Architecture

In 1702 Vanbrugh entered another field: he designed Castle Howard in Yorkshire, for Lord Carlisle. His first design was far simpler than the richly articulated palace that resulted. Probably he was untrained, but aptly at hand was Nicholas Hawksmoor, the accomplished clerk of the great architect Sir Christopher Wren.Hawksmoor played the assistant to Vanbrugh but was in effect the partner. These two men brought to its peak English Baroque—an architecture concerned with the rhythmic effect of diversified masses, using Classical architectural elements to that end. The Vanbrugh-Hawksmoor Baroque manner is often called “heavy,” but the heaviness is in the service of the dramatic. The style they evolved was a joint creation: Hawksmoor had already begun to develop it in the 1690s and acted as draftsman, administrator, and architectural detailer, while Vanbrugh is credited with the buildings’ general plan and heroic scale.Through Lord Carlisle, who was head of the Treasury, Vanbrugh became in 1702 comptroller of the queen’s works. In 1703 he designed the Queen’s Theatre, or Opera House, in the Haymarket. Though a magnificent building, it proved a failure, partly because of its poor acoustics, and he lost considerable money in the venture.In 1705 Vanbrugh was chosen by John Churchill, 1st duke of Marlborough, to design the palace at Woodstock, Oxfordshire, which was the nation’s gift to that hero of many campaigns. Blenheim Palace, named for Marlborough’s most famous victory, was the architectural prize of Queen Anne’s reign. Again Hawksmoor was indispensable to Vanbrugh: Blenheim (1705–16) is their joint masterpiece.Any one of its powerful components may have been of Hawksmoor’s shaping, but the planning and broad conception were surely Vanbrugh’s, and the massive effect was the result of the hero-worshipping soldier-architect. Though the duke approved the plans, the duchess did not; there was trouble over costs and payments, and Vanbrugh left the project. He continued to design picturesque country houses in the style of castles, however, and in such buildings as Kimbolton Castle in Huntingdon (1707–10) and Kings Weston in Gloucestershire (now in Bristol; c. 1710–14), his style became simpler in its use of decoration.Under George I, Vanbrugh was knighted in 1714 and made comptroller again in 1715. Influenced by the art of fortification and Elizabethan building, Vanbrugh’s great last works were Eastbury (1718–26) in Dorset, Seaton Delaval (1720–28) in Northumberland (1720–28), and Grimsthorpe Castle (1722–26) in Lincolnshire. Without Hawksmoor, he adopted a simple style in these designs, using a few elementary forms with increasing audacity, until in Seaton Delaval he achieved the height of drama with a comparatively small house.