We go about twice a year, and always enjoy the exhibitions and find the staff cheerful and helpful. Although the cafe menu is small, the cooking is good and the food delicious. Spotless toilets too.

A nice way to spend an afternoon - check beforehand what exhibitions are on - we saw the Quentin Blake cartoonist one while we were there & it was superb
There are plenty of grounds to explore (but rather cold when we went)
Not a cheap day out for a whole family though..

This was our first visit and we found the staff helpful and welcoming. We very much enjoyed the Stanley Spencer exhibition and the Capability Brown was an extra bonus. Lunch was good. We had a lovely sunny day - how lucky - so were able to walk round the park afterwards. We plan to return soon.

I really like Compton Verney - it is an interesting art gallery with some nice collections. A good series of changing exhibitions, the ground are lovely, and a nice cafe and book shop. It is important that visitors are aware that it is a rather fine art gallery that happens to be in a beautiful country house; there is no sense of the historic interior of the house at all (except for a couple of rooms). It is pleasing to see that they have a short history of the house now, but people visiting it should know that they are going to a rather serious art gallery rather than expecting a country house experience.
My main complaint is that I feel that that exhibition prices are expensive: while the Spencer was a good exhibition, the Capability Brown was rather disappointing. There was relatively little information, many of the images were recent photographs, and the information about Compton Verney was rather scanty. It looks like (as I guess it was) that the exhibition was put together by people used to putting art gallery exhibitions together. As this had relatively little art and lots of cultural history, they needed to take a cultural historical approach to display. Sadly they didn't, and so there is too little information - the bits they have are great (although there is at least one misinterpretation or mis-representation of an eighteenth-century document) but we would have liked more for our £13. I appreciate it is an independent museum, and that it is the going rate (sadly) for art exhibitions, but it is rather a lot. I think the exhibitors ought to remember that at such a high rate the people who know about the subject will go expecting a lot more ...