Fig. 301.—Chimney-Piece in the George Inn, Winchester.
Fig. 302.—Chimney-Piece in the Deanery, Wells.
Fig. 303.—Design for a Chimney-Piece, by Flaxman.
From the Ionides Collection in the V. and A. M.
Fig. 304.—Marble Chimney-Piece, 60 Carey Street, London.
But to return to the question of fireplaces, and more particularly to the chimney-pieces which surrounded them. The method adopted in William III.’s time of having merely a bold moulding round the opening, tended to establish the practice of having chimney-pieces of one stage in height instead of two. In Jacobean time most of the large chimney-pieces reached from the floor to the ceiling; so they did in the mid-seventeenth century under Inigo Jones and John Webb, although a few of their designs show one stage only. When the “Designs of Inigo Jones” were published by Kent in 1727, they gave an impetus again to the two-stage type, such as that shown in Fig. [170]; but smaller and less pretentious patterns were frequently adopted, of which a typical example is shown in Fig. [301]; here a marble slab surrounds the opening, and is in its turn surrounded by a small wood moulding and surmounted by a flat frieze and a cornice which forms the mantel shelf. This type held the field all through the eighteenth century, sometimes plain, sometimes enriched, as in the example from the Deanery at Wells (Fig. [302]). A variation, all in marble, is shown in Fig. [304], from a house in Carey Street.