FIG. 187.

—EXTERIOR OF ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL.

St. Paul’s ranks among the five or six greatest domical buildings of Europe, and is the most imposing modern edifice in England.

WREN’S OTHER WORKS. Wren was conspicuously successful in the designing of parish churches in London. St. Stephen’s, Walbrook, is the most admired of these, with a dome resting on eight columns. Wren may be called the inventor of the English Renaissance type of steeple, in which a conical or pyramidal spire is harmoniously added to a belfry on a square tower with classic details. The steeple of Bow Church, Cheapside, is the most successful example of the type. In secular architecture Wren’s most important works were the plan for rebuilding London after the Great Fire; the new courtyard of Hampton Court, a quiet and dignified composition in brick and stone; the pavilions and colonnade of Greenwich Hospital; the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, and the Trinity College Library at Cambridge. Without profound originality, these works testify to the sound good taste and intelligence of their designer.

FIG. 188.—PLAN OF BLENHEIM.

[ Larger View]

THE 18TH CENTURY. The Anglo-Italian style as used by Jones and Wren continued in use through the eighteenth century, during the first half of which a number of important country-seats and some churches were erected. Van Brugh (1666–1726), Hawksmoor (1666–1736), and Gibbs (1683–1751) were then the leading architects. Van Brugh was especially skilful in his dispositions of plan and mass, and produced in the designs of Blenheim and Castle Howard effects of grandeur and variety of perspective hardly equalled by any of his contemporaries in France or Italy. Blenheim, with its monumental plan and the sweeping curves of its front (Fig. 188), has an unusually palatial aspect, though the striving for picturesqueness is carried too far. Castle Howard is simpler, depending largely for effect on a somewhat inappropriate dome. To Hawksmoor, his pupil, are due St. Mary’s, Woolnoth (1715), at London, in which by a bold rustication of the whole exterior and by windows set in large recessed arches he was enabled to dispense wholly with the orders; St. George’s, Bloomsbury; the new quadrangle of All Souls at Oxford, and some minor works. The two most noted designs of James Gibbs are St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, at London (1726), and the Radcliffe Library, at Oxford (1747). In the former the use of a Corinthian portico—a practically uncalled-for but decorative appendage—and of a steeple mounted on the roof, with no visible lines of support from the ground, are open to criticism. But the excellence of the proportions, and the dignity and appropriateness of the composition, both internally and externally, go far to redeem these defects (Fig. 189). The Radcliffe Library is a circular domical hall surrounded by a lower circuit of alcoves and rooms, the whole treated with straightforward simplicity and excellent proportions. Colin Campbell, Flitcroft, Kent and Wood, contemporaries of Gibbs, may be dismissed with passing mention.