The English Home from Charles I. to George IV. / Its Architecture, Decoration and Garden Design

by J. Alfred Gotch

The changes here indicated will be dealt with at length in subsequent chapters; the first step towards them was taken when the hall ceased to be a living-room and became a vestibule, as the result of an alteration in domestic habits, an alteration which rendered easy the adoption of a house-plan more closely related than was formerly possible to those Italian models to which architects had been approximating their designs for half a century. So far, the models had been copied but halfheartedly, partly because of the conservatism of English habits, partly from incomplete knowledge of Italian methods of design. But as knowledge increased, both from the study of books and from the first-hand investigations of travelling students, so was the Italianising of English buildings accelerated; and a great obstacle to this progress was removed when the ancient use and position of the hall—which had a tradition of three centuries behind them—were no longer preserved. The movement indicated was by no means regular; it was quicker in some places than in others, and in some hands than in others: much depended upon the architects employed. Those who were learned, those who had travelled, and again those who were influenced by the cultured few, departed more completely from old-fashioned ways than did those who had not enjoyed the same advantages. The main stream of architectural development is fairly well marked and continuous; but there are innumerable backwaters in which the impetus of the current is hardly perceptible. As a consequence there are to be found as late as the end of the seventeenth century buildings which look almost contemporary with those of the beginning.

The man who did more than anyone else to bring learning to bear on design, and to introduce into England a true and correct knowledge of Italian detail, was that great artist, Inigo Jones. His first architectural work of importance was the Banqueting House at Whitehall, which was finished in 1622. It has no trace of traditional English design about it (see Fig. [22]). To us it appears a beautiful building, but by no means abnormal, because we can see many others of the same type. But to those who saw it when it was just built, it was something entirely novel, something in which they sought in vain for any of the customary devices for producing architectural effect. Doubtless it was a stimulant, but it did not revolutionise English architecture. Indeed, it was only Inigo Jones, and after him his pupil John Webb, who could pretend to work on such learned lines. The ordinary surveyors—of whom there must have been a large number, although their names have not survived—still worked in the hybrid style in which they had been trained, with the result that such a house as Aston Hall, near Birmingham, which was completed in 1635, is thoroughly Jacobean in character (Fig. [2]), although of sufficient importance to have warranted the adoption of the latest ideas in design, had they been at all widespread.

There is one point, however, in which Aston Hall shows the impending change in house-planning, and that is the disposition of the great hall. It is entered in the middle of one side, instead of through screens at the end, thus making a large vestibule of it instead of a living-room. The same treatment is to be found in some of the plans of John Smithson, an eminent architect of the time; and an examination of his drawings will presently be undertaken, in order to illustrate the steps which led from the Jacobean style to the more fully developed classic.

Nothing illustrates this change more aptly than a comparison between Smithson’s drawings and those of Inigo Jones and John Webb. The first are Jacobean, the second are classic. In the Jacobean are seen efforts to sever the ties which ancient traditions still imposed; a striving after Italian detail, which was never thoroughly achieved; a mixture of a little old-fashioned romance, with a little new-fashioned learning. In the classic are seen an ignoring of tradition; a mastery of Italian methods; a mixture of sound knowledge with a feeling for good proportion. As an illustration of the first large building in England conceived in the fully developed classic style, nothing could be better than the drawing made by Thomas Sandby about the middle of the eighteenth century, showing how the great palace designed for Charles I. would have appeared (see Fig. [1]). It is also interesting in connection with the inquiry into the Jones and Webb drawings, which will be fully dealt with in Chapter IV.

Incidentally a study of the drawings by Jones and Webb forces the inquirer to reconsider the relations of those two men as hitherto accepted, and compels him to readjust his ideas as to some of the work he had been taught to attribute to Jones.

With the seventeenth century we get into much closer touch with the designers of buildings than was possible in earlier times: in many cases we can get behind the buildings to their architects. But the chief purpose of the following pages is to trace the changes that took place in the houses themselves and their accessories, and although it would be neither possible nor desirable to omit all mention of the architects, the latter will be subsidiary to the main theme, and will be dealt with not so much biographically as by way of showing how their training, their opportunities and their idiosyncrasies affected the buildings with which they were concerned.

The present and immediate purpose is to give a brief and broad outlook over the period dealt with in detail in subsequent chapters; and to that end a series of houses has been selected, separated from each other in point of date by intervals of some twenty or thirty years.

The first of the series is Aston Hall (Fig. [2]), which may be considered an example of how the old order lingered on. It has all the characteristics of Jacobean design, with its two pronounced wings, its curved gables, its fine chimney-stacks, and its mullioned windows: not to mention an open arcade and a forecourt with garden houses at the two outlying corners. These characteristics were gradually to disappear from houses. The plan became more compact, and wings were discarded, except that version of them which became fashionable later on, and which consisted of a separate block on either side of the main building, connected to it by a colonnade. Gables disappeared, the only approach to such features being the flat pediments which were often employed as central ornaments to the façades. Chimney-stacks became plainer, and the flues were massed into solid blocks, instead of rising in separate shafts from a common base. Mullioned windows lingered on for some years, but the mullions were of wood, and were insignificant compared with their stone predecessors. They were merely part of the wood window frame, and they disappeared almost entirely after the advent of the sash-window in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.

In the meantime, greater attention was paid to the cornices which made the circuit of the buildings; more especially was the topmost cornice emphasised—that from which the roof sprang. The general proportions of the building were more closely studied, and in particular the proportion of the window openings to the plain wall space.