Burlington House a Brief History
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BURLINGTON HOUSE A BRIEF HISTORY This guide is given out free to teachers and full-time students with ID at the Education Desk and is available to other visitors for purchase from the RA Shop. BURLINGTON HOUSE A BRIEF HISTORY An Introduction to the Architecture of the Home of the Royal Academy for Teachers and Students Written by Peter Schmitt Introduction with Owen Hopkins For the Education Passing through the gateway from Piccadilly into the Burlington House Department © courtyard, the visitor is met with three hundred and fifty years of architectural Royal Academy of Arts history. Though undetectable in its exterior, Burlington House itself, standing Designed by Niten Patel, London to the north of the courtyard and home to the Royal Academy since 1867, is the Printed by last surviving town palace of four that were built along Piccadilly in the 1660s. Tradewinds Ltd For its first 200 years it housed two aristocratic families related by marriage. Over that time it was subject to dramatic and still visible transformations as Front cover Gallery III detail each owner sought to remake it according to their particular requirements and Royal Academy of Arts, imperatives. In 1854 it was bought by the government and during the 1860s London Photo © Royal Academy of Arts/ the site was remade for institutional use as a home of arts and sciences – a Paul Highnam great statement of national cultural and intellectual might. The house’s already Back cover heavily altered facade was extended upwards; around its courtyard rose grand The Sackler Wing of new buildings for six Learned Societies; and on its gardens to the north were Galleries Staircase (viewed from below) constructed a range of purpose-built galleries, considered amongst the finest in Royal Academy of Arts, London. London Photo © Royal Academy A building rarely remains as it was when first built, and at Burlington of Arts/Paul Highnam House the successive transformations enacted by those who have occupied it Right are especially vivid. This guide provides a brief introduction to this remarkable Courtyard of Burlington history, charting Burlington House’s complex and fascinating evolution from its House and facade of Royal Academy of Arts, beginnings to the present day. London The playwright and architect Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) famously Photo © Alys Tomlinson wrote that such multi-layered historic buildings have the power to create ‘lively and pleasing Reflections … On the Remarkable things which have been transacted in them, Or the extraordinary Occasions of Erecting them.’ Vanbrugh was suggesting that the experience of visiting historic buildings can fire the imagination and conjure a wealth of ideas about their builders and occupants. Similarly, through looking at and understanding a building such as Burlington House one can begin to appreciate the motivations and circumstances of those who left their mark upon it. 1 CORNICE Fig. 1 The surge in building following the Great Fire of 1666 had made materials Restoration town-palace The horizontal projection and labour expensive, but the architect Hugh May (1621–1684), Denham’s When Charles II came to the throne in the Restoration of 1660, he rewarded at the top of a building or wall. deputy, was able to complete the house for Burlington by 1668 at a cost of four of his supporters with plots of land on which to build houses, on the PEDIMENT £5,000. As can be seen in Knyff and Kip’s aerial view, the house was designed north side of Piccadilly. The street, also called Portugal Street after Charles’s A typically triangular around a broad central block with projecting wings on each side. As was typical Portuguese queen, Catherine of Braganza, was the main thoroughfare of what gable end with horizontal cornice. of the period, the house featured a steeply sloping roof above a thick wooden was then a light and airy suburb on the western edge of town, far removed from cornice. A first-floor balcony and rather undersized pediment provided a central the narrow, winding streets of the City. DORMER WINDOW A window which emphasis to the facade. Numerous chimneys show that there were fireplaces in The four town-palaces erected on these plots were built to designs that protrudes from the plane many of the rooms. The dormer windows protruding through the roof brought broadly resembled the Parisian model of an hôtel particulier or ‘town palace’, of a sloping roof. light into the garrets where the servants lived. The windows gave the house set back beyond a formal courtyard which was protected from the street by a something of a continental look, which extended to the parterre or formal high wall. One of these town-palaces was Burlington House. It was erected in geometric garden behind, comparable to Dutch models. In front of the house, the 1660s by the poet Sir John Denham (1615–1669), who as well as receiving Fig. 1 the symmetrical single-storey courtyard outbuildings housed stables to the east the house’s three-and-a-half-acre plot, was appointed Surveyor-General of Burlington House in Pickadilly (on the right of the picture) and kitchens to the west (on the left). Providing the King’s Works, the body charged with the task of building and maintaining Line engraving by Johannes access to the house from Piccadilly, the courtyard served as both service yard royal palaces and other state buildings. In the words of the diarist John Evelyn, Kip from a drawing by Leonard Knyff, 325 x 478 mm and ceremonial space. Denham was ‘a better poet than architect’, and so relied on his department’s Published in Britannia Illustrata, Despite its relatively plain facade, Burlington House was one of the craftsmen to design the house. However, he was never to occupy it. In 1667, London 1707, pl.29 Royal Academy of Arts, London COLONNADE grandest houses in London and even in the 1690s still paid the highest residential before the house was complete, his wife died and he sold the unfinished shell for Photo © Royal Academy A series of regularly of Arts/Prudence Cuming spaced columns rates in the city. £3,300 to Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Burlington (1612–1698). Associates supporting an entablature. What can we learn about this area of London from Knyff and Kip’s view? DORIC What is the relationship between the house and the gardens? How is the style of the garden in keeping with that of the main house? How do the two relate to the surrounding landscape? Architectural manifesto In the next stage of Burlington House’s development, the figure of Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington (1694–1753), looms large. Famously, Burlington IONIC House was the site of the first exposition of Lord Burlington’s architectural ideas, which were to have a great impact on architectural taste in Britain for much of the first half of the eighteenth century. However, before he came into his inheritance, the first steps in renovating the house, which by this time would have looked somewhat dated, were taken by Burlington’s mother, the Dowager Countess Juliana. CORINTHIAN To undertake this renovation Lady Juliana employed James Gibbs (1682– 1754), one of the most fashionable of contemporary architects, who was fresh from his training in Rome. Gibbs is thought to have made alterations to the interior of the house, but his most visible known work, though now long since demolished, was the construction in 1715–17 of a semi-circular Doric colonnade in the courtyard (fig. 2). Gibbs would have seen Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s great colonnade in Saint Peter’s Square in Rome (1656–67), although his own colonnade was designed to impress a select few rather than act as a theatre for 2 3 public spectacle. Fig. 3 William Kent, Coming into his inheritance The Glorification in 1717, Lord Burlington was of Inigo Jones, 1719–20 Oil on canvas, diameter 182.9 cm clearly determined to imprint his Royal Academy of Arts, London own personality and architectural Photo © Royal Academy of Arts/John Hammond ideas on the house. He dismissed Gibbs and in his place employed the Scottish architect, Colen Campbell (1676–1729). Two years earlier Campbell had published Vitruvius Britannicus, an explicitly nationalistic architectural manifesto in which he documented the current state of architecture in Britain and attempted to formulate and codify a distinctly British style of classical architecture. Though it included, and celebrated, works by the Baroque architects Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723) and Sir John Vanbrugh, Campbell’s key exemplars were the Italian architect Andrea Fig. 2 PIANO NOBILE and the first-floor piano nobile whose tall windows are topped by alternating Burlington House, The principal floor in Palladio (1508–1580) and the English architect Inigo Jones (1573–1652). Piccadilly: perspective of a classical building, triangular and segmental pediments. The windows are separated by Ionic one side of the colonnade, usually the first floor. half-columns whose entablature projects forward. The overall scheme was looking east, c.1815 Fig. 3 The importance of Inigo Jones for Campbell and Burlington is vividly likely inspired by Palladio’s Palazzo Porto in Vicenza (begun around 1546). Drawn to illustrate one of ENTABLATURE demonstrated in this painting by William Kent (c. 1685–1748). It shows a Sir John Soane’s lectures as The upper part of A source closer to home was Jones’s Banqueting House on Whitehall Professor of Architecture at a classical order, heavenly allegorical scene depicted in a strongly architectural setting amongst the Royal Academy (1619–22; fig. 5), which employed an architectural scheme similarly consisting of the whole Watercolour, 714 x 641 mm two Palladian buildings. At the centre of the composition sits the figure of By courtesy of the Trustees of horizontal section inspired by the Palazzo Porto and, like Burlington House, was also Sir John Soane’s Museum supported by columns or Architecture, with two figures to the right, one of whom presents an easily pilasters.