Great and lordly legacy preserved in public

BAKEWELL, Derbyshire, England -- There has been a grand house on the grounds at Chatsworth since Elizabethan times. Centuries before the concept existed of the stately home as museum, strangers could knock on the door and have a housekeeper show them the family's paintings and sculpture (as Elizabeth Bennett and her aunt and uncle did at Pemberley in ''Pride and Prejudice").

One of the greatest of the great, Chatsworth is still in the hands of the original owners, the Cavendish family, who became the earls and dukes of Devonshire. They were -- and still are --compulsive builders. At the moment, the house has 297 rooms connected by 3,426 feet of passageways and 18 staircases. Expansion plans are in the works.

The Cavendish clan included not only compulsive builders, but collectors, too. For a sampling of what they bought, see the show of 200 works from their private holdings (not the ones on public view) opening at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem on Saturday.

Not that the family's apartments will be stripped bare. The Cavendish family always has had a fear of empty spaces. They cannot stop acquiring and they cannot throw anything out, not even a broken soup tureen cover. They have about 100 of those.

They also have priceless treasures. Visitors to the house encounter paintings by Rembrandt, Tintoretto, and Sargent; a giant stone foot from ancient Greece; a library acknowledged as one of the greatest in private hands; frescoes with scenes from mythology, including the apotheosis of Julius Caesar and The Rape of the Sabines, which is in a bedroom reserved for the noblest of guests (possibly not the best location, given the subject); giant mineral specimens; a huge collection of white marble neoclassical sculpture; porcelain and silver in staggering quantities; and the propeller from a Rolls-Royce airplane (Rolls- Royce planes are made nearby.)

The house inspires fierce loyalty from those who work and live there, and pride in the estate's self-sufficiency. When the 11th Duke of Devonshire died in May, joiners from the house built his coffin out of Chatsworth oak. The seamstresses who labor endlessly in restoring the bed hangings and draperies are a team of local women. Sheep's wool from the property is used in carpets sold in the shop on the grounds. Vegetable gardens and grazing animals are in abundance. One has the sense that if Chatsworth were suddenly walled off from the rest of the world, life could go on quite well. Being walled off wouldn't induce claustrophobia, either: All told, the estate covers 35,000 acres.

The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire is as hands-on as her staff. Chickens -- real and figural -- are her passion. The duchess raises them, collects the eggs herself, and sells them in the estate's Farm Shop. Her ideas for dining table centerpieces have included a glass dome with a live chicken hatching eggs during the meal.

Eccentricity is in her blood. Deborah, the youngest of the storied Mitford sisters, is the only one of the six still living. The Mitfords were the ''It" girls of the 1930s. Jessica and Nancy became famous authors. Diana and Unity became infamous for their support of Nazi Germany. Only Pamela lived a quiet countrywoman's life.

Chatsworth began as a manor house in 1549 and three years later started its centuries of expansion. Mary Queen of Scots was kept captive here off and on for 11 years. The fifth duchess, Georgiana, lived for years in an apparently happy mnage a trois with her husband and her best friend. The sixth duchess was in the habit of going around the house with a mallet, believing she could use it to give a concussion to woodworms that had bored holes in her furniture. So in addition to the holes, there are lots of dents.

Jane Austen was so bowled over by Chatsworth that it may have been the model for Mr. Darcy's Pemberley, and most certainly will be the setting for a new movie of ''Pride and Prejudice" to be filmed this fall -- at night, so as not to disturb the paying public. Helium-filled balloons will rise to the ceiling with lighting that will replicate daytime.

The Honorable Deborah Mitford was not on track to become duchess. The title was slated to go to a Bostonian, Kathleen Kennedy, daughter of Joseph and Rose and sister of the future president. As Marquess and Marchioness of Hartington, she and her husband, the 10th Duke's eldest son, would have succeeded to the dukedom had they not both perished, he in the war and she after. That left the duke's second son, Andrew, and his wife, Deborah, to take on the title and the huge responsibility that includes caring for 13 acres of roof, much of it leaking when they rolled up their sleeves after the 10th Duke's death in 1950.

They were in grave danger of losing this ultimate fixer-upper due to Britain's crushing death taxes. They suddenly owed the government 80 percent of all Cavendish property. It took them 27 years to pay the debt, which they did by giving up other properties to the National Trust.

Giving the family house to the National Trust has become standard in cases when heirs are less determined than the 11th Duke of Devonshire. He wanted Chatsworth to remain the principal seat of the Cavendishes, no matter what they had to sell. Eventually they succeeded.

While the National Trust is worthy indeed, it tends to sanitize houses, to freeze them in time. Chatsworth is still a home, and it keeps evolving. And while the taste of centuries-old aristocratic families generally peters out before the family itself does, the Cavendishes have remained adventurous in their collecting.

One recent addition is a new work by Lucien Freud, Britain's most celebrated living painter and a friend of the Cavendishes for more than half a century. (The duchess once gave Freud a basket of eggs and he reciprocated with a painting of them.) The new picture depicts a cow's rear end in all its voluptuous volume. That the cow's head isn't in the picture will no doubt puzzle at least a few of Chatsworth's annual 685,000 visitors.

The new duke (Peregrine Cavendish, the only son among three children) is keen on horses. His card reads, ''The Duke of Devonshire CBE [Commander of the British Empire] Her Majesty's Representative & Chairman, The Ascot Authority." (''Ascot" is a magical word in racing circles, as well as being the world's most outrageous millinery display, with hats rivaling the size of their wearers.) One contribution he has made to Chatsworth is a series of artist-designed fences on the grounds, used for equestrian jumping events.

In the grand entrance hall of the house is another contemporary work, a portrait of the late duke by Stephen Conroy, a British painter of a younger generation than Freud. The Dowager Duchess asked that her husband's nose be made less bulbous, but Conroy declined.

The collections form a family portrait of centuries of Cavendishes. They're also evidence of changing tastes in both architecture and landscape design.

The first house was in the Tudor style, with formal, Euclidean gardens. In the 17th century, the first Duke of Devonshire tore down that Elizabethan house one wall at a time, replacing it with columned Baroque grandeur. When the fourth wall went up, it was nine feet out of alignment: The architectural solution was a graceful bow joining the two sides. The great cascade of water that falls precipitously from a hillside garden folly, and a pond dug to replace a hill, also resulted from the first duke's addiction to building.

There was more deliberate destruction when Lancelot ''Capability" Brown, the greatest English landscape architect of the 18th century, tore up the formal gardens to create sweeping meadows that lead the eye right to the horizon. The fields are punctuated by clumps of trees. Pat of Brown's genius was in envisioning what these trees would look like when mature, some 200 years after he had planted them.

Still more building came in the 19th century. The ''Bachelor Duke" couldn't possibly have had time for a family, given his devotion to erecting the house's vast North Wing. He was forced to sell off property to pay for it. He also sent expeditions to the Americas and the Far East to bring back rare plants for the grounds.

The landscape design pendulum swung back in the 20th century, when appreciation of formal gardens was renewed. In her private garden, which the public can see by looking through a second-story window, the Dowager Duchess has created a golden box hedge in the shape of the floor plan of Chiswick, the perfect Palladian villa outside London that once was Cavendish property and now is in the hands of English Heritage, another preservation organization.

These shifts in landscape style are one of the themes in Tom Stoppard's 1993 hit play, ''Arcadia." The playwright was surely influenced by Chatsworth; he has stayed there as a guest, and wrote the introduction to one of the Dowager Duchess's several books on the estate.

Some stately homes have become theme parks, with exotic animals and adventure rides. Chatsworth has not sunk to that level; three summer pop concerts is about it. Both the nobles who own the house and their loyal staff, some of whom have spent their lives there, caring for the collections and winding the clocks, hope it stays that way.

Continuity is the goal. The 12th duke and his son, Lord Burlington, are the 16th and 17th generations of the Cavendish family to care for this great estate. Not that the Dowager Duchess, now 84, will quietly retire. In many people's minds, she is Chatsworth. She is beloved for her opinions. In her 2002 book of essays, ''Counting My Chickens . . . and Other Home Thoughts" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), she rails against bottled water, the worthlessness of the entire profession of ''consultant," the difficulty of turning on the telly with those nasty, inscrutably labeled remotes, and other horrors of modern life.

She is also beloved for her wit and self-deprecation.

''I'd thought of opening 'Counting My Chickens' with the line, 'I had a farm in Derbyshire,' " she says. ''But it just didn't seem to hold up to, 'I had a farm in Africa,' " the famous opening line of Isak Dinesen's ''Out of Africa." It seemed to the Dowager Duchess ''pretentious" to liken her poultry to Dinesen's big game.

Christine Temin can be reached at temin@globe.com.