JEANNINE ALTON has good reason to celebrate spring - the opening of a new exhibition at Compton Verney

What are the signs of spring for you? Great sunbursts of yellow in every garden, grass verge and highway rim as daffodils and forsythia riot? The return of summer time' as the clocks go forward (hurray)? Of course. One small , delightful portent for me is the reopening of Compton Verney.

That imposing house near Banbury, its splendid grounds and its constantly replenished art collections, has seen many vicissitudes since the Verneys first 15th-century manor, and the grand 18th-century makeover to which Robert Adam (inside) and Capability' Brown (outside) were the main contributors .

The very existence of the place and its contents today, however, is due to the generosity of the Peter Moores Foundation which rescued it in 1991 and continues to care for it with taste and affection.

It has four permanent art galleries, with abundant guides, information and video resources - also an excellent restaurant and helpful staff.

In addition, it mounts a programme of special exhibitions each season, opening with a remarkable collection of paintings from the Royal Academy under the title Opulence and Anxiety, on until June 10.

Curator Tim Barringer explained his trawl through the recesses of the academy to find the 40 or so works to illustrate his theme of conflicting trends between industrial and imperial power (opulence) and the loss of rural utopia (anxiety).

Many are Diploma works - those chosen as presentations by artists themselves on their election - which adds a special interest. They are also in quite amazing condition, unglazed and pristine. They range from Gainsborough (1783) to Hockney (1998).

Trouble is, was all this really an age of anxiety, and how do you paint an anxious picture? If you had, or hoped to have, a commission from a rich chap, would you aim to make him anxious? And, of course, by choosing landscapes and omitting any living images of the rural poor or the industrial workforce, Barringer has seriously limited his scope.

As usual, I think we should take a careful, but not a thematic, look at the paintings, which are splendid.

The first room alone has a Gainsborough, a Turner, five super small studies by Constable (often of bad weather as usual) and his large Diploma piece with beautiful brushwork and highlights on the boatman's sweating brow, the wind-tossed trees and the churning lock-race.

Here, too, are paintings of Tahiti, Benares and India by early travellers to the East; the architecture, temples and domes are exotic, yet the foliage, cloudscapes and river reflections belong much nearer home.

Constable's piece finds a link in F.Lee's painting of a punt at Cliveden, very attractive, though neither opulent nor anxious; Peter Graham's Homewards is a rare picture of the toiling peat-gatherers in the Highlands. The Edwardian artists show, inevitably, French influence - Priestman and Waterlow to Corot, Fisher to the Impressionists (Orchard in the Spring).

There's a fascinating group of cityscapes, which I always enjoy though the theme' runs amok here. Dominating the room is a huge painting of Regent's Canal, Paddington (1930) by Algernon Newton, empty of people, Canaletto-like in its tranquil mirrored reflections but surely not symbolic of decay'.

Nor does Rutherford's 1935 Camden Town, muted and evocative, have prophetic overtones because the artist's nearby studio was bombed in 1942!

Back to the pictures: Carol Weight's Silence, three generations, matriarch, breadwinner, and schoolboy observing Remembrance Sunday, and Chamberlain's marvellous creation in America Dock of Liverpool's dark, pre-Beatle days of locked dockgates, cranes, lorries and the overhead railway cutting a black diagonal to meet the dark, rainswept pavement.

The last room shows some still very trad work (Fell, Williams) and some much bolder - Hamilton Fraser's Train in the Desert almost abstract with blazing blue sky and stark yellow desert bisected by the brilliant train, and Hockney's Double Study from the 1998 set of 96 he painted from memory, unaided by photographs, for his Closer Grand Canyon series. That must speak for itself.

This isn't the only exhibition. The house and its history are drawn upon for garden installations. Where Anya Gallaccio in 2000 used Adam's plans to recreate his ceiling patterns in the gardens, Kate Whiteford recalls recent wartime history for her Airfield, combined with Capability Brown's vistas' for the gardens, in painted runways leading to the lake, marked with crosses indicating airfield out of use'.

A very special addition to the opening event was the presence of Sir Peter Moores himself. I ventured on some boldly-going and asked him when his latest purchase (for £4m) of a rare Chinese bronze wine vessel would be installed.

"In a few weeks," he said. The point really is that this is no static treasure house. All the galleries have new acquisitions listed - a carved Virgin of 1200, an alabaster Resurrection of 1400, a touching picture of William Hamilton and (first) wife - alongside the permanent collection.

To get there? Motorway (if you must) Junction 12; Banbury and the Warwick turn to Kineton; or the pretty way via Chipping Norton, Shipston and the Fosse Way, a tad further but no shorter than Banbury as the traffic thickens and the jam sets. Well worth it. More exhibitions are programmed throughtout the season.