Ed Kluz — Monuments
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Ed Kluz — Monuments Private View 13 October 6-9pm Exhibition 14 - 31 October 2015 John Martin Gallery 38 Albemarle Street T +44 (0)20 7499 1314 Mon-Fri 10-6 London, W1S 4JG [email protected] Sat 10-2 — Bach-y-Graig Collage on Paper, 31½ x 43½ ins £4,000 Bach-y-Graig is thought to have been the first brick built building in Wales. The house was built in 1567 for Sir Richard Clough, Sir Thomas Gresham’s representative in Antwerp. Clough employed a Flemish architect to create a house in the Renaissance style of the Netherlands. Owner of the near- by Nantlys Hall, Phillip Pennant, described Bach-yGraig as a singular house, which consisted of ‘ a mansion of three sides, enclosing a square court. The first consists of a vast hall and parlour: the rest of it rises into six wonderful stories, including the cupola; and forms from the second floor the figure of a pyramid: the rooms are small and inconvenient.’ By 1774, when the well-known lexicog- rapher, critic and essayist Dr Samuel Johnson visited the house, it was in decline and he wrote in his diary of its missing floors and stopped up windows. The main house at Bach-y-Graig was then demolished at some point between 1795 and 1817, when Clough’s descendant Mrs Thrale married an Italian music master called Piozzi. Together they built a new mansion, Brynbella - combining their Welsh and Italian ancestry in the name. A wrought-iron weathervane from Bach-y-Graig is thought to have been re-used at Brynbella’s stables. The Piozzis made numerous alterations to what remained of Bach-y-Graig. What was originally the gatehouse became the main farmhouse. This remains today and is currently Bed and Breakfast accommodation. — Cannons House Collage on Paper, 31½ x 43½ ins £4,000 Cannons was a stately home in Little Stanmore, Middlesex. It was inherited by James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, after his marriage to his first wife Mary Lake. The name ‘Cannons’ is an obsolete spelling of ‘canons’ and refers to the Augustinian canons of St Bartholomew-theGreat, London, who owned the estate before the English Reformation. Brydges filled Cannons with Old Masters and Grand Tour acquisitions, and from 1717 to 1718 appointed Handel as resident house composer. Cannons’ fame led to the introduction of crowd control measures - including a one-way system - to manage the large numbers of visitors. Early travel guides featured Cannons. In a 1725 travelogue by Daniel Defoe, he described Cannons’ extravagance thus: ‘This palace is so beautiful in its situation, so lofty, so majestick the appearance of it, that a pen can but ill describe it... ‘tis only fit to be talk’d of upon the very spot... The whole structure is built with such a Profusion of Expense and finished with such a Brightness of Fancy and Delicacy of Judgment.’ In 1720, the year in which the building of the palace was completed, Brydges lost his fortune in the South Sea Bubble financial disaster. Following the first Duke’s death in 1744, Cannons passed to his son Henry Brydges. In 1747 the house was demolished and Henry Brydges held a twelve-day sale to compensate for family losses. The sale catalogue included works by Titian, Giorgione, Raphael and Guercino. Among the most notable paintings were Caravaggio’s ‘Boy Bitten by a Lizard’, which the National Gallery in Lon- don acquired in 1986, and Nicolas Poussin’s ‘The Choice of Hercules’. Of the sculptures, Grinling Gibbons’ carved panel ‘The Stoning of St Stephen’ is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The estate itself was bought by William Hallett, who built a relatively modest house in the site. Follow- ing his death in 1781 the estate passed though several owners before eventually being purchased by its current occupants, the North London Collegiate School, in 1929. — Claremont House Collage on Paper, 31½ x 43½ ins £4,000 Sir John Vanburgh, the architect responsible for the creation of Blenheim Palace and Castle How- ard, built Claremont as his own residence in 1708. In 1714, describing it as a ‘very small box’, such was its size relative to Vanburgh’s grander buildings, it was sold to the wealthy politician Thomas Pelham-Holles, Earl of Clare, who later became the Duke of Newcastle and served twice as Prime Minister. Pelham-Holles commissioned Vanburgh to expand the house, and two great wings were added, along with a fortress-like turret on the adjoining knoll to act as a viewing tower over the Surrey countryside. On the Pelham-Holles death in 1768 the house was sold to Lord Robert Clive. Lord Clive demolished the building as it was by then out of fashion and supposedly built on damp ground. Clive engaged the architect Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, who took on his future son-in- law Henry Holland to assist on the project. Despite the vast building project he had undertaken at Claremont, Lord Clive never actually lived at the house, dying the year the house was finished. Over the next 100 years Claremont has various owners. In 1882, having enjoyed visits as a child, Queen Victoria bought the building for her youngest son, Prince Leopold when he married the German Princess Helena. The marriage was tragically short as Leopold died following a fall in 1884. Helena was pregnant with their second child at the time and the son she bore, Charles, a German citizen, served as a general in the German army during the First World War. Consequently the British gov- ernment refused to allow him to inherit Claremont on his mother’s death in 1922. The house was sold to Sir William Corry, director of the Cunard Shipping Line. Corry made many improvements to the house but began to sell parts of the park to housing developers. Corry died in 1926 and in 1928 Claremont was, ironically, sold to a wealthy German financier. When the mansion and remaining grounds came up for sale in 1930, it was bought by the Governors of a London school. Claremont School merged with a boys’ preparatory school, Fan Court, in 1978 and has since been known as Claremont Fan Court School, based in the mansion commissioned by Lord Clive. Fifty acres of the remaining grounds were acquired by the National Trust in 1949. The Claremont Landscape Gar- den has been restored to its former glory. The tower on the knoll above Claremont, which had been added at the request of Pelham-Holles survives intact as Belvedere Tower, owned by the school but periodically opened to the public with the assistance of the National Trust. — Coleshill House Collage on Paper, 31½ x 43½ ins £4,000 Small but perfectly formed, Coleshill House was architecturally groundbreaking in its day. Complet- ed around 1662, its simple and logical layout was new to England. Its designer, Roger Pratt, went on to become a Royal Commissioner for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666. In 1668 he was knighted by Charles II, becoming the first architect to receive such an honour. Roger Pratt designed the house for his cousin, Sir George Pratt. Fashionable European houses inspired the design, but he laid out the house to meet the needs of an English country gentleman. The sym- metrical plan meant Pratt had to put the main staircase into a central hall. The hall couldn’t be used as a dining room, but it made a grand entrance hall for visitors to the house. Sir George was not hugely wealthy, so Coleshill House was not as grand as other houses from the time. Yet no expense was spared on the plasterwork and carving of the richly ornate ceilings and entrance hall staircase. For many years the Pleydell Bouverie family lived in the house. The unexpected destruction of the house came only a few years after it was sold to Ernest Cook at the end of the Second World War. — Eastbury Park Collage on Paper, 31½ x 43½ ins £4,000 Work on Eastbury Park began in 1718 when the owner of the site, Lord of the Admiralty George Doddington, commissioned Sir John Vanburgh to design him a new and suitably impressive man- sion. Vanburgh had earned his reputation through Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard and East- bury was the third large house that Vanburgh designed. The park and formal gardens were similar- ly impressive, being designed by Charles Bridgeman, who also created the gardens at Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Doddington did not live to see the mansion completed. On his death in 1720 the estate passed to Doddington’s nephew, George Bubb, who assumed the name George Bubb Doddington, and in 1738 the house was finally completed. Bubb Doddington was known for his extravagant habits and social climbing. Born the son of an apothecary in Weymouth, he court- ed notable individuals, such as the Prince of Wales, and attracted the scorn of contemporary poet Alexander Pope, who wrote of Bubb ‘he is too much a half-wit to love a true wit, and too much half-honest to esteem any entire merit…. I must affront to be rid of him.’ From contemporary de- scriptions it appears that Bubb Doddington was an overweight dandy and member of the Hell Fire Club (an eighteenth century club for high society rakes). On Bubb Doddington’s death in 1762, sub- sequent heirs were unable to afford the maintenance of Eastbury. The magnificent furniture was sold off in 1763. In 1775 its owner George, 2nd Earl Temple of Stowe, sent instructions from Italy to his steward, William Doggett, requesting the dismantling of the wings of the house.