Own work: Sketches Preparatory to a New Painting

     Thought I'd just share with you some sketches I've done in the past week towards a new architectural painting.  It hasn't a name yet simply because, well, because it is based on a printed version of a design by Inigo Jones for part of one of his designs for a vast new palace he designed for King Charles I, to replace the muddled structures of Whitehall Palace.  These designs remained on paper but proved influential in the burgeoning Neo-Palladian movement in early Georgian England.  This Neo-Mannerist design, that combines elements of Giulio Romano and Andrea Palladio, is however nothing like the sterile creations of Neo-Palladianism.  It has drama and heft, physical and emotional.  Oh, btw you really can forget any idea that Jones was a Palladian; he was essentially a pragmatic eclectic designer who, magpie-like, took ideas where ever he fancied.

     The illustration, I am basing this new work on, comes from William Kent's 'The Designs of Inigo Jones', the engravings being the work of the architect Henry Flitcroft.  As with the illustrations in the Vitruvius Britannicus of 1715, there is the possibility that the original Jones designs were altered in the engraving process to make them conform to the aesthetics of the new, and insanely dogmatic, architectural regime.