Burlington House

     I was in London to catch the Richard Dadd exhibition at the Royal Academy on Piccadilly.  While I was there I took the opportunity to revisit the 'John Madeski Fine Rooms', that is the rooms that were designed for 'display' when the building was a private residence, what is called in France an 'hotel particulier'. They currently have a dual function, part administrative and part gallery for the RA permanent collection.  When starting this post I believed that they were of a piece, but the history is quite complex.  It is because of the tact of later interventions that the rooms possess such a unity of style.

     I presume that beneath the plaster, the shell of the original late 17th century house survives.  Either way, Lord Burlington - Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington & 4th Earl of Cork - working with Colen Campbell undertook a major redesign of the house in the first half of the 18th century.  Now, we have mentioned Burlington before, and I tend to see him rather as a pantomime villain in the history of British architecture.  It was he who successfully ousted the pragmatic Wren school of English baroque architecture, pushing British architecture into the first its periodical phases of doctrinally driven quests for purity, both stylistic and moral.  Burlington had a desire to return architecture to a state of pristine authentic Antique classicism, purged of the licentiousness of the Baroque which he, a good Whig, associated with Roman Catholicism.  To that end he saw the work of the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio as a contemporary embodiment of Antique virtue, ignoring Palladio's obvious Mannerist Style.  But it was more than that.  As I have written here before it was an attempt to change the orientation of British taste from France to the Italian peninsular in general, and the Venetian Republic in particular; promoting Italian opera, importing Italian singers, and painters.  And so architecture in Britain took a turn towards the dull, and the understanding of Palladio's work skewed to fit Burlington's moral and political vision.  Of course such quests are always riven by such ambiguities and contradictions. We have seen these play out at Houghton Hall, particularly in the interior, and we see the same things at Burlington House. 

    The façade was remodelled after Palladio's Palazzo Iseppo Porto in Vicenza, but without the Mannerist boldness of the original.  One might say emasculated.* The interiors were also remade.  The exterior was, I suppose, a relatively straightforward intellectual exercise.  The interior, as at Houghton, was not.  Palladio left no instructions for interior decoration of his buildings, not designed any furniture.  In any case, the villas, which not designed as a whole for clients as wealthy as the British aristocracy, were decorated in a very simple manner.  Burlington and Campbell therefore turned to the work of Inigo Jones, the early 17th century court architect, who introduced to Britain a more consistent and intellectually thorough use of the classical orders, was interested in Classical Antiquity, and produced designs for interior decoration.  Jones was promoted also because he was British.  The irony of this is that the Jones's designs for interiors e.g. ceilings, fireplaces etc. thoroughly influenced by contemporaneous French taste.

     And so, finally, to the actual rooms. Some six in all - on the Piano Nobile, or Bel Etage of the original structure. They are approached from the Main Stairs, created in their present position in c.1815 during alterations for Lord George Cavendish by Samuel Ware.  On the two side walls are two massive canvasses by the Venetian artist Sebastiano Ricci painted 1713-15 for Burlington's mother Lady Juliana, the Dowager Countess of Burlington.  the ceiling painting, 'The Glorification of the Inigo Jones', is by William Kent.
     Of the six rooms, five are situated on the s, entrance side of the house, while the Tenant Gallery is on the N side i.e. it is in the rear pile of what is a double pile house.  The southern rooms are arranged in an enfilade.  That is, all the communicating doors line up.  The ceilings of the three centre rooms share the same iconography ie Cupid and Psyche. Mahogany doors throughout.  With the exception of the General Assembly Room, they are almost completely devoid of furniture.

     The most important in terms of decoration is the Saloon, in the middle of the entrance front.  It is the work of William Kent (1685-1748), and the Roman sculptor Giovanni Battista Guelphi, both of whom Burlington collected on one of two his Grand Tours to Italy.**  Although the doorcases are very correct, the overall effect is Baroque; there are stucco putti on the frontoni, and elaborate frames for paintings (that, at some point, have been removed).**  The ceiling has a deep cove and a central panel in the French manner.  Originally it was painted by Kent in his Baroque Illusionistic style.  Only the central panel 'The Wedding Feast of Cupid and Psyche' survives.  The ceiling is currently undergoing restoration.

     To the east of the saloon are three rooms: the first, is the Richard Sharpe Council Room. It originally served as the head of the main staircase hall, and contains a very good ceiling by Sebastiano Ricci of 'Cupid and Jupiter'.  I believe it was also the original location of the two Ricci paintings on the Main Stairs.  Now, it is mainly the work of Samuel Ware.

     Beyond that is the former ball room, now the Reynolds Room, constructed by Ware from a number of smaller spaces.  It is a triple cube room (roughly 20 x 20 x 60ft) and has a particularly fine ceiling, also by Ware, in the approved Burlington manner.  Very sculptural.  Richly detailed full cornice.  Ware's work here and in the General Assembly Room is excellent but heavier, richer and more robust - it has more heft - then the earlier worker.  20th century figurative painting on the walls - the likes of John Nash, Carel Weight, L S Lowry, and dame Laura Knight.  At the far end of the room to the left is the crepuscular Tenant Gallery, containing 19th century art, for example, by Waterhouse, and Cadogan Cowper.

     To the west of the saloon are the remaining two rooms.  The first is the 'The Lee & James C. Slaughter Room', formerly the Secretary's Room, with a painting on the ceiling by William Kent, 'The Assembly of the Gods'.

     The furthest room was once the State Dining Room but is now The Generally Assembly Room.  It is perhaps the friendliest room in the suite, having furniture etc.  Ceiling is again by Ware in the Burlingtonian taste.  Central panel, 'The Meeting of Bacchus and Ariadne', is however, by Sebastiano Ricci. N door by Richard Norman Shaw.  Full cornice with a richly decorated frieze. On entering the room my first thought was that it had been decorated by Davis Hicks.  The pinky-orange walls just seemed to be the sort of thing he'd do. More twentieth century figurative art, skied, on the e wall.  Rather homely in its arrangement.

      I have, sadly, to confess to a slight disappointment, for the rooms are somewhat bare, lacking as they do curtains, furniture, and the light fittings are particularly intrusive.  If money, allowed I 'd like to see curtains, chairs, perhaps even brocade wallpaper, and the odd bit of furniture - console tables, and the like, that could be used to display sculpture, perhaps even larger pieces of ceramic. It would certain raise the temperature of the rooms.

     Finally, apologies for the rather poor photographs.  It is said the poor workman blames his tools; I am going to blame the circumstances - poor weather and the presence of people.

*Colen Campbell's 'Vitruvius Britannicus' depicts the façade of the house with statues and urns.  I suspect that they were never erected.  The other interesting thing to note, is the oddly divided nature of the design: grand palazzo on the entrance front and something all together plainer, rather High Renaissance, on the garden front.  Burlington House is not alone in Campbell's work to demonstrate this: both Houghton Hall and Stourhead have contrasting Palladian and Mannerist facades.  Perhaps the influence of Sir John Vanbrugh at work: both Castle Howard and Seton Delaval have Doric entrance fronts contrasting with Corinthian and Ionic garden facades.

** According to Rudolph Wittkower Burlington soon tired of Guelfi, just as he had  previously tired of James Gibbs and later would tire of Colen Campbell.

*** No mention of the original contents of the frames in the Survey of London.  Elsewhere on the internet, and probably erroneously, it is suggested that they were designed to contain paintings by Pellegrini - four of the original ten by the artist that decorated Burlington House and are now at Narford Hall in Norfolk.  It has also been suggested that they were fitted with mirrors as part of Samuel Ware's work on the house.

The Fitzwilliam Museum II

     

      I've neglected this, my final post on my stay in Cambridge.  Apologies.  There is a quite a bit going on at the moment.

      Back to the Fitzwilliam Museum and its rehang of four its thirty-three galleries of art. (The galleries of Italian, Spanish and Dutch art seemed to have escaped, as have the galleries dedicated to the applied arts such as ceramics.) The results in the four are mixed in that you can walk into two of them, 'Nature' and 'Men Looking at Women', and, ignoring the introductory signage, think nothing is amiss.  However enter Gallery 6, which contains the Medieval and Early Renaissance collections is completely trashed by the rehang.  Gallery 3 is no better.  The only purpose all of this serves, and one I suspect the museum failed to foresee, is to demonstrate just how poor contemporary art, including my own, actually is.  Even the rather dull portraiture of the 18th century wins in the first round; it is just so much more technically competent.  
     I cannot help but feel how different this world of contemporary, regime sponsored art is from the work and lives of the majority of arts working in Britain today.  I doubt many of us are receiving Arts Council funding, but then perhaps we have our own networks etc and we don't need the institutions in the manner they believe we do.  I certainly keep my distance, particularly here, in the Infernal City.

 

     Anyway some random photos of the stunning entrance hall of the museum as recompense:

     My final day I took the train to Bury St Edmunds, that deeply attractive town in Suffolk to look at the cathedral, but more of that in subsequent posts.

     I suppose I should sum things up.  The college was utterly delightful, the city perhaps less so.  Oh, all the buildings were still there as I remember them, but things were subtly different.  Trinity St was still vibrant and deeply attractive.  There were, however, far more tourists than there used to be - their presence, in such numbers, explains the almost entire closure of colleges to visitors, and yet, for all that, there were, for instance, empty shops in the city centre, particularly in that unhappy area of Market St. and St Andrew's St.  At times there was a slightly uneasy atmosphere, particularly around the market, which seemed a little frayed.  There were also less local independents and more generics - this was especially true of eating out, where the likes of Byron, etc. predominate.  I shall, however, be back.  There is nowhere quite like it.

     As for food, the best experience was the Cambridge Chophouse on King's Parade, and Rocco on Regent St, and then there was the homely, soothing gnocchi at Stazione.  By far the worst experience was at Cote Brasserie, on Bridge St. where the Boeuf Bourguignon was so badly presented it was an insult.  There were moments when I wasn't quite sure what I was eating.  On a much happier note I did notice a flock of new bakeries, not in the city centre but in semi-suburban Hills Rd.  I presume that's where the creativity now lies, away from the centre.

Exhibition: Autumn Gathering

     Pleased to relate that this morning de delivered four paintings to Aberglasney for inclusion in the new Studio Cennen exhibition 'Autumn Gathering'.  The art works are; 'Foliate Head'; 'Bethania, Chapel Morriston'; 'Sardis Chapel, Ystradgynlais'; and 'St Mary, West Walton'.  The exhibition runs from Wednesday 28th October until Thursday 5th November.

Currently Reading....

     'The Duke's Children' by the seemingly inexhaustible Anthony Trollope.  The final novel of Trollope's six novels about the aristocratic Palliser family, and Trollope's penultimate novel.  It was originally published in monthly instalments in the magazine 'All the Year Round' - a common procedure in the 19th century, which did allow for a wider readership.  When published in book form in May 1880 by Chapman & Hall, it was as 3 volumes.   I have decided to follow that pattern, giving me time between volumes to complete the other three novels I have on the go.

      As with the Barchester Chronicles I came to 'The Duke's Children' through one of those BBC adaptations which sadly seem so thin on the ground these days.  Not that I remember the original broadcast of the early 1970s, but the repeat sometime about a decade ago on BBC2 of a weekday afternoon.  And a treat it was.  Some 26 episodes in all, the work of the thoroughly scurrilous writer, the priapic Simon Raven.  A man worthy of a blogpost all to himself.

     However, my trip to London, to see the current Richard Dadd exhibition at the RA, in the last couple of days has put a spanner in the works, for instead of taking the 'The Duke's Children' (a hard back edition by the Folio Society, which has an eloquent forward by the politician Roy Jenkins) with me, I decided to buy a vintage Penguin paperback from Skoob Books in Bloomsbury.  I plumped for 'The Waterfall' by Margaret Drabble, one of her novels that give the lie to the 'show don't tell' school of literature. So now I have five books on the go.  So much for my good intentions.

St Peter & St Paul, Rock, Worcestershire I

     On our way to Bewdley, in Worcestershire, (a week ago today, in fact), we stopped off at St Michael's, Tenbury Wells; that remarkable creation of the Rev Sir Arthur Gore Ousley, and the architect Henry Woodyer. I posted about the exterior here.  An original and idiosyncratic riff on the Gothic style by a pupil of William Butterfield, who himself was no stranger to the idiosyncratic and the original. An unexpected, rather shrine like, rather urban object in the midst of a bucolic and remote part of England.  Trusting in the internet, I believed we could finally get to have a look inside.  I was wrong, thwarted, the church was closed.   

     Not wanting to disappoint you, approaching Bewdley, ahead of time, we made an unscheduled visit to the church of St Peter and St Paul, Rock.  However, it was not to be our day, for it too was locked.  The weather too had taken a turn from sunshine to overcast, blustery and cold.  Still some photographs of the exterior of what is the one of the most important Romanesque churches in the county.  It has been linked to the school of Herefordshire masons we have encountered before at Kilpeck and Leominster. That early work is largely confined to the n side of the nave and the chancel.  The doorway, as you can see, is pretty grand, no money spared.  The rest of the church was rebuilt in the later Middle Ages, when a s aisle was added to the nave and s chapel to the chancel and is not to be sniffed at. The tower is particularly fine.  Sandstone, some nice textures.  Church restored in 1861 by F Preedy, who sounds like a character in a novel by Dickens or Trollope.

The Ballad of Wallis Island

     To Worcestershire over the weekend and a visit to family.  On Saturday night we settled down to watch the recent British film, 'The Ballad of Wallis Island'.
     Charles Heath (Tim Key), widower, and double lottery winner, lives alone in a large house on an island off the British coast.  Travel there is by a daily skiff from the mainland (twice a day if they are lucky).  Such is the lingering intensity of his grief, Charles dreams of reuniting his dead wife's favourite band, the British folk duo MacGyver Mortimer (Tom Basden & Carey Mulligan).  Excellent film score by Adem Ilhan. Charles's plan, of course, goes awry, but in the ensuing emotional turmoil new possibilities emerge.  A charming, whimsical film.  Atmospheric and rather moving at times.

The Ballad of Wallis Island

2025

Producer:               Rupert Majendie

Director:                 James Griffiths

Cinematographer: G Magni Agustsson

Last night we also watched the inexecrable 'Madfabulous'.  The story of Henry Paget, the  5th Marquess of Anglesey.  What an absolute mess of a film.  I can't think of a single redeeming feature.

Madfabulous

2025

Producer:               Nadia Jaynes, Sean Marley

Director:                 Celyn Jones

Cinematographer: Laurie Jones

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 from 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.