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.”
Here we have a vast change from fifty years earlier. Thorpe and
Smithson came under the Italian influence, especially the latter; but
both of them thought Henry VII.’s Chapel worthy of study. Each of them
has a plan of it among his drawings; and Smithson has a plan of some
of the vaulting as well, not to mention an outline drawing of a Gothic
window. The Italianising of English taste had indeed progressed when we
find an architectural guide placing not only Henry VII.’s Chapel, but
all Gothic work, outside the domain of architectural study. But outside
it was, and there it remained until the commencement of the nineteenth
century, when the publications of Carter, Britton, and others began to
awaken interest in it.
The pursuit of architecture now became an elegant accomplishment,
and it fell largely into the hands of amateurs. Books in plenty gave
precise rules for its treatment. Any one gifted with a modicum of taste
could design a façade; and if he followed his rules his proportions
would probably be not unpleasing. If he had some inventive faculty
and were sufficiently bold, he could produce a group of buildings
that should have a striking and even noble effect. This was indeed
the weakness of the whole system. Designing became a striving after
external effect without paying due regard to the purpose of the
building. The large houses of the time of the first two Georges are
magnificent to look at, but uncomfortable to live in. Everything is
sacrificed to the state apartments. Most of these are noble rooms
admirably adapted for stately functions; but the ordinary living rooms
are mean in comparison, and are not contrived, whether as to aspect,
position, or their relation one to the other, in order to make for
cheerfulness or comfort. In towns, where space was restricted, a more
simple treatment was adopted, and extravagance eschewed. This resulted
in such plain but well-proportioned houses as Newcastle House, in
Lincoln’s Inn Fields (Fig. 157), designed for Lord Powys by Captain
Wynne in 1686. It has, however, lost much of its character by the
removal of the stone cornice which originally surmounted the windows of
the second floor.
[Illustration: 157. Newcastle House, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London
(1686).]
One of the favourite devices of the time for producing a splendid group
was to place the principal rooms in a lofty central block, to flank it
on either side with a block of subsidiary rooms at some distance, and
to connect these outlying wings with the main building by colonnades.
As a rule one wing contained the kitchens and the other the stables.
Two inconveniences must have followed from this arrangement: the
stables were too near the house, the kitchens too far off. Sir Henry
Wotton had already uttered a warning against placing the kitchen
at a great distance from the dining-room, “or else, besides other
inconveniences, perhaps some of the dishes may straggle by the way.”
Inigo Jones appears to have been the first to adopt this wide-spreading
disposition at Stoke Bruerne in Northamptonshire, a house of which the
central block has been burnt down; his successors bettered his example,
followed it with frequency, and established a fashion which survived
till late in the eighteenth century.
In Isaac Ware’s “Complete Body of Architecture,” written for students
of the art, and published in 1756, several chapters of the third
book are devoted to explaining how a house of this kind should be
designed. The author supposes a gentleman with a moderate family to
be desirous of building a house in the country “without columns, or
other expensive decorations”; handsome, though not pompous. Having
selected a site in accordance with principles previously enunciated
by Mr Ware, the gentleman asks a builder how much ground the house
ought to cover to meet his requirements. The builder at once replies
that a 65 ft. frontage will answer the purpose. Although the steps by
which this rapid decision is arrived at are not indicated, it seems
to be satisfactory as well as inevitable. Sixty-five feet being the
correct length of the front, it follows that from 40 to 45 ft. must be
the depth. The intention being to achieve something handsome (though
not pompous), the kitchen is not to be put under the parlour, nor
the stable in the corner of the yard: “a bricklayer could do that.”
These offices are to be placed in detached wings, “so that from a
plain design, such as the vulgar builder would have proposed, here
shall arise, with little more expense, a centre, its wings, and their
communication.” The position of the detached wings is next to be
settled. In order to be proportionate with a centre of 65 ft. frontage,
it would appear that the wings should start 28 ft. away to the right
and left; as to their distance frontwards from the centre, the author
is not so certain, but he advises 13 ft. Then comes the actual size of
the wings, which must correspond exactly with one another, although one
is to contain the kitchen and the other the stables. The best measure
in proportion to the 65 ft. is 35: accordingly that is to be the length
of the front of each wing. As to their depth, “for a house of this
bigness and design, 48 ft. will be a good measure.” The size of the
three blocks being thus settled on these somewhat arbitrary lines, the
architect is to proceed to the construction and distribution of the
rooms, bearing in mind that it is “always best to accommodate the inner
distribution of a house to the outer aspect when that can conveniently
be done.” But as the author admits that tastes may vary and occasions
alter the choice, he proceeds in different chapters to set forth
different ways in which his spaces may be divided up into rooms. Into
these details we need not enter, but it is evident that the gentleman
with the moderate family would have to keep his personal predilections
as to aspect, prospect, the relation of rooms one to the other, and
other matters incidental to comfort, strictly in subjection, in order
not to conflict with the proportions and outlines laid down by his
architect.
The study of architecture as an art governed by rules and founded on
proportion has carried us a long way from mediæval methods, which
led to rooms being placed where they were wanted without regard to
regularity of appearance; and almost as far from the ways of the
Elizabethan designer, who contrived to get the requisite accommodation
in its traditional relationship within his symmetrical outline. The
former subordinated appearance to convenience; the latter regarded
them as of equal importance; the eighteenth-century preceptor made
convenience bow to his duly proportioned outline.
[Illustration: 158. Plan and Elevation of a House.
_From Isaac Ware’s “Complete Body of Architecture”_ (1756).]
Mr Ware gives a plan and elevation of his design (Fig. 158), but
with the wings rather more distant from the house than he at first
suggested. The left-hand block contains the kitchens, the right-hand
the stables. Of the six ground-floor windows in the outlying blocks,
the exigencies of internal arrangement require that four should
be shams, although they are in the forefront of his architectural
composition; and it is probable that some of the upper windows followed
suit. The route from the kitchen to the dining-room lies across a
lobby, a room, and 50 ft. of open arcade before it arrives at the outer
wall of the central house wherein the dining-room is situated. When
these and other inconveniences are borne in mind, it is manifest that
such principles of design could have no lasting vitality.
[Illustration: 159. Plan and Elevation of a House.
_From Kent’s “Designs of Inigo Jones.”_]
Mr Ware, writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, was only
following in the footsteps of his eminent guides of thirty years
earlier. Whether we look at the house designs of Inigo Jones through
the eyes of Kent in 1727, or those of Gibbs through his own eyes in
1728, we find formal arrangements aiming at, and often achieving
stateliness, but at much sacrifice of household comfort. Kent’s
“Designs of Inigo Jones,” many of which probably owe their special
characteristics as much to himself as to the great master, consist of
a series of plates giving plans and elevations; an explanatory “Table”
precedes them. The elucidatory matter is confined to a few lines, such
as those to plate 15 of vol. ii. (Fig. 159). “The Plan of the first
Story with the Elevation of the principal Front of a House, with an
Arcade, standing on a Terras, about which is a Ballustrade. The Rooms
of the Plan are 18 Feet high; those above ’em are 16 Feet high, except
the Middle Room which comes over the Arcade to the Front, and includes
the _Attic_ Story. The Windows of the _Attic_ Story are in
the Frieze of the Entablature that encompasses the Building.” There
are three points to be remarked here. First, the importance attached
to the heights of the rooms. Secondly, that the “middle room” includes
the attic storey; it became fashionable (at any rate in published
plans) to have one large and lofty room, sometimes as much as 40 ft.
high. Thirdly, that the windows of the attic storey are in the frieze
of the entablature: this would allow a width of 3 or 4 ft., by a
height which could only be measured in inches, for the windows of
rooms of considerable area--a complete sacrifice of internal comfort
for the sake of external effect. But no doubt, as such rooms were
only “lodgings for servants,” they were considered good enough. Kent
explains on another plate that the lodging rooms for servants “receive
their light from the hall, whose top rises in a pavilion above the
roof.”
[Illustration: 160. Plan, Elevation, and Section of a House.
_From Gibbs’s “Book of Architecture,”_ 1728.]
Kent gives this as one of Inigo Jones’s own designs; it may be in
reality Jones revised by Kent; but in any case the master’s reputation
rests on surer ground. The illustration is offered not as a specimen of
Inigo Jones’s work, but of what the early eighteenth century regarded
as a suitable and elegant piece of domestic architecture. The attic
storey, here starved of light, was a considerable trouble to designers.
Its space was necessary in order to get sufficient accommodation,
partly owing to the fact of the great room occupying two floors; and
much ingenuity was brought to bear upon the problem of lighting it
without overloading the elevation with windows. One method was this
of squeezing them into the frieze. Another was to light it from the
roof where hidden from observation. Another was to borrow light from
the upper part of the central lofty room. This device is adopted in
connection with the passages of Gibbs’s design in Fig. 160, which also
gives a good idea of the manner in which the central hall was treated.
Such lofty rooms as this hall, lighted from windows at their summit,
and warmed (if they ever got warm) by a single fire, must have been
much more magnificent than comfortable. In large houses vast rooms
had their uses; they could be opened on state occasions and left for
more homely apartments in the intervals; but both in Kent’s book and
in Gibbs’s they occur in houses of moderate size, and could hardly
have been left out of account in daily life. They go to show what
importance was attached to state and dignity by every “person of
quality.”
Campbell’s designs were actuated by similar motives. In his “Vitruvius
Britannicus,” published in 1717, he describes a small essay of his
invention for the ingenious gentleman, Tobias Jenkyns, Esq. On the
“first storey, extending 120 foot,” he says, “here is the double and
single cube, the hall being 27 by 54; here is 18 by 27, which is the
_sesqui altera_, and 21 by 27, the _sesqui tertia_, and you
pass gradually from the larger to the lesser.” The front was to have “a
rustic basement and two orders of pilasters in the theatrical, which
admits of more gaiety than the temple or palatial style.”
Such were the principles underlying the house design of professed
masters in architecture in the first half of the eighteenth century,
and it was by publishing their designs that they commended themselves
to the public. They had travelled far from the virility of Inigo Jones
and the splendid common-sense of Wren. Not that Wren had left much
of a legacy in house design. He was an architect of the first rank,
but his work had been chiefly concerned with St Paul’s Cathedral in
London, with the city churches, with palaces and public buildings.
There are but few houses among his preserved drawings, and what there
are throw little illumination on the subject; he never pursued it so
as to make it his own. A few houses here and there are attributed to
him, but it has always been the fashion to attribute unknown work of
exceptional merit to some master of the period on little or no sound
authority. But although he left no direct legacy, a man of such wealth
in architectural power could hardly die and leave nothing behind him;
and doubtless to his influence may be traced much of the spirit which
characterises the vernacular work of the eighteenth century.