Houghton Hall II: The House

     An apology is in order.  It's been over a week since I posted my first piece on Houghton, a month since my visit.  (Regular readers may even be surprised that I should have even wanted to go to house usually described as 'Palladian'.) Since then I've been trying to formulate my response to what is a complex and often ambiguous building.

    When I write a piece like this I do some research, however in this case the research hasn't helped clarify anything; for instance in 'Architecture in Britain 1530-1830' (Pelican History of Art, 1953) Sir John Summerson states that James Gibbs took over as architect at Houghton after the death of its designer Colen Campbell.  He also credits Gibbs with the design of the four domes at the corners of the house.  Straight forward enough one would think.  However Campbell died in 1729 and two of the domes are dated 1725 & 1727.  Either Gibbs took over earlier than 1729 or the domes are by somebody else other than Gibbs.  The only other candidate is likely to be the on-site architect Thomas Ripley, who shows no talent for design such sophisticated things.  Confusing.  Hence the delay.  I've also pondered about how much detail I should go into the ridiculously complex interplay of architecture and politics in early 18th century Britain.  All equally confusing and contradictory. Thankfully I've decided to largely ignore it.

     Sufficient to know that Houghton is one of the three seminal buildings of Neo-Palladiansim, along with Wanstead and Stourhead, all designed by Colen Campbell and which was copied repeatedly during the next forty years.  Politically Campbell, Walpole and Campbell's patron the Duke of Argyll were Whigs, and James Gibbs was a Tory.  The traditional account says Whigs = Palladian, Tories = Baroque.  However Gibbs worked here at Houghton and also for the Duke of Argyll, of all people, at Sudbrooke Park, Petersham, Surrey (now Greater London) - creating there one of the most beautiful and continental of Baroque spaces in Britain.  On top of that there has always been some debate about who actually designed Houghton: general opinion is Campbell, though Isaac Ware said it was Ripley, the Earl of Oxford Gibbs - there is also some evidence that Gibbs had drawn up plans before he took over as architect in the mid 1720s. See what I mean about confusing.... 

     And then there are the critical responses to the building: James Lees Milne and Hussey both talk of Houghton as Baroque.  Others as 'pure' Palladian. 'Pure' it is not.

     And so, finally, to the house.  As you can see from my photographs it isn't that large a house, but it does have a strong monumental presence in the landscape - a public proclamation of the status of its creator. Work commenced in 1721/22 just as Sir Robert became, what was in effect, Britain's first Prime Minister and at the apogee of his power.  It was Campbell's second major country house after Wanstead. 

     Houghton's presence is partially created by the  beautiful stonework: sandstone that was shipped via Whitby to King's Lynn and Heacham from quarries at Aislaby in North Yorkshire, Norfolk having no freestone of its own. From a distance it has a certain fortress like quality, something that the original design for the corner towers might well have heightened. A verticality too that isn't so far removed from the English Baroque tradition, but which is played down on the garden front, at least, by the long low lines of the two wings. The garden façade is the most typically Neo-Palladian of the four: the ground floor, or rustic, is suitably rusticated in treatment while the two floors above are plain ashlar.  Basically the wall therefore is inert, there is minimum layering or movement.  In the centre of the facade is a risalto in the form of an engaged temple front - think Roman temple, not Greek.  It stands on a podium ie the rustic.  It is reached by a pair of external stairs known as a perron.  At each end are towers, but I think they may equally called pavilions (in the French manner) because on piano nobile they contain bedrooms - state bedroom to the north, Walpole's to the south.  In fact it is the piano nobile that determines the elevation: the risalto perhaps too weak a feature, articulates the 'State centre'; the withdrawing rooms are represented by the windows between the portico and the pavilions.

     Campbell had intended that there should be a proper projecting temple front, which might have given it a stronger presence in what is a long overall composition.  There are other changes too from the design illustrated in 'Vitruvius Britannicus'; both 2nd floor and ground floor windows are longer than the square ones depicted; the perron (a modern-ish replacement for the lost original) has straight flights.  The quadrant colonnades were originally to be convex, like the ones Sir William Bruce originally designed at Hopetoun, Lothian, and not as they are now, concave. And then there are the towers.  Campbell had intended square attics with pyramid roofs, a homage to the towers at Wilton which were the thought to be the work of Inigo Jones, but are now thought to be the work of John Webb.  As I have written above in the mid 1720's James Gibbs substituted domes and rather fine they are in themselves.  I wonder what Campbell thought about it?  Campbell omitted Gibbs from the 'Vitruvius', so it's obvious the two of them didn't get on in any case. The domes, it has to be said look only marginally more absurd than the intended towers, and this is only when viewed in conjunction with much narrower N & S facades.  They are however far more sophisticated than Campbell's designs.  Towers occur at Ragley and Croombe Court, both of which are based on Houghton, and at both they seem unhappy things.  The towers at Croome, in Worcestershire, where the house is even narrower than Houghton look very wrong. The N & S facades contain elements that very definitely outside the Palladian & Neo-Palladian canon.  Firstly there are the Baroque 2nd floor windows and there is also the arched window in the centre of the piano nobile with its Serlio derived rustication.  It all kind of reminds me of the end facades of Sir William Bruce's masterpiece, Kinross House.

     I am deeply intrigued by the design of the entrance façade.  Firstly there is no central risalto - anything could be going on behind that façade, when actually there was originally nothing different to the eastern side of the house.  The only emphasis is the massive, heavily Mannerist/Baroque door in the middle of façade (now merely a window, as the original perron was removed in the late 18th century to save on the cost of repair).  In fact the architecture of the entire piano nobile is deeply Mannerist, with lots of that sort of blocking found on the Palazzo Thiene, which is traditionally attributed to Palladio but which may actually have been commenced by Guilo Romano.  Either way this sort of architecture derives from Romano or Serlio, and I find the most satisfactory of the facades. That contrast between Palladian and Mannerist facades occurs in another house by Campbell, Stourhead.  However I would never be surprised to find out that it was the work of Gibbs and not Campbell, though at the moment there is no evidence for that.

   The wings too are more to my taste. They combine part of Inigo Jones's design for Whitehall Palace and the stable block at Wilton which was, in the early 18th century, thought to be by Jones.  The result is Mannerist, verging on Vanbrughian Baroque. I really should have taken more photographs of them but I guess I was too busy admiring them!  Like a good many wings sprouting from Neo-Palladian houses they're a good deal more fun than the actual houses they serve and which tend to conventionality. 

Houghton Hall I: The Park & Gardens

Than in we went to the garden gloyous,

Lyke to a place of pleasure and solacyous.

Amiddes the garden so myche delectable

There was an heber fayre and quadrante,

To paradyse right well camparable,

Set all about with flours fragraunt;

And in the myddle there was respledyshaunte

A dulcet spring and marvaylous fountaine,

Of golde and asure made all certaine.

     On the Wednesday we had yet another jaunt.  We drove north into Norfolk, turning off the A10 at Downham Market we headed north-east along the A1122 crossing the Devil's Dyke and on to the market town of Swaffham. After a brief stop for refreshments we headed north through Castle Acre (we must return there sometime) and then along the ancient trackway known as Peddars Way and through the Massinghams and Harpley.  Norfolk was looking very dry and dusty after the vivid, lush landscape of Wales. 

     Turning off the A148 we found ourselves at the head of a wide avenue of chestnut trees leading gently downhill to a small village, New Houghton - just two neat rows of whitewashed cottages on either side of the road - that was established to house the villagers evicted when the park was extended southwards, leaving the village church marooned in the midst of the park and the villagers with a bit of a schlep every Sunday morning and afternoon.  Ahead of us a pair of great wrought iron gates also painted white.  We had arrived.  Houghton Hall home of the Cholmondelys, built by Sir Robert Walpole (1676 - 1745), 1st Earl of Orford, not as a result, but as part of his political ascent.
      Through the gates we entered a well wooded park.  The drive swung gently in an arc to approach the Hall at a suitably picturesque angle; the park was originally laid out by Bridgeman in the early 1700s in the Baroque manner, and, as at Wimpole and countless other country houses, it was subsequently altered in the Picturesque landscape tradition.  The alterations were perhaps not as drastic here as elsewhere and three of the four main avenues survive.  The most important runs E-W through the 'state centre' of the house.  A version of Bridgeman's plan is illustrated in the 3rd vol of Colen Campbell's 'Vitruvius Britannicus'.  I've written 'version' because I suspect it does not show the park and gardens as they were actually laid out.

     As the house was not open for another half hour we decided to do the gardens first then rather than have lunch.  It was quite the best thing to do.  There are two gardens at Houghton - one beside the house and the second created with the walls of the old kitchen garden, which - with the stables - is to one side and out of sight of the house. The new gardens were started in 1991 and are the work of the then head gardener, Paul Underwood and, later, the garden designers Julian and Isobel Bannerman.  All three are to be congratulated.  The new gardens are superb; the vast space of the kitchen garden has been divided up into a number of interconnected formal gardens - some practical, some purely for pleasure.  It was a delight to wander about and really are worth a visit in their own right.  The herbaceous borders were amazing even though we were there past peak season.  I particularly loved the combinations of hot pinks, reds and oranges with blues.  There is a greenhouse too and a fantastical tempietto that references the 'primitive hut' as described by the French Neo-classical architectural theorist the Abbe Laugier. Delightful.

     The stables, constructed of brick and the local carstone, are perhaps one of the orangiest building I've seen. They are the work of William Kent, and with all Kent's buildings the Baroque, in the form of Sir John Vanbrugh, is never far away.  They are also very monumental, and form the beginning of the route that visitors take to enter the house.  It is possible to omit the stables from the route by walking around them but I'd advise against it. The route is so carefully contrived and baroque you have to do it all. Go through the archway nearest the walled garden and the car park, cross the courtyard (or get way laid in the cafe and shop) and through the arch opposite.  On the other side is a bosquet of densely planted lime trees - take the path.  At the centre a tall sundial, ahead a flight of stone stairs.  
     At the top of the steps you find yourself on the edge of a plateau, a vast Baroque garden that is part original (though most of the original planting was swept away in the 1770s to save money), part Picturesque remodelling and part subsequent restoration of the original plan.  The Baroque predominates. Walk on through the loose planting of trees and then all of sudden this amazing space opens up before you.  Breathtaking.  A real coup du theatre. The scale is colossal, and beyond my limited talents with a camera.

      Essentially an immense rectangle in plan this deeply formal and austere garden (there are no flowers) is bounded on one side (E - to your right) with the house and its flanking pavilions, and on the other three sides by ha-has and terraces.  A great lawn - bloody enormous, actually - runs from the house along the great E-W axis. (To your left) It is lined with double rows of pleached lime trees, echoing in their bare trunks the columns of the arcades that link the house to its pavilions. The lawn appears to have no end - the ha-ha dissolving the boundary at that point between garden and park.  The avenue of trees shown in 'Vitruvius Britannicus' has been removed at some point but the Baroque concept of 'infinite extension' assiduously maintained by the subsequent informal planting.  Behind the lines of pleached trees on either side of the lawn are blocks of bosquets sliced through by radiating avenues and bounded by hedges of either beech or hornbeam.  I wasn't sure which.  Four of the bosquets north of the lawn are hollowed out to form 'cabinets du verdure', in reference to those illustrated in the 'Vitruvius Britannicus', and where Modern sculpture and installations have been sited.  Rachel Whiteread had made a cast of the interior of a garden shed - 'Bit of a one trick pony' said the bf.  It was hard to disagree.  It was pretty underwhelming, as were the rest with the exception of 'Skyspace', 2000, by James Turrell.  (Apologies for ending this post on such a mildly negative note.  Everything else at Houghton though is marvellous!)

London

   On Wednesday I went up to London and in a very hectic day took in five exhibitions.  Things started at the RIBA Headquarters in Portland Place with the exhibition 'Palladian Design: The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected'. 

   I'm not a great fan of English Neo-Palladian design, which always strikes me as an anaemic homage to the master, and this exhibition did nothing to change my mind.  It didn't do much either for my opinion of Inigo Jones as a draughtsman.  Palladio's drawings were a bit disappointing too, but then Lutyens was no draftsman either, so it is no barrier to being a great architect.  For sheer technical brilliance the prize went to Cyril Farey's perspective drawing of the parliament building at Stormont in Northern Ireland designed by Arnold Thorneley.  The Exhibition was also graced by one of Quinlan Terry's atmospheric linocuts of King's Walden Bury, which he designed with Rayond Erith for the Pilkingtons in the late 1960s. Henry Flitcroft's drawing of that strange up-tight little building Chiswick House for Lord Burlington was incredibly delicate but dull.   This exhibition is a lightning tour of the influence Andrea Palladio has had in the four hundred plus years since his death in 1580.  His greatest influence was here in the British Isles, first with the work of Inigo Jones in the early to mid 17th century, and then in the 18th century with Lord Burlington and his circle, the Neo-Palladian school.  It is mainly, therefore, a history of the architecture of Britain and her Empire. Reference is made however the Palladianism in Prussia and Russia.  Much less is made of the influence of Palladio, and British Palladian architects like William Kent, on French Neo-classical architecture.

   It should not be forgotten that the British Neo-Palladians looked as much to Roman Antiquity as they did to Palladio himself.  Part, in fact, of a wholesale attempt by Lord Burlington to replace the influence of France with that of the Italian peninsular. That desire for the Antique perhaps explains the presence of a model of St Martin-in-the-Fields by James Gibbs, which is essentially a Late Baroque building, with Serlian, not Palladian details. (Serlio, I think, is the hidden influence in British architecture, an almost continual ghostly presence from the Elizabethan age onwards.  Perhaps he deserves his own exhibition.)  It is the great west portico of St Martin's makes for the church's inclusion though perhaps for the wrong reasons.  Good to see a drawing by Asplund, with its rather whimsical lettering, but I somehow think that the influence of Palladio is not direct, but mediated through French Neo-classicism.  Of the modern work of architects influenced by Palladio I found the work of Oswald Ungers thoroughly convincing; another happy discovery were the Modernist villas designed by John Penn in Suffolk. Their planning was wonderfully clear, even if visually their appeal was slightly lacking. By and large, I couldn't help but feel that this was just too large a subject for the space available.  A disappointment of sorts then.  But then the catalogue is a lovely thing, and I picked up a copy for myself and a friend, for I was also a man on a mission.
   After lunch in Polpo, Beak St, I headed into Mayfair and the 'Monument' exhibition of works by Ed Kluz in Albemarle St..  On the way I got side-tracked by the current exhibition at 'Borough' at Waterhouse & Dodd (47 Albermale St  Until 24th Oct.).  This was a group show centred on the work of David Bomberg and of his pupils in the life drawing class Bomberg ran between 1945 and 1953 at the then Borough Polytechnic in south London. Pupils included Leon Kossof, Frank Auerbach and Denis Creffield.  This was a minor revelation of profoundly strong picture making - not all to my taste, but no one could doubt the integrity of the what was produced.  Wholly convincing.  Miles away in its ferocity from the world of Lord Burlington and the Neo-Palladians.  The discovery of this show was for me the work of Dorothy Mead, but there were also impressive work by Richard Michelmoore, Miles Richmond and Leslie Marr - the fantastic 'Ronda' of 1958.  If I only had the money to spare.  Bomberg thought deeply about art and wrote extensively.  There is an illuminating essay by Roy Oxlade on Bomberg's aproach to art, 'David Bomberg: Notre Dames of the Mind' in the first edition of  the magazine 'Modern Painters' (Volume 1 Number 1 1988).  It's worth a read.  Bomberg saw art as a spiritual activity: 'There is in man the desire to see perpetuated, in some form of imagery, his inward spiritual urge to a higher and more complete existence. In periods when artist can be inspired - given freedom to express this inspiration, we get great art.'
Make the effort to go if you can.
   Finally I arrived at J M Martin (38 Albemarle St. Until 31st Oct.) and the work of Ed Kluz.  A suitable title 'Monument'.  For not only are monuments - cathedrals, country houses, and the Crystal Palace - Ed's subjects, but the work is on a commensurate scale.  Collages; vast, austere works, though rich in colour, and deeply atmospheric. Austere in the sense of being great empty landscapes, as though the subject had been scooped by some gigantic hand and dropped into a slightly sinister fenland landscape.  I suspect, for although I'm fortunate to own a work by Kluz I don't know his work well enough, that these works on display represent a new direction for the artist.  The Crystal Palace, with its seemingly infinite pieces of card reminded me (in a good way) of those models people, mainly men I suspect, made out of matchsticks.  This isn't to denigrate Kluz's work - far from it - merely to link it into British Popular Art, which I know to be important to Kluz and artists like him.  Another exhibition I would urge you to go and see.  They really are quite dazzling.
   From there I popped into the Royal Academy, and ignoring the Ai Weiwei exhibition went in search of Danile Maclise's immense Waterloo Cartoon (Weston Rooms, until 3rd Jan 2016).  At over 13m wide, this staggering work (1858-59) is merely the preliminary drawing prepared by Maclise for the mural painting that decorates the House of Lords.  It has been restored, with Arts Council Funding, as part of the commemorations of the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.  I was struck by the detail, but also the pathos. This is a sophisticated work honouring both the triumph and the suffering.  And at the centre of things Wellington pensive and humble in victory.  The calm centre of the storm. In the adjoining gallery there were some really wonderful French engravings on display telling the French side of the Napoleonic Wars.  Over in the Tenant Gallery there was a big display of the sketch books of the architect Chris Wilkinson RA (until 14th Feb 2016).  Not my type of architecture at all, but lovely drawings, beautifully composed on the page.  Anyone who keeps a sketchbook should visit and take time to study.

   My final port of call was the wonderful shop 'Pentreath & Hall' in Rugby St, co-owned by my friend Ben Pentreath and his business partner Bridie Hall, and it was at his request I picked up that second copy of the exhibition catalogue at the RIBA.  Ben unfortunately was held up in Dorset so I couldn't hand over the book in person.  However I had the pleasure of meeting a couple of Ben's lovely staff and also Ben's partner Charlie McCormick who had just opened a pop-up shop next door. I really should have tried the cake; it looked wonderful.  Charlie has just started a new business venture that sounds very exciting.  You can read about it here