185. Wilton House, Wiltshire.
Chimney-piece in the Single Cube Room (cir. 1648).
186. House in Hatton Garden, London. (Now destroyed.)
The large panels, the dado, the bold bolection mouldings are everywhere in evidence at Boughton House, where suites of rooms, opening one from the other, afford long vistas through lofty doors (Fig. 183). There is an excellent example in a house (now rebuilt) in Buckingham Street, near the Strand (Fig. 184), built about 1675; a house which was the residence of Peter the Great while he was studying at Deptford. By the middle of the seventeenth century pilasters, as a means of dividing wall-panelling into bays, had gone out of fashion; their place was sometimes taken, as at Wilton, by carved drapery or flowers apparently hung on the wall (Fig. 185); but even this attempt at grouping the panels was subsequently relinquished, and the walls became covered with nothing but the large panels, crowned with a good cornice and relieved by the dado, the windows, the doors, and the chimney-piece. This simple but satisfactory treatment may be seen in numberless houses of the time of Queen Anne and the early Georges, where the panelling consists of nothing more than slightly raised panels, surrounded by the plainest of mouldings (Fig. 186). Later in the century the wood panelling disappeared, and its place was taken by panels sunk in the plaster of the walls, such as Abraham Swan shows in his “Designs of Architecture” (Fig. 187), or by the more elaborate plaster panels of the old War Office (Fig. 188) attributed to Brettingham; or yet again by wallpaper, such as is familiar to every one in the present day.
187. Treatment of One Side of a Room.
From Abraham Swan’s “Designs in Architecture” (1757).
188. Room in Old War Office, formerly Cumberland House, Pall Mall (1760–67).