Ickworth I

    A spur of the moment thing our trip to Ickworth, and well worth it.  The house is a stunner, and also, almost unique.  Coincidental too, considering my current fascination with the cultural efflorescence of the Protestant Ascendancy that ruled Ireland for a hundred years or so following the Glorious Revolution. (Perhaps more of that in a further post.)  And perhaps it is with the Irish connection that I should begin.
   The builder of Ickworth was Frederick Hervey (1730-1802), 4th Earl of Bristol, Lord Bishop of Derry. (The estate at Ickworth had been the hands of the Hervey's since the 15th century.)  As was common for a younger son Hervey entered the church, though his faith seems to have been somewhat lukewarm.  He achieved preferment however and when his older brother became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland he was elected Bishop of Cloyne.  After a year he became Bishop of Derry, and as such he enjoyed a sizeable yearly income.  I have to confess that I don't warm to the Earl-Bishop - an apparently volcanic temper, most likely a Deist if not an agnostic but happy to have church preferment. A man of contradictions, perhaps, even hypocrisy. It's hard not to see him, at least, as cynical.  Worldly, certainly.  However, it's hard not to warm to him as artistic patron.

   In Ireland Harvey built, almost concurrently, two large houses: Downhill, built romantically upon a cliff top in County Londonderry, and Ballyscullion in County Antrim.  It's really the folly he had built at Downhill by Michael Shanahan of Cork - the Mussenden Temple - and Ballyscullion that are important here, for both, like Ickworth, are rotundas.  Alas, Ballysullion, like the house at Downhill, has perished, but from surviving drawings it is clear that it was very close to Ickworth in design - a central rotunda, with a pedimented temple front (think the Pantheon in Rome), linked to flanking wings by curving colonnades.  

   The architect of Ballyscullion is not known for certain, but the design has been linked to Francis Sandys who was in m'Lord Bishop's household - his brother was the Earl-Bishop's chaplain. (Any number of architects are connected to Downhill - the Sardinian Davis Ducart, Soane, Wyatt and Charles Cameron - but the executant architect is most likely to have been Shanahan.)  A similar confusion hangs over the design of Ickworth; but it is however believed that the design originates with the 'Italian' Mario Asprucci the Younger, the executant architect being Francis Sandys. However, as I have said, the house is so similar to that at Ballyscullion that it's hard not to think that Sandys had more a hand in the design than he is usually credited with. Perhaps both Asprucci and Sandys were only actualising Frederick Hervey's ideas and that the design is essentially his.

   The house was begun in 1795, by which time the Earl-Bishop, with entourage, had left Ireland for good and was on another Grand Tour.  By then he had inherited Ickworth and the Hervey titles, so he had two income 'streams' and was very rich indeed.  Alas, m'Lord Bishop of Derry died with the house incomplete, and having never seen it.  It had been destined to hold his vast art collection but that had already been confiscated by Napoleon.  The shell of the house wasn't completed until 1830, by John Field, and the western wing was never fitted out as intended, but then without the art it was rather purposeless, and the east wing which, I think, was destined to be the library, became the family wing.
   What was realised, however, is very impressive.  The central rotunda is vast - 100 feet to the top of the dome, each order is 30 feet high - and very satisfying.  It has great heft and presence that is sometimes lacking in contemporary English architecture (compare it to Heveningham by Taylor, also in Suffolk).  Like the rotunda at Bullyscullion it is decorated with half-orders - two orders here though, Ionic below, Corinthian above, executed in stone.  The walls, of brick, are coated in stucco.  The two friezes, of terracotta and Coade stone, are the work of Casimiro and Donato Carabelli of Milan.

   The wings are huge in themselves.  I detect in them a touch of the Baroque, just as there is in the curve and countercurve of rotunda and colonnade.  That shouldn't surprise.  Italy went straight from Baroque to Neoclassical and the Irish Neo-Palladianism was always rather baroque inclined.  It begs the question though: just how Irish is Ickworth?  A question I can't answer.
   The interior is very monumental, the principal rooms are very high and there great columns of scagliola in the Saloon and entrance hall.  But it is all a little plain. The principal stair threads its way up through the architecture as though it was designed by Vanbrugh or Hawksmoor.  Its current form however is Edwardian and is the work of  Arthur Blomfield, viz Oundle.  My favourite parts were the corridors leading to the wings, which seem to be fully commensurate with the exterior.  The east corridor is particularly fine.  Alas the Pompeiian room (very late, by J G Grace, viz Algarkirk) was closed for restoration.  I was looking forward to that.