Own work: The Temple of Bacchus, Stowe

     Of late I've been rather interested in garden structures, such as follies and banqueting houses, and, slightly tangential, to that the influence English garden structures, such as those by Vanbrugh and Kent had on French Neo-classicists such as Claude-Nicholas Ledoux.  I'm particularly drawn to the over-scaled and dramatic architecture of Sir John Vanbrugh.

     Here is my interpretation of a now lost building by Vanbrugh - The Temple of Bacchus that once stood in the gardens at Stowe, in Buckinghamshire.  It was built in 1719 for Viscount Cobham and survived until the 1920s when it was demolished for the school chapel designed by Sir Robert Lorimer.  I accidentally discovered a photographic illustration of the temple in a book in the horticultural library at Aberglasney.  It was my first I encounter with the building and I was very intrigued - it had drama and heft.  A quality of presence and mystery.  It was, I thought, a suitable subject for a painting, but could find very few other illustrations of the temple? and those were of poor quality or too small.  However I wasn't to be deterred, and so here then, based on those meagre resources, is my evocation of a lost part of our architectural history, our patrimony.  Mixed media, 23 x 46 cms.

Grimsthorpe Castle I

   A week ago the bf came over for the weekend, and on the Sunday afternoon after lunch we drove over to Grimsthorpe Castle - a place of great beauty and tranquillity in the gentle, undulating landscape of south west Lincolnshire.

   The castle is an atmospheric concretion of hundreds of years of building and decoration, of both the monumental and domestic, and the cumulative effect is wonderful, and each visit increases my attachment. Without boring you too much with the history of things, the house developed out of a rectangular courtyard castle of which one tower (King John's) survives.  The most dramatic and architecturally important development came at the beginning of the 18th century with the building of the present north front and forecourt.  It is the design of that master of the English Baroque Sir John Vanbrugh - his last work, in fact -  and is the only complete section of Van's plan to rebuild the whole castle.  With his death the work just ceased.  Although I am a great fan of his work I have to admit that I'm pleased that the old house was not completely replaced - it has that layered, accidental quality I admire in a building.  In contrast the monumental north façade the south façade is the most domestic in scale, the east is the most varied, punctuated as it is by a series of great bay windows that light the state rooms.  The west façade was rebuilt in a quiet Tudorish Gothick in the early nineteenth century.

   The interior is a delight.  (But, alas, no photography is allowed in the house.) There is the great pomp and spatial ingenuity of the Vanbrugh's Great Hall and attendant spaces - quite breath-taking.  However apart from that complex and monumental sequence of spaces, the interiors are, perhaps, more domestic than you would encounter in many Country Houses, and none the worse for that.  The enfilade of state rooms is itself quite short - there is, for instance, no 'state bedroom' to complete the sequence; and it could be that they occupy the same place as the Tudor 'state' rooms.  (Van's plan was to put an enfilade of state rooms in the west wing with the chapel at one end (N) and the state bedroom at the other, in the manner of an English royal household.) It may come as a surprise to some to realize that the decoration of the interior is largely twentieth century and the work firstly of that unsung Arts & Crafts architect Detmar Blow, and secondly John Fowler who worked at Grimsthorpe over a number of years in the Mid-century.  Their work is a triumph, uniting the various periods of architectural activity in the house in a cohesive whole.
   The gardens are a delight too, and illustrate how in the last two centuries garden design in Britain returned to formality.  Happily.  The eastern sequence of formal garden and walled potager is particularly impressive, the latter, developed in the 1960s, is a pioneer in the revival of that form of garden.

The photographs are in the order I took them