Painted Ceiling of the King’s Grand Staircase.
THE ceiling of the staircase being square and flat, it did not afford much scope for the exercise of imaginative design, and Kent was obliged to content himself with a very commonplace pattern—sufficiently apparent in the accompanying plate. In the four corners are a sort of double oblong panels, with similar square ones intervening between them. The ground colour is gray. The oblongs are painted with ornamental scroll-work and horses’ heads, the squares with human heads. These panels are bordered with very heavy projecting frames of plaster work, white and gilt, as is also the great square compartment in the middle. The panel of this last is painted with a representation of a circle, within which are four semicircular spaces or apertures, apparently intended to portray a pierced dome with galleries—but they are all in quite impossible perspective. In three of these spaces are seen musicians playing on various instruments, and spectators looking down upon the company below. In the fourth “the painter,” says Pyne, “has introduced his own portrait, holding a palette and pencils, with two of his pupils, who assisted him in the decoration of the walls, and a female of a very pleasing countenance, which is supposed to be a resemblance of an actress with whom he lived in the habits of peculiar friendship, and to whom he left a part of his fortune.”
All these decorations—including “the female of a very pleasing countenance”—the visitor can make out, if he thinks it worth while to incur a stiff neck in doing so; but, in truth, the figures, as well as the perspective, are all so badly drawn and painted, that the less they are examined the better. They prove to us once more that Kent, as a pictorial artist, was beneath contempt. If, however, we are content to look on his paintings on this staircase as mere formless colour decoration, the general effect is rich and sumptuous enough.
The paintings of the staircase were finished, as we have said, about 1726. Three years after we find among the records the following warrant:
“For the delivery of the following for the King’s service at Kensington, viz. for the Great Staircase 6 lanthorns, 12 inches square and 17 high, with a shade over each, an iron scroll and 2 flat sockets for candles, 1 lanthorn for a pattern 11 inches square and 19½ inches high, with scrolls, etc.”
Our illustration, taken from Pyne’s drawing dated 1818, shows these lanthorns still in it. Except for these, which disappeared a long time ago, and the tall German stove, which was only removed a few months ago, the staircase appears exactly the same to-day.
In this room we have a blending of the style of Wren, who originally built and designed it, and of Kent, who redecorated it for George I. The chimney-piece and over-mantel, with its fine Gibbons carving of foliage, fruit, and flowers, the beautifully designed and richly carved oak cornice and the panelled dado are Wren’s; whereas the painted ceiling and the doors are Kent’s. It was, doubtless, he also who altered the spacing of the window sashes, and substituted the present ugly large panes for the originally picturesque small ones. There is record of this being done in 1723, among the old accounts.
The walls appear originally to have been entirely lined, like most of Wren’s rooms, with oak wainscot, but this had entirely disappeared long before the beginning of this century, when they were covered with tapestry, over which were nailed a great quantity of pictures—among them several which have now been brought back here from Hampton Court. At the same period, in 1818, there was still hanging between the windows “a looking-glass of large dimensions, tastefully decorated with festoons of flowers, painted with great truth and spirit by Jean Baptiste Monnoyer.... Queen Mary sat by the painter during the greatest part of the time he was employed in painting it.”