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John Vanbrugh

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Artists

   Sir John Vanbrugh in Godfrey Kneller's Kit-cat portrait, considered one
   of Kneller's finest portraits.
   Enlarge
   Sir John Vanbrugh in Godfrey Kneller's Kit-cat portrait, considered one
   of Kneller's finest portraits.

   Sir John Vanbrugh (pronounced "Van'-bru") ( January 24, 1664?– March
   26, 1726) was an English architect and dramatist, perhaps best known as
   the designer of Blenheim Palace. He wrote two argumentative and
   outspoken Restoration comedies, The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked
   Wife (1697), which have become enduring stage favourites but originally
   occasioned much controversy.

   Vanbrugh was in many senses a radical throughout his life. As a young
   man and a committed Whig, he was part of the scheme to overthrow James
   II, put William III on the throne and protect English parliamentary
   democracy, dangerous undertakings which landed him in the dreaded
   Bastille of Paris as a political prisoner. In his career as a
   playwright, he offended many sections of Restoration and 18th-century
   society, not only by the sexual explicitness of his plays, but also by
   their messages in defence of women's rights in marriage. He was
   attacked on both counts, and was one of the prime targets of Jeremy
   Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
   Stage. In his architectural career, he created what came to be known as
   English Baroque. His architectural work was as bold and daring as his
   early political activism and marriage-themed plays, and jarred
   conservative opinions on the subject.

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Early life

   Vanbrugh was born in London, and grew up in Chester, where the family
   had been driven by the major outbreak of the plague in London in 1665.
   Downes is sceptical of earlier historians' claims of a lower
   middle-class background, and shows that an 18th-century suggestion that
   his father Giles Vanbrugh "may have been a sugar-baker" has been
   misunderstood. " Sugar-baker" implies wealth, as the term refers not to
   a maker of sweets but to an owner of a sugar house, a factory for the
   refining of raw sugar from the Barbados. Sugar refining would normally
   be combined with sugar trading, which was a lucrative business. Downes'
   example of one sugar baker's house in Liverpool being estimated to
   bring in £40,000 a year in trade from the Barbados throws a different
   light on Vanbrugh's social background than the picture of a backstreet
   Chester sweetshop which is painted by Leigh Hunt in 1840 and reflected
   in many later accounts.

   How Vanbrugh spent the years from age 18 to 22 (after leaving school)
   is something of a mystery. There are no records of him between 1682 and
   1686, or any shred of evidence for the persistent story that he was
   studying (sometimes specifically architecture) in France (stated as
   fact in the Dictionary of National Biography). As Laurence Whistler
   pointed out more than 60 years ago, there would have been no need for a
   young man of talent to go to France from England to study architecture.
   Moreover, the early drawings for Castle Howard show that he still drew
   like a novice in 1700, while the first thing he would have learned in a
   French architect's office would have been to set out a drawing
   properly.

   The picture of a well-connected youth is reinforced by the fact that
   Vanbrugh in 1686 took up an officer's commission in his distant
   relative the Earl of Huntingdon's regiment. Since commissions were in
   the gift of the commanding officer, Vanbrugh's entry as an officer
   shows that he did have the kind of upscale family network that was then
   essential to a young man starting out in life.

   It is worth noting, however, that in spite of the distant noble
   relatives and the sugar trade, Vanbrugh never in later life possessed
   any capital for business ventures such as the Haymarket Theatre, but
   always had to rely on loans and backers. The fact that Giles Vanbrugh
   had twelve children to support and set up in life may go some way
   towards explaining the debts that were to plague John all his life.

Political activism and the Bastille

   The infamous French state prison the Bastille, where Vanbrugh was
   incarcerated.
   Enlarge
   The infamous French state prison the Bastille, where Vanbrugh was
   incarcerated.

   From 1686, Vanbrugh was working undercover, playing a role in bringing
   about the armed invasion by William of Orange, the deposition of James
   II, and the Glorious Revolution of 1689. He thus demonstrates an
   intense early identification with the Whig cause of parliamentary
   democracy, with which he was to remain affiliated all his life.
   Returning from bringing William messages at The Hague, Vanbrugh was
   arrested at Calais on a charge of espionage (which Downes concludes was
   trumped-up) in September 1688, two months before William invaded
   England. Vanbrugh remained in prison in France for four and a half
   years, part of the time in the Bastille, before being released in
   exchange for a French political prisoner. His life is sharply bisected
   by this prison experience, which he entered at age 24 and emerged from
   at 29, after having spent, as Downes puts it, half his adult life in
   captivity. It seems to have left him with a lasting distaste for the
   French political system but also with a taste for the comic dramatists
   and the architecture of France.

   The often-repeated claim that Vanbrugh wrote part of his comedy The
   Provoked Wife in the Bastille is based on allusions in a couple of much
   later memoirs and is regarded with some doubt by modern scholars (see
   McCormick). After being released from the Bastille, he had to spend
   three months in Paris, free to move around but unable to leave the
   country, and with every opportunity to see an architecture
   "unparalleled in England for scale, ostentation, richness, taste and
   sophistication" (Downes 75). He was allowed to return to England in
   1693, and took part in a naval battle against the French in Camaret Bay
   in 1694. At some point in the mid-1690s, it is not known exactly when,
   he exchanged army life for London and the London stage.

Public life

London

   Vanbrugh's London career was diverse and varied, comprising
   playwriting, architectural design, and attempts to combine these two
   overarching interests. For a chronological overview of his overlapping
   achievements and business ventures, which were sometimes confusing even
   to Vanbrugh himself.

The Kit-Cat Club

   Vanbrugh was a committed Whig and member of the Whig Kit-Cat Club —
   indeed being regarded as its most popular and beloved member — in line
   with the charm of personality and talent for friendship which his
   contemporaries mention over and over again. The Club is best known
   today as an early 18th-century social gathering point for culturally
   and politically prominent Whigs, including many artists and writers (
   William Congreve, Joseph Addison, Godfrey Kneller) and politicians (the
   Duke of Marlborough, Charles Seymour, the Earl of Burlington, Thomas
   Pelham-Holles, Sir Robert Walpole).

   Politically, the Club promoted the Whig objectives of a strong
   Parliament, a limited monarchy, resistance to France, and the
   Protestant succession to the throne. Yet the Kit-Cats always presented
   their club as more a matter of dining and conviviality, and this
   reputation has been successfully relayed to posterity. Downes suggests,
   however, that the Club's origins go back to before the Glorious
   Revolution of 1689 and that its political importance was much greater
   before it went public in 1700, in calmer and more Whiggish times.
   Downes proposes a role for an early Kit-Cat grouping in the armed
   invasion by William of Orange and the Glorious Revolution. Horace
   Walpole, son of Kit-Cat Sir Robert Walpole, claims that the respectable
   middle-aged Club members generally mentioned as "a set of wits" were
   originally "in reality the patriots that saved Britain", in other words
   were the active force behind the Glorious Revolution itself. Secret
   groups tend to be poorly documented, and this sketch of the pre-history
   of the Club cannot be proved. But as we have seen, young Vanbrugh was
   indeed back in 1688 part of a secret network working for William's
   invasion. If the roots of the Club go back that far, it is tempting to
   speculate that Vanbrugh in joining the club was not merely becoming one
   of a convivial London "set of wits" but was also linking up with old
   friends and co-conspirators. A hero of the cause who had done time in
   French prison for it could have been confident of a warm welcome.

The Haymarket theatre

   The Queen's Theatre
   Enlarge
   The Queen's Theatre

   In 1703, Vanbrugh started buying land and signing backers for the
   construction of a new theatre in the Haymarket, designed by himself and
   intended for the use of an actors' cooperative (see The Provoked Wife
   below) led by Thomas Betterton. Vanbrugh and his associate William
   Congreve hoped by this enterprise to improve the chances of legitimate
   theatre in London, which was under threat from more colourful types of
   entertainment such as opera, juggling, pantomime (introduced by John
   Rich), animal acts, travelling dance troupes, and famous visiting
   Italian singers. They also hoped to make a profit, and Vanbrugh
   optimistically bought up the actors' company, making himself sole
   owner. He was now bound to pay salaries to the actors and, as it turned
   out, to manage the theatre, a notorious tightrope act for which he had
   no experience. The often repeated rumour that the acoustics of the
   building Vanbrugh had designed were bad is exaggerated (see Milhous),
   but the more practical Congreve had become anxious to extricate himself
   from the project, and Vanbrugh was left spreading himself extremely
   thin, running a theatre and simultaneously overseeing the building of
   Blenheim, a project which after June 1705 often took him out of town.

   Unsurprisingly under these circumstances, Vanbrugh's management of the
   Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket showed "numerous signs of confusion,
   inefficiency, missed opportunities, and bad judgment" (Milhous). Having
   burned his fingers on theatre management, Vanbrugh too extricated
   himself, expensively, by selling the business in 1708, though without
   ever collecting much of the putative price. He had put a lot of money,
   his own and borrowed, into the theatre company, which he was never to
   recover. It was noted as remarkable by contemporaries that he continued
   to pay the actors' salaries fully and promptly while they were working
   for him, just as he always paid the workmen he had hired for
   construction work; shirking such responsibilities was close to being
   standard practice in early 18th-century England. Vanbrugh himself never
   seems to have pursued those who owed him money, and throughout his life
   his finances can at best be described as precarious.

The College of Arms

   Vanbrugh's introduction and advancement in the College of Arms, remain
   controversial. On 21 June 1703 the obsolete office of Carlisle Herald
   was revived for Vanbrugh. This appointment was followed by a promotion
   to the post of Clarenceux King of Arms in March of 1704. In 1725 he
   sold this office to Knox Ward and he told a friend he had "got leave to
   dispose in earnest, of a place I got in jest" . His colleagues'
   opposition to an ill-gotten appointment ought to have been directed to
   Lord Carlisle, who as Deputy Earl Marshal, arranged both appointments
   and against whose wishes they were powerless. Vanbrugh went on to make
   more friends than enemies at the College, however. The pageantry of
   state occasions appealed to his theatrical sense, his duties were not
   difficult, and he appears to have performed them well. In the opinion
   of a modern herald and historian, although the appointment was
   "incongruous," he was "possibly the most distinguished man who has ever
   worn a herald's tabard" In May of 1706 Lord Halifax and
   Vanbrugh—representing the octogenarian Garter King of Arms, Sir Henry
   St George—led a delegation to Hanover to confer the Order of the Garter
   on Prince George.

Marriage and death

   In 1719, at St Lawrence Church, York, Vanbrugh married Henrietta Maria
   Yarborough of Heslington Hall, aged 26 to his 55. In spite of the age
   difference, this was by all accounts a happy marriage, which produced
   two sons. Unlike that of the rake heroes and fops of his plays,
   Vanbrugh's personal life was without scandal.

   Vanbrugh died "of an asthma" in 1726 in the modest town house designed
   by him in 1703 out of the ruins of Whitehall Palace and satirised by
   Swift as "the goose pie". His married life, however, was mostly spent
   at Greenwich (then not considered part of London at all) in the house
   on Maze Hill now known as Vanbrugh Castle, a miniature Scottish tower
   house designed by Vanbrugh in the earliest stages of his career.

Playwright

   Actor Colley Cibber's comedy Love's Last Shift, or Virtue Rewarded
   inspired Vanbrugh to write The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger.
   Enlarge
   Actor Colley Cibber's comedy Love's Last Shift, or Virtue Rewarded
   inspired Vanbrugh to write The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger.
   Thomas Betterton, Sir John Brute in The Provoked Wife. Betterton's
   acting ability was lavishly praised by Samuel Pepys, Alexander Pope,
   Richard Steele and Colley Cibber.
   Enlarge
   Thomas Betterton, Sir John Brute in The Provoked Wife. Betterton's
   acting ability was lavishly praised by Samuel Pepys, Alexander Pope,
   Richard Steele and Colley Cibber.
   Elizabeth Barry was a celebrated tragedienne who brought depth to Lady
   Brute in Vanbrugh's comedy The Provoked Wife.
   Enlarge
   Elizabeth Barry was a celebrated tragedienne who brought depth to Lady
   Brute in Vanbrugh's comedy The Provoked Wife.
   Anne Bracegirdle, Bellinda in The Provoked Wife, often played the comic
   half of a contrasted tragic/comic heroine pair with Elizabeth Barry.
   Enlarge
   Anne Bracegirdle, Bellinda in The Provoked Wife, often played the comic
   half of a contrasted tragic/comic heroine pair with Elizabeth Barry.

   Vanbrugh arrived in London at a time of scandal and internal drama at
   London's only theatre company, as a long-running conflict between
   pinchpenny management and disgruntled actors came to a head and the
   actors walked out. A new comedy staged with the makeshift remainder of
   the company in January 1696, Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift, had a
   final scene that to Vanbrugh's critical mind demanded a sequel, and he
   threw himself into the fray by providing it.

The Relapse

   Cibber's Love's Last Shift

   Colley Cibber's notorious tear-jerker Love's Last Shift, Or, Virtue
   Rewarded was written and staged in the eye of a theatrical storm.
   London's only and mismanaged theatre company, known as the United
   Company, had split in two in March 1695 when the senior actors began
   operating their own acting cooperative, and the next season was one of
   cutthroat rivalry between the two companies.

   Cibber, an inconspicuous young actor still employed by the parent
   company, seized this moment of unique demand for new plays and launched
   his career on two fronts by writing a play with a big, flamboyant part
   for himself: the Frenchified fop Sir Novelty Fashion. Backed up by
   Cibber's own uninhibited performance, Sir Novelty delighted the
   audiences. In the serious part of Love's Last Shift, wifely patience is
   tried by an out-of-control Restoration rake husband, and the perfect
   wife is celebrated and rewarded in a climactic finale where the
   cheating husband kneels to her and expresses the depth of his
   repentance.

   Love's Last Shift has not been staged again since the early 18th
   century and is read only by the most dedicated scholars, who sometimes
   express distaste for its businesslike combination of four explicit acts
   of sex and rakishness with one of sententious reform (see Hume). If
   Cibber indeed was deliberately attempting to appeal simultaneously to
   rakish and respectable Londoners, it worked: the play was a great
   box-office hit.

   Sequel: The Relapse

   Vanbrugh's witty sequel The Relapse, Or, Virtue in Danger, offered to
   the United Company six weeks later, questions the justice of women's
   position in marriage at this time. He sends new sexual temptations in
   the way of not only the reformed husband but also the patient wife, and
   allows them to react in more credible and less predictable ways than in
   their original context, lending the flat characters from Love's Last
   Shift a dimension that at least some critics are willing to consider
   psychological (see Hume).

   In a trickster subplot, Vanbrugh provides the more traditional
   Restoration attraction of an overly well-dressed and exquisite fop,
   Lord Foppington, a brilliant re-creation of Cibber's Sir Novelty
   Fashion in Love's Last Shift (Sir Novelty has simply in The Relapse
   bought himself the title of "Lord Foppington" through the corrupt
   system of Royal title sales). Critics of Restoration comedy are
   unanimous in declaring Lord Foppington "the greatest of all Restoration
   fops" (Dobrée), by virtue of being not merely laughably affected, but
   also "brutal, evil, and smart" (Hume).

   The Relapse, however, came very close to not being performed at all.
   The United Company had lost all its senior performers, and had great
   difficulty in finding and keeping actors of sufficient skills for the
   large cast required by The Relapse. Members of that cast had to be kept
   from defecting to the rival actors' cooperative, had to be "seduced"
   (as the legal term was) back when they did defect, and had to be
   blandished into attending rehearsals which dragged out into ten months
   and brought the company to the threshold of bankruptcy. "They have no
   company at all", reports a contemporary letter in November, "and unless
   a new play comes out on Saturday revives their reputation, they must
   break". That new play, The Relapse, did turn out a tremendous success
   that saved the company, not least by virtue of Colley Cibber again
   bringing down the house with his second impersonation of Lord
   Foppington. "This play (the Relapse)", writes Cibber in his
   autobiography forty years later, "from its new and easy Turn of Wit,
   had great Success".

The Provoked Wife

   Vanbrugh's second original comedy, The Provoked Wife, followed soon
   after, performed by the rebel actors' company. This play is different
   in tone from the largely farcical The Relapse, and adapted to the
   greater acting skills of the rebels. Vanbrugh had good reason to offer
   his second play to the new company, which had got off to a brilliant
   start by premièring Congreve's Love For Love, the greatest London
   box-office success for years. The actors' cooperative boasted the
   established star performers of the age, and Vanbrugh tailored The
   Provoked Wife to their specialties. While The Relapse had been robustly
   phrased to be suitable for amateurs and minor acting talents, he could
   count on versatile professionals like Thomas Betterton, Elizabeth
   Barry, and the rising young star Anne Bracegirdle to do justice to
   characters of depth and nuance.

   The Provoked Wife is a comedy, but Elizabeth Barry who played the
   abused wife was especially famous as a tragic actress, and for her
   power of "moving the passions", i.e., moving an audience to pity and
   tears. Barry and the younger Bracegirdle had often worked together as a
   tragic/comic heroine pair to bring audiences the typically tragic/comic
   rollercoaster experience of Restoration plays. Vanbrugh takes advantage
   of this schema and these actresses to deepen audience sympathy for the
   unhappily married Lady Brute, even as she fires off her witty ripostes.
   In the intimate conversational dialogue between Lady Brute and her
   niece Bellinda (Bracegirdle), and especially in the star part of Sir
   John Brute the brutish husband (Betterton), which was hailed as one of
   the peaks of Thomas Betterton's remarkable career, The Provoked Wife is
   something as unusual as a Restoration problem play. The premise of the
   plot, that a wife trapped in an abusive marriage might consider either
   leaving it or taking a lover, outraged some sections of Restoration
   society.

Changing audience taste

   In 1698, Vanbrugh's argumentative and sexually frank plays were singled
   out for special attention by Jeremy Collier in his Short View of the
   Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, particularly for their
   failure to impose exemplary morality by appropriate rewards and
   punishments in the fifth act. Vanbrugh laughed at these charges and
   published a joking reply, where he accused the clergyman Collier of
   being more sensitive to unflattering portrayals of the clergy than to
   real irreligion. However, rising public opinion was already on
   Collier's side. The intellectual and sexually explicit Restoration
   comedy style was becoming less and less acceptable to audiences and was
   soon to be replaced by a drama of sententious morality. Colley Cibber's
   Love's Last Shift, with its reformed rake and sentimental
   reconciliation scene, can be seen as a forerunner of this drama.

   Although Vanbrugh continued to work for the stage in many ways, he
   produced no more original plays. With the change in audience taste away
   from Restoration comedy, he turned his creative energies from original
   composition to dramatic adaptation/translation, theatre management, and
   architecture.

Architect

   As an architect (or surveyor, as the term then was) Vanbrugh is thought
   to have had no formal training (compare Early life above). His
   inexperience was compensated by his unerring eye for perspective and
   detail and his close working relationship with Nicholas Hawksmoor.
   Hawksmoor, a former clerk of Sir Christopher Wren, was to be Vanbrugh's
   collaborator in many of his most ambitious projects, including Castle
   Howard and Blenheim. During his almost thirty years as a practising
   architect Vanbrugh designed and worked on numerous buildings. More
   often than not his work was a rebuild or remodel, such as that at
   Kimbolton Castle, where Vanbrugh had to follow the instructions of his
   patron. Consequently these houses, which often claim Vanbrugh as their
   architect, do not typify Vanbrugh's own architectural concepts and
   ideas.

   Though Vanbrugh is best known in connection with stately houses, the
   parlous state of London's 18th-century streets did not escape his
   attention. In the London Journal of March 16, 1722–23, James Boswell
   comments:

          "We are informed that Sir John Vanbrugh, in his scheme for new
          paving the cities of London and Westminster, among other things,
          proposes a tax on all gentlemen's coaches, to stop all channels
          in the s"eet, and to carry all the water off by drains and
          common sewers under ground.

   Vanbrugh's chosen style was baroque, which had been spreading across
   Europe during the 17th century promoted by, among others, Bernini and
   Le Vau. The first baroque country house built in England was Chatsworth
   House designed by William Talman three years before Castle Howard. In
   the race for the commission of Castle Howard, the untrained and untried
   Vanbrugh astonishingly managed to out-charm and out-clubman the
   professional but less socially adept Talman and to persuade the Earl of
   Carlisle to give the great opportunity to him instead (see Downes,
   193–204). Seizing it, Vanbrugh instigated European baroque's
   metamorphosis into a subtle, almost understated version that became
   known as English baroque. Three of Vanbrugh's designs act as milestones
   for evaluating this process:-
    1. Castle Howard, commissioned in 1699;
    2. Blenheim Palace, commissioned in 1704;
    3. Seaton Delaval Hall, begun in 1718.

   Work in progress on each of these projects overlapped into the next,
   providing a natural progression of thoughts and style.

Castle Howard

   Vanbrugh's south facade of Castle Howard.
   Enlarge
   Vanbrugh's south facade of Castle Howard.

   Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, a fellow member of the Kit-Cat
   Club, commissioned Vanbrugh in 1699 to design his mansion, often
   described as England's first truly baroque building. The baroque style
   at Castle Howard is the most European that Vanbrugh ever used.

   Castle Howard, with its immense corridors in segmental colonnades
   leading from the main entrance block to the flanking wings, its centre
   crowned by a great domed tower complete with cupola, is very much in
   the school of classic European baroque. It combined aspects of design
   that had only appeared occasionally, if at all, in English
   architecture: John Webb's Greenwich Palace, Wren's unexecuted design
   for Greenwich, which like Castle Howard was dominated by a domed centre
   block, and of course Talman's Chatsworth. A possible inspiration for
   Castle Howard was also Vaux-le-Vicomte in France.

   The interiors are extremely dramatic, the Great Hall rising 80  feet
   (24  m) into the cupola. Scagliola, and Corinthian columns abound, and
   galleries linked by soaring arches give the impression of an opera
   stage-set — doubtless the intention of the architect.

   Castle Howard was acclaimed a success. This fantastical building,
   unparalleled in England, with its facades and roofs decorated by
   pilasters, statuary, and flowing ornamental carving, ensured that
   baroque became an overnight success. While the greater part of Castle
   Howard was inhabited and completed by 1709, the finishing touches were
   to continue for much of Vanbrugh's lifetime. The west wing was finally
   completed after Vanbrugh's death.

   The acclaim of the work at Castle Howard led to Vanbrugh's most famous
   commission, architect for Blenheim Palace.

Blenheim Palace

   The West facade of Blenheim Palace ("Vanbrugh's castle air") shows the
   unique severe towering stone belvederes ornamenting the skyline.
   Enlarge
   The West facade of Blenheim Palace ("Vanbrugh's castle air") shows the
   unique severe towering stone belvederes ornamenting the skyline.

   The Duke of Marlborough's forces defeated King Louis XIV's army at
   Blenheim, a village on the Danube in 1704. Marlborough's reward, from a
   grateful nation, was to be a splendid country seat, and the Duke
   himself chose fellow Kit-Cat John Vanbrugh to be the architect. Work
   began on the palace in 1705.

   Blenheim Palace was conceived to be not only a grand country house, but
   a national monument. Consequently, the light baroque style used at
   Castle Howard would have been unsuitable for what is in effect a war
   memorial. The house had to display strength and military glory. It is
   in truth more of a castle, or citadel, than a palace. The qualities of
   the building are best illustrated by the massive East Gate
   (illustration, below, left), set in the curtain wall of the service
   block, which resembles an impregnable entrance to a walled city. Few
   realise it also serves as water tower for the palace, thus confounding
   those of Vanbrugh's critics who accused him of impracticability.
   Vanbrugh's monumental East Gate at Blenheim Palace is more the entrance
   to a citadel than to a palace. Vanbrugh cunningly slightly tapered the
   sides to create an illusion of even greater height and drama.
   Enlarge
   Vanbrugh's monumental East Gate at Blenheim Palace is more the entrance
   to a citadel than to a palace. Vanbrugh cunningly slightly tapered the
   sides to create an illusion of even greater height and drama.

   Blenheim, the largest non-royal domestic building in England, consists
   of three blocks, the centre containing the living and state rooms, and
   two flanking rectangular wings both built around a central courtyard:
   one contains the stables, and the other the kitchens, laundries, and
   storehouses. If Castle Howard was the first truly baroque building in
   England, then Blenheim Palace is the most definitive. While Castle
   Howard is a dramatic assembly of restless masses, Blenheim is
   altogether of a more solid construction, relying on tall slender
   windows and monumental statuary on the roofs to lighten the mass of
   yellow stone.

   The suite of state rooms placed on the piano nobile were designed to be
   overpowering and magnificent displays, rather than warm, or
   comfortable. Cosy, middle class comfort was not the intention at
   Versailles, the great palace of Marlborough's foe, and it was certainly
   not deemed a consideration in the palace built to house the conqueror
   of Versailles' master.
   The pediment over the south portico is a complete break from the
   convention. The flat top is decorated by a trophy bearing the marble
   bust of Louis XIV looted by Marlborough from Tournai in 1709, weighing
   30 tons. The positioning of the bust was an innovative new design in
   the decoration of a pediment.
   Enlarge
   The pediment over the south portico is a complete break from the
   convention. The flat top is decorated by a trophy bearing the marble
   bust of Louis XIV looted by Marlborough from Tournai in 1709, weighing
   30 tons. The positioning of the bust was an innovative new design in
   the decoration of a pediment.

   As was common in the 18th century, personal comfort was sacrificed to
   perspective. Windows were to adorn the facades, as well as light the
   interior. Blenheim was designed as a theatre piece from the 67 foot
   (20 m) high great hall, leading to the huge frescoed saloon, all
   designed on an axis with the 134 foot (41 m) high column of victory in
   the grounds, with the trees planted in the battle positions of
   Marlborough's soldiers. Over the south portico (illustrated right),
   itself a massive and dense construction of piers and columns,
   definitely not designed in the Palladian manner for elegant protection
   from the sun, a huge bust of Louis XIV is forced to look down on the
   splendours and rewards of his conqueror. If this placement and design
   was an ornamental feature created by Vanbrugh, or an ironic joke by
   Marlborough, is not known. However, as an architectural composition it
   is a unique example of baroque ornament.

   At Blenheim, Vanbrugh developed baroque from the mere ornamental to a
   denser, more solid, form, where the massed stone became the ornament.
   The great arched gates and the huge solid portico were ornament in
   themselves, and the whole mass was considered rather than each facade.

Seaton Delaval Hall

   Seaton Delaval Hall – corps de logis viewed from the north
   Enlarge
   Seaton Delaval Hall – corps de logis viewed from the north

   Seaton Delaval Hall was Vanbrugh's final work, this northern, seemingly
   rather bleak country house is considered his finest architectural
   masterpiece (see all architectural references below). The reasons for
   this are not immediately apparent to the viewer; by this stage in his
   architectural career Vanbrugh was a master of baroque, he had taken
   this form of architecture way beyond the almost flamboyant continental
   baroque of Castle Howard, past the more severe but still decorated
   Blenheim, to a point of pure sophistication. Vulgar ornament was almost
   disguised: a recess or a pillar was not placed for support, but to
   create a play of light or shadow. The silhouette of the building was of
   equal, if not greater, importance with the plan of rooms. In every
   aspect of the house, subtlety was the keyword; this is the secret of
   Seaton Delaval.

   Built between 1718 and 1728 for Admiral George Delaval, it replaced the
   existing house on the site. It is possible that the design of Seaton
   Delaval was influenced by Palladio's Villa Foscari (sometimes known as
   "La Malcontenta"), built circa 1555. Both have rusticated facades and
   similar demilune windows over a non-porticoed entrance. Even the large
   attic gable at Villa Foscari hints at the clerestory of Seaton's great
   hall.

   The design concept Vanbrugh drew up was similar to that employed at
   Castle Howard and Blenheim: a centre block between two arcaded and
   pedimented wings. However, Seaton Delaval was to be on a much smaller
   scale. Work began in 1718 and continued for ten years. The building is
   an advancement on the style of Blenheim, rather than the earlier castle
   Howard. The principal block, or corps de logis, containing, as at
   Blenheim and Castle Howard, the principal state and living room, forms
   the centre of a three-sided court. Towers crowned by balustrades and
   pinnacles give the house something of what Vanbrugh called his castle
   air.

   Seaton Delaval is one of the few houses Vanbrugh designed alone without
   the aid of Nicholas Hawksmoor. The sobriety of their joint work has
   sometimes been attributed to Hawksmoor, and yet Seaton Delaval is a
   very sombre house indeed. Whereas Castle Howard could successfully be
   set down in Dresden or Würzburg, Seaton Delaval firmly belongs in
   Northumberland and in that landscape. Vanbrugh, in the final stage in
   his career, was fully liberated from the rules of the architects of a
   generation earlier. The rustic stonework is used for the entire facade,
   including on the entrance facade, the pairs of twin columns supporting
   little more than a stone cornice. The twin columns are severe and
   utilitarian, and yet ornament, as they provide no structural use. This
   is part of the furtive quality of the baroque of Seaton Delaval: the
   ornamental appears as a display of strength and mass.

   The likewise severe, but perfectly proportioned, garden facade has at
   its centre a four columned, balcony-roofed portico. Here the slight
   fluting of the stone columns seems almost excessive ornament. As at
   Blenheim, the central block is dominated by the raised clerestory of
   the great hall, adding to the drama of the building's silhouette, but
   unlike Vanbrugh's other great houses, no statuary decorates the
   roof-scape here. The decoration is provided solely by a simple
   balustrade hiding the roof line, and chimneys disguised as finials to
   the balustrading of the low towers. Vanbrugh was now truly a master of
   the baroque. The massing of the stone, the colonnades of the flanking
   wings, the heavy stonework and intricate recesses all create light and
   shade which is ornament in itself.

   Only Vanbrugh could have taken for his inspiration one of Palladio's
   masterpieces, and while retaining the humanist values of the building,
   alter and adapt it, into an unrivalled form of subtle, sophisticated
   baroque unseen elsewhere in Europe. English baroque had arrived.

Architectural reputation

   Vanbrugh's prompt success as an architect can be attributed to his
   friendships with the influential of the day. No less than five of his
   architectural patrons were fellow members of the Kit-cat club. In 1702,
   through the influence of Charles Howard, Earl of Carlisle, Vanbrugh was
   appointed comptroller of the Royal Works (now the Board of Works, where
   several of his designs may still be seen). In 1703, he was appointed
   commissioner of Greenwich Hospital, which was under construction at
   this time, and succeeded Wren as the official architect (or Surveyor),
   while Hawksmoor was appointed Site Architect. Vanbrugh's small but
   conspicuous final changes to the nearly completed building were
   considered a fine interpretation of Wren's original plans and
   intentions. Thus what was intended as an infirmary and hostel for
   destitute retired sailors was transformed into a magnificent national
   monument. His work here is said to have impressed both Queen Anne and
   her government, and is directly responsible for his subsequent success.

   Vanbrugh's reputation still suffers from accusations of extravagance,
   impracticability and a bombastic imposition of his own will on his
   clients. Ironically, all of these unfounded charges derive from
   Blenheim — Vanbrugh's selection as architect of Blenheim was never
   completely popular. The Duchess, the formidable Sarah Churchill,
   particularly wanted Sir Christopher Wren. However, eventually a warrant
   signed by the Earl of Godolphin, the parliamentary treasurer, appointed
   Vanbrugh, and outlined his remit. Sadly, nowhere did this warrant
   mention Queen, or Crown. This error provided the get-out clause for the
   state when the costs and political infighting escalated.
   Blenheim Palace The great court, and state entrance to the palace. The
   Duchess of Marlborough felt the building was extravagant.
   Enlarge
   Blenheim Palace The great court, and state entrance to the palace. The
   Duchess of Marlborough felt the building was extravagant.

   Though Parliament had voted funds for the building of Blenheim, no
   exact sum had ever been fixed upon, and certainly no provision had been
   made for inflation. Almost from the outset, funds had been
   intermittent. Queen Anne paid some of them, but with growing reluctance
   and lapses, following her frequent altercations with her one time best
   friend, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. After the Duchess's final
   argument with the Queen in 1712, all state money ceased and work came
   to a halt. £220,000 had already been spent and £45,000 was owing to
   workmen. The Marlboroughs went into exile on the continent, and did not
   return until after Queen Anne's death in 1714.

   The day after the Queen's death the Marlboroughs returned, and were
   reinstated in favour at the court of the new King George I. The
   64-year-old Duke now decided to complete the project at his own
   expense; in 1716 work re-started and Vanbrugh was left to rely entirely
   upon the means of the Duke of Marlborough himself. Already discouraged
   and upset by the reception the palace was receiving from the Whig
   factions, the final blow for Vanbrugh came when the Duke was
   incapacitated in 1717 by a severe stroke, and the thrifty (and hostile)
   Duchess took control. The Duchess blamed Vanbrugh entirely for the
   growing extravagance of the palace, and its general design: that her
   husband and government had approved them, she discounted. (In fairness
   to her, it must be mentioned that the Duke of Marlborough had
   contributed £60,000 to the initial cost, which, supplemented by
   Parliament, should have built a monumental house.) Following a meeting
   with the Duchess, Vanbrugh left the building site in a rage, insisting
   that the new masons, carpenters and craftsmen were inferior to those he
   had employed. The master craftsmen he had patronised, however, such as
   Grinling Gibbons, refused to work for the lower rates paid by the
   Marlboroughs. The craftsmen brought in by the Duchess, under the
   guidance of furniture designer James Moore, completed the work in
   perfect imitation of the greater masters, so perhaps there was fault
   and intransigence on both sides in this famed argument.

   Vanbrugh was deeply distressed by the turn of events. The rows and
   resulting rumours had damaged his reputation, and the palace he had
   nurtured like a child was forbidden to him. In 1719, while the duchess
   was "not at home", Vanbrugh was able to view the palace in secret; but
   when he and his wife, with the Earl of Carlisle, visited the completed
   Blenheim as members of the viewing public in 1725, they were refused
   admission to even enter the park. The palace had been completed by
   Nicholas Hawksmoor.

   That Vanbrugh's work at Blenheim has been the subject of criticism can
   largely be blamed on those, including the Duchess, who failed to
   understand the chief reason for its construction: to celebrate a
   martial triumph. In the achievement of this remit, Vanbrugh was as
   triumphant as was Marlborough on the field of battle.

Legacy

   Vanbrugh is remembered today for his vast contribution to British
   culture, theatre, and architecture. An immediate dramatic legacy was
   found among his papers after his sudden death, the three-act comedy
   fragment A Journey to London. Vanbrugh had told his old friend Colley
   Cibber that he intended in this play to question traditional marriage
   roles even more radically than in the plays of his youth, and end it
   with a marriage falling irreconcilably apart. The unfinished
   manuscript, today available in Vanbrugh's Collected Works, depicts a
   country family travelling to London and falling prey to its sharpers
   and temptations, while a London wife drives her patient husband to
   despair with her gambling and her consorting with the demi-monde of con
   men and half-pay officers. As with The Relapse at the outset of
   Vanbrugh's dramatic career, Colley Cibber again became involved, and
   this time he had last word. Cibber, now poet laureate and successful
   actor-manager, completed Vanbrugh's manuscript under the title of The
   Provoked Husband (1728) and gave it a happy and sententious ending in
   which the provocative wife repents and is reconciled: a eulogy of
   marriage which was the opposite of Vanbrugh's declared intention to end
   his last and belated "Restoration comedy" with marital break-up. Cibber
   considered this projected outcome to be "too severe for Comedy", and
   such severity was in fact rarely to be seen on the English stage before
   Ibsen.
   The role of Sir John Brute in The Provoked Wife became one of David
   Garrick's most famous roles.
   Enlarge
   The role of Sir John Brute in The Provoked Wife became one of David
   Garrick's most famous roles.

   On the 18th-century stage, Vanbrugh's Relapse and Provoked Wife were
   only considered possible to perform in bowdlerised versions, but as
   such, they remained popular. Throughout Colley Cibber's long and
   successful acting career, audiences continued to demand to see him as
   Lord Foppington in The Relapse, while Sir John Brute in The Provoked
   Wife became, after being an iconic role for Thomas Betterton, one of
   David Garrick's most famous roles. In the present day, The Relapse, now
   again to be seen uncut, remains a favourite play.

   With the completion of Castle Howard English baroque came into fashion
   overnight. It had brought together the isolated and varied instances of
   monumental design, by, among others, Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren.
   Vanbrugh thought of masses, volume and perspective in a way that his
   predecessors had not.

   He also had the unusual skill, for an architect, of delivering the
   goods that his clients required. His reputation has suffered because of
   his famed disagreements with the Duchess of Marlborough, yet, one must
   remember his original client was the British Nation, not the Duchess,
   and the nation wanted a monument and celebration of victory, and that
   is what Vanbrugh gave the nation.

   His influence on successive architects is incalculable. Nicholas
   Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh's friend and collaborator on so many projects
   continued to design many London churches for ten years after Vanbrugh's
   death. Vanbrugh's pupil and cousin the architect Edward Lovett Pearce
   rose to become one of Ireland's greatest architects.

   Vanbrugh is remembered throughout Britain, by inns, street names, a
   university college ( York) and schools named in his honour, but one
   only has to wander through London, or the English country-side dotted
   with their innumerable country houses, to see the ever present
   influence of his architecture.

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