155. Cold Overton Hall, Leicestershire.
(Late in first half of 17th cent.)
It would seem as though the small size of the lights of mullioned windows had begun to be irksome before the solution of the difficulty by the adoption of sash windows. Accordingly round-headed lights of double the usual width were sometimes introduced among the small oblong lights, as may be seen in the drawing of the house of wood and plaster which formerly stood in High Street, Southwark (Fig. 151). Gables are still retained here, and also the old fashion of bringing forward the upper storeys beyond the lower. But indications of the change to a later treatment are to be found not only in the round-headed lights with their wood key-stones, but in the character of the ornamental plasterwork. If this street front is compared with that in Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, by John Webb (Fig. 153), the completeness of the impending change will be more readily grasped. In the later example there are no gables, no mullioned windows, no lead-lights. Instead we have a well-developed classic cornice with a row of dormers above it, sash windows, and bold pilasters, carefully proportioned. If again Sparrow’s House at Ipswich (Fig. 154) were remodelled, as alleged, subsequently to the Restoration, it is a striking instance of the survival of the old-fashioned methods of treatment. But in the absence of any definite evidence it is probable that whatever was done in the time of Charles II., including the modelling of his arms in plaster, was merely a renovation. In style, at any rate, it is a step later than the house in Southwark. The windows in both cases are of the same family, but instead of the walls being finished by gables, they are crowned with a heavy classic cornice.
156. The Vicarage, Burford, Oxfordshire (dated 1672).
Another example of the transition is to be seen at Cold Overton in Leicestershire (Fig. 155), an interesting although somewhat plain house built among the grassy slopes beloved of hunting men. Here the mullioned windows are survivals from the ancient ways; even more so is the projecting porch, with its round-arched doorway flanked by columns and surmounted by a four-light window; while the plain flat bands which replace the old profiled strings, and the wide, flat-pitched gable belong to the newer methods of design. The date of this house is not known, but it must be in the earlier half of the century, and some of the work inside, notably the staircase with its dog-gate (Fig. 144), is frankly Jacobean in character. The survival of old ways in remote places is well shown in the vicarage at Burford in Oxfordshire, a house dated 1672 (Fig. 156). Here there is no attempt at pronounced classic. The roof is gabled, it has no cornice of any account; the windows are mullioned, and the dormers retain some of the fantastic curls of the early years of the century. Nevertheless, in the plainness and precision of the whole treatment, in the flat shape of the mullions, and in the ovals of the dormers, the experienced eye can detect the march of Time. When it is remembered that this house was built when Wren was in the midst of his career, it will be realised how distinct were the two streams of design already alluded to—the stately, guided by great artists; the homely, guided by unknown artisans.
CHAPTER XII.
Classic Detail Established—Influence of the Amateurs.
The Civil War diverted men’s thoughts from house-building, and inclined them rather in the opposite direction of destruction. The middle of the century was accordingly not prolific in examples of domestic architecture. Inigo Jones himself was hampered in his career by the part he was obliged to take in public affairs and by the disturbed state of the times. He was among those who surrendered at the fall of Basing House, and must have heard with regret of the order for “slighting” so interesting an old building. But many another ancient seat shared the same fate, to the great prejudice of the modern student of architecture.
With the Restoration, however, matters improved, and Charles II., in the intervals of more congenial pursuits, was regarded as a great patron of the arts, among which architecture now took a recognised place in English opinion. Many books had been published on the subject, especially in Italy. Some of these treatises had already been translated into English sixty or seventy years earlier, but they had not been studied with full effect. The efforts of Inigo Jones towards a purer taste were highly appreciated by men of culture like John Evelyn, and it became fashionable among the elect to study building from the somewhat new point of view of architecture. The only means of becoming acquainted with the art was through books, all of which derived their ultimate inspiration from the ancient Roman, Vitruvius. Already, in the second quarter of the century, Sir Henry Wotton had written a sensible treatise on the “Elements of Architecture,” and now the same subject was undertaken by Evelyn. The Italian authorities, who were his guides, as they had been Wotton’s, had taken Vitruvius as their high priest, and the old buildings of Italy as their ensamples. Within the pale of their cult, therefore, came no Gothic at all. Evelyn, accordingly, has no words too damnatory of Gothic buildings. Barbarous nations, he says, destroyed the glorious Roman empire together with its stately monuments, “introducing in their stead, a certain fantastical and licentious manner of building, which we have since called modern (or Gothic rather): congestions of heavy, dark, melancholy, and monkish piles, without any just proportion, use, or beauty, compared with the truly ancient.” Instead of the “beautiful orders,” he says, they set up “slender and misquine pillars, or rather bundles of staves, and other incongruous props, to support incumbent weights and ponderous arched roofs, without entablature.” He begs any man of judgment to compare Henry VII.’s Chapel at Westminster, with its “sharp angles, jetties, narrow lights, lame statues, lace, and other cut-work and crinkle crankle,” with Inigo Jones’s Banqueting Hall, or what was then being advanced by Sir Christopher Wren at St Paul’s; and then to “pronounce which of the two manners strikes the understanding as well as the eye with the more majesty and solemn greatness.” The whole of the ancient cathedrals of England and the Continent, mentioning the most famous by name, he dismisses as “mountains of stone, vast and gigantic buildings indeed; but not worthy the name of Architecture.”