Own Work: Arundel House Arch

     Finally a new painting to show you.  A depiction of a now non-existent gate Inigo Jones designed for Arundel House, London.  Mannerism in full flow, almost Jacobean.  Mixed media.

Own Work: Inigo Jones

   I've been rather tardy with posting of late.  Here then is one of the pieces I painted last month and should have been posted at least a week ago: an arch designed by Inigo Jones for Ely House, London.

Thorney

     The theme continued.  Wednesday saw us in the fenland town of Spalding and the newly restored Ayscoughfee Hall.  Alas, they had ridded themselves of the immense flock of stuffed birds that haunted one of the rooms, but there was however a lovely temporary exhibition on William Stukeley and his garden designs - he planted circles of trees in imitation of megalithic circles apparently.  I recommend a visit.
     Anyway the real subject of this post is the visit we made on Thursday to Thorney, in the Fenland just east of Peterborough.  I had been there before as a child to the zoo that then existed there.  I haven't been back since, except passing through on the top of a double decker heading for King's Lynn, but it has always intrigued me.

     Like Crowland to the north, Thorney is built on a fen 'island' and is the site of an ancient monastic community.  Its oldest recorded name is 'Ancarrig' - the isle of the anchorites - referring to the community traditionally founded by Saxulf Abbot of Peterborough c.662.  In 870 it was sacked by the Vikings and three of the hermits there, Tancred, Tothred & Tova, were martyred.  The island reverted to wilderness and the name changed over time to Thorney to reflect its abandonment - the island of thorns.  In 972 a new monastery, Benedictine, was founded by St Ethelwold.  It soon began to amass a massive collection of relics, and became a place of pilgrimage.  In the 1530s the monastery was dissolved and abandoned, the stone being quickly carted off to use in Cambridge.
     I was not a disappointed pilgrim.  The village and the church are especially attractive, more like a village in the Great Limestone Belt to the west than a fenland community.  This is due mainly to the fact that Thorney was an estate village, owing its appearance to the Dukes of Bedford.  Rows of pretty cottages line the main street.  Around the remains of the abbey are rather muscular Victorian Gothic cottages and shops, and to the south of the church is a village green lined with older, grander houses.  The church itself is basically Norman (1085-1128), built under Abbot Guenther.  Sadly all that remains of the church are the west front and the five western most bays of the nave.  The church originally was nearly 300ft long.  The nave has been stripped of  clerestory and aisles.  In 1638, when the local fens were being drained to form the Bedford Level, the church was restored to use, apparently by Inigo Jones. The attribution though might be apocryphal. The west window and door, and the plaster vault inside date from that period. In the 1840-1 Edward Blore added a chancel of sorts - a crossing and transepts in a monumental, rather Germanic, Romanesque - making the church 'T' shaped in plan. The churchyard is crammed with monuments, the Georgian ones very distinctive, the relief sculpture being deeply cut and often bearing a representation of the Lamb of God.

Belton House I

   It's nearly a fortnight since the bf and I spent Saturday afternoon at Belton House, near Grantham.  It was warm and sunny and very busy.  Belton is a perfect example of a Restoration House.  Probably the best example there is, after the loss of Coleshill and Clarendon House, both designed by Sir Roger Pratt (1620 - 1685).  The architect in this case is probably William Wynde - not Pratt or Wren, as once thought.  The Master Mason was William Stanton, who was also designed a couple of the many monuments in the village church, but more of those in a later post.  Belton House dates from the mid 1680s and was built for Sir John Brownlow, and remained in the Brownlow and then Cust families until acquired by the National Trust in, I think, the 1980s.  In 1777 Wyatt made a number of alterations - the more drastic, like the removal of the cupola and balustrade from the roof, were reversed in the late 1800s.  Otherwise the house is remarkably intact.  It is likely that the ancillary buildings, such as the stables, are by William Stanton alone.

   This style of astylar house (that is, it has no columns - the pair flanking the main entrance are later, by Wyatt), came to England in 1638 with the house Inigo Jones designed for Lord Maltravers.  However similar houses were being constructed in the previous decade in the Dutch Republic, for example the 'Huis Ten Bosch' by Jacob Van Campen - look in particular at the garden façade.  These houses constituted a successful attempt to combine the Dutch vernacular tradition with the more rigorous approach of Classicism.  Among a number of sources architects, such as Van Campen, were looking towards contemporary French architecture, and it is there I suspect that the deep origins of buildings such as Belton lie, in the work of such architects as Sebastiano Serlio  and Pierre Lescot, who in the previous century set the pattern for French architecture for the next hundred years or so, attempting, equally successfully to combine Italian Renaissance and French Medieval traditions, such as the steep pavilion roof.  A marriage, then, of Northern and southern European traditions. In particular two of the urban interventions undertaken by King Henri IV in Paris: The Place Dauphine, and the Place Royale (now the Place des Vosges) both of which date from the first two decades of the 17th century (architects unknown), had a direct influence on Van Campen and Jones, who's own urban intervention of Convent Garden, in London, was undertaken in the 1630s.  In Maltravers House Jones works his own variation: his Classicism is that of the High Renaissance palazzo not the Mannerism of Serlio or Lescot. It that sense Belton does not fit into the Jonesian model.  With it's equal storeys it fits more easily into the French Classical tradition; it even plays, in a very mild way, with the sort of complex layering of the façade that you find in work of Mansart.  Regardless of its origins this style became a favourite of architects and more importantly masons, possibly never going out of fashion in places such as Stamford, also in Lincolnshire, until the 19th century (only the detailing changing), partly because it is so sensible and flexible, and partly because it fitted easily into pre-existing English vernacular building traditions.  

  The house stands with its back to the estate village at the meeting of two mighty axial avenues of tress, one running e-w and the other, longer, N-S with its Baroque sense of infinite expansion.  The original Baroque gardens have been lost; the oblong 'Canal Pool' must be a remnant of the first formal scheme.  The bathing pavilion was added later in 1816.  The gardens as they are now were laid out firstly by Wyatt and secondly at the end of the 19th century.  The Orangery, which I really admire, is by Wyatt.