The appreciation a man may win in his own day and generation is no sure guide to his quality as an artist, as witness the cases of Mr. Martin Tupper and many Past Presidents of the Royal Academy; but when the chorus of praise persists during something like eighty years and comes from men in every walk of life, it is at least evidence of notable character. Such praise was Wren’s in a marked degree, and it helps to explain the way he held his own under the fickle King Charles, the cantankerous King William, and the casual Queen Anne. Under King George I., when Wren was a very old man, he lost his appointment, but only as the culmination of a discreditable campaign against him by futile people who lacked the wit to appreciate the greatness of the man against whom they plotted their dishonest little persecutions.
In so far as Wren’s advancement as an architect may be attributed to any one man, it is clear that John Evelyn the diarist must have the credit. Whether he met Wren before 1654 does not appear; but he was in Oxford on July 11 of that year, Wren being then twenty-two years old, and after dinner he visited “that miracle of a youth,” and had further dealings with him two days later, as is noted in an earlier chapter. By 1664, when Wren showed Evelyn the model of the Sheldonian, he had become “that incomparable genius,” and Evelyn went to Oxford in 1669 for the celebrations which marked the completion of the theatre.
Wren’s appointment as Surveyor-General of His Majesty’s Works was due to Evelyn’s great influence with Charles II., to whom he seems to have acted in some sort as an architectural adviser.
How greatly Evelyn valued Wren’s judgment in ordinary matters is shown by a letter in 1665 in which the diarist asks Wren to recommend a tutor for his boy. In the same letter Evelyn mentions his translation of Fréart’s Parallels, a book on architecture which had been very successful in France and sold very largely in England in Evelyn’s edition. The first issue was dedicated to Sir John Denham, but it is interesting to find that in February, 1696-7, Evelyn wrote to Wren saying that he would dedicate to him the new edition he was then producing, and so he did with many flourishes.
There is a characteristic outburst in the Diary for May 5, 1681, when Sir W. Fermor dined with him and Wren: “A wonderful genius had this incomparable person,” an echo of what he had written seventeen years before when Wren showed him the model of the Sheldonian—“that incomparable genius.”
The last Wren entry in the Diary was forty-four years later than the first. Wren went down to Says Court with “Mr. London, his gardener,” to render Evelyn the service of estimating the damage done to the house and gardens during its occupation by Peter the Great, who had comported himself in a manner which justly disgusted Evelyn. Wren outlived his old and faithful friend by more than twenty years.
PLATE XIII
THE WADHAM PORTRAIT OF WREN.
An 1825 copy by John Smith of Oxford based on the Sheldonian portrait, to which Dallaway attached the unlikely attribution of Thornhill, “painted in conjunction with Verrio and Kneller.”