The restoration of Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole’s Twickenham summer home, has presented curators Michael Snodin of the V&A and Cynthia Roman of the Lewis Walpole Library with the opportunity to present the story of a man and his home.

This cleverly designed exhibition uses architectural details inspired by Strawberry Hill, such as the tracery pattern from a wooden screen, as a backdrop for Walpole’s remarkable collection. Despite this stylish presentation, however, the display space does not communicate the carefully orchestrated interplay between the architecture of the house and its objects. As a result, the exhibition feels fragmentary and individual objects become navigational points that lead one through the space.

The sinister bulk of the armour, reportedly belonging to Francis I of France, for example, and Walpole’s cabinet of miniatures, complete with ivory statuettes of Rubens, Francois Dusquesnoy, and Inigo Jones, are fascinating as objects in their own right. Other objects are included for anecdotal interest - the Chinese basin in which Selima the cat tragically drowned, for example. Yet Walpole’s art collection is a real highlight, featuring an all-star cast of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century portrait painting: Holbein, Van Dyck, Lely, Hilliard and Oliver. The beautiful Reynolds portrait of Walpole’s great-nieces, The Ladies Waldegrave, dominates the final section of the exhibition and encapsulates Walpole’s preoccupations with legacy and connoisseurship.

This obsession with power and status is successfully set up as the background to Walpole’s esoteric collection and his pretensions to gothic grandeur. Walpole has not always been taken seriously, as shown in satirical watercolours by Rowlandson, and Strawberry Hill has been considered kitsch. By emphasizing his work as antiquarian, novelist and art historian, this exhibition corrects this characterisation and reflects Walpole’s true significance in the cultural life of the British Enlightenment. Until Jul 4

KATIE FAULKNER