbs, before Cobbe and his trustees succeeded in retrieving them and displaying them here at Hatchlands.

A painter himself, Cobbe has recorded many of the interiors he has worked on in detailed watercolours, and has donated his design archive to the V&A. Friends and patrons are often the lucky recipients of his elaborate invitation cards – beautiful, fantastical things enlivened with flourishes of chinoiserie, heraldry or Georgian curlicues; yet another talent of this highly individual, creative man. 

‘Passion, Wisdom and Violence: Titian & Venice’ is at Hatchlands Park, East Clandon, until 30 September.

From the September 2025 issue of Apollo, out on Monday.