Fig. 6.—HAMPTON COURT.
Part of the River Front, 1689.
Of much the same character, but loftier and more dignified, is Hanbury Hall, near Droitwich, built in 1701 for a certain Thomas Vernon (Fig. [5]). The façade is here emphasised by a pediment, which professes to be partly carried on two columns. Ornament goes but a little way towards producing the pleasing effect, which, in fact, is obtained by the windows (including the dormers), the quoins, and the bold eaves cornice. The cupola adds a note of interest; it is a feature which had been used by Inigo Jones, and before him, although designed on other lines, by Jacobean architects.
But a greater figure than the men who designed Moyles Court or Hanbury Hall occupied the stage at this time. This was Sir Christopher Wren, the greatest architect that England has produced. His work, however, lay for the most part outside the scope of the present inquiry which is chiefly concerned with domestic architecture. It was largely the city churches, and especially the noble cathedral of St Paul, that occupied and developed Wren’s uncommon powers. Of ordinary domestic work, but little can be put to his credit with certainty. However, at the palace of Hampton Court (Fig. [6]), he showed the same strong hand, the same virility of design which appear in his churches. Wren had mastered the medium in which he worked, and he used it with freedom, unfettered by slavish obedience to the rules which kept his less gifted successors in leading strings, and induced them to tread the paths of safety rather than those of adventure.
There was, perhaps, one exception to this slavery in the person of Sir John Vanbrugh, who had a singular gift for grandiose design. Kings Weston, near Bristol (Fig. [7]), is one of his simpler and more restrained efforts, but even here the scale is large and the detail verging on coarseness. But it is neither the personal note nor the minutiæ of design which concerns us at present. Kings Weston is advanced as illustrating, not so much Vanbrugh’s style, as the complete departure from the old ways which architectural design had by this time taken. The date of Kings Weston is about 1715. It is not only in the external appearance that this departure is noticeable, but also in the plan, and in the internal embellishments. These points will be dealt with fully in due course, but even on looking at the outside of Kings Weston, it is obvious that it is disposed on lines widely different from those of a Jacobean house.
These differences are still more apparent in the next illustration of the series, Wolterton Hall, in Norfolk (Fig. [8]). This house is attributed to Ripley, and its date is put at 1736. It is staid and eminently respectable, but there is none of the picturesqueness of the Jacobean methods about it, none of those unexpected human touches which help us to condone the ignorance of classic detail exhibited by Jacobean designers; no “accident,” as Sir Joshua Reynolds puts it, which might lead to variety or intricacy. In making the circuit of its walls, the visitor knows exactly what he is likely to find. The appeal is to narrower sympathies than of old, to sympathies which spring from an acquired feeling for proportion, and are not merely roused by quaint personal incidents attractive to all alike, whether trained in architecture or not. The dignified effect is produced by the stone base, the proportion of the windows in relation to the wall space, and the bold cornice at the eaves. The chimneys are symmetrically placed, but they have had no design worthy of the name bestowed upon them.
At Fonthill House, in Wiltshire, built about 1760 (Fig. [9]), there is a reversion to a type of plan which had almost died out, a central block, namely, with detached wings connected to it by curved colonnades. This type had been frequently adopted in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, and was still advocated in some of the text-books on house design. But its obvious inconveniences in dissipating the forces of domestic service instead of concentrating them, so far outweighed the advantages of stateliness and grandeur which it bestowed, that it fell into disuse. Fonthill House was built by Alderman Beckford in succession to a house which was burnt in 1755, and it is doing the alderman no injustice to suppose that he strove to make his new house a very splendid affair, and accordingly adopted a striking, if inconvenient, plan. He succeeded to such an extent that the result of his labours has been referred to as “Fonthill splendens.” His son, the author of “Vathek,” is said to have been born at Fonthill in 1759, possibly in the new house, but there is no record of the actual date of its erection. The son eventually sold it for £9,000, a mere bagatelle in comparison with its cost, which was nearly a quarter of a million. He was then, about 1795, building on a vast scale, with the help of Wyatt, one of those freaks in which the late eighteenth century delighted, a mansion in the guise of a sham abbey, costing another quarter of a million. This wonderful edifice had but a short life, for in 1825, two years after he had sold the estate, the great tower fell and started the decay of the whole structure. So famous were Fonthill Abbey and its contents that half England had flocked to the sale, filling every inn for miles around, and eating the countryside bare. Beckford the younger, like many of his contemporaries, was a man of great wealth and of considerable culture; a great collector of art treasures, and one who spent large sums in building in an ancient style of which neither he nor anyone living knew the rudiments. Reynolds, however, may be held to have countenanced the practice, for he says that the imagination being affected by the association of ideas, and we having naturally a veneration for antiquity, whatever building brings to our remembrance ancient customs and manners, such as the castles of the barons of ancient chivalry, is sure to give delight.
Fig. 7.—KINGS WESTON, near Bristol, cir. 1715.
