Last stop Ditchley.  Not much to do with Vanbrugh, apart from being a wonderful house designed by his rival, James Gibbs, for George Lee, second Earl of Lichfield:-

Fine plasterwork in the saloon:-

And a wonderful chimneypiece in the entrance hall :-

Day five of the great Vanbrugh Tour.

The fact that so much of Blenheim is still under scaffolding compels one to pay close attention to the detailing: the abstract qualities of the stonework and whether the detailing is by Vanbrugh or Hawksmoor.

Much of it feels very characteristic of Vanbrugh who had such a strong sense of simplified geometry – Brobdingnagian, as Laurence Whistler would have said:-

I don’t think I have previously see the south façade of the kitchen wing – not surprisingly, much simpler in design than the main block:-

There’s so much to admire:-

On to Kimbolton, only my second visit to the large, late medieval castle which Vanbrugh adapted by adding a new façade and changing the layout of the ground floor rooms for his friend, Charles Montagu, fourth Earl of Manchester. 

He gave it what he described as ‘a Castle air’ which did not amount to much more than crenellations:-

The thing which is really impressive about Kimbolton is the wealth of paintings by Pellegrini, including the Venus and Cupid in a corner room:-

And much less accomplished paintings in the chapel:-

Day four of the great Vanbrugh Tour.

Grimsthorpe:-

It’s so saturated with Ancaster heraldic devices:-

Day three of the Vanbrugh tour at Chatsworth, without many Vanbrugh connections, apart from the fact that Vanbrugh invited himself to stay there for five days in the summer of 1699 when he was working on the original designs for Castle Howard, showing the Duke of Devonshire sketches of what he proposed.

The house would have been as shown in Kip and Knyff’s engraving of 1699 – two new fronts complete, as designed by Talman, but the entrance front to the west still Tudor:-

The Duke of Devonshire compared what Vanbrugh proposed to a greenhouse.  This (below) was the first Chatsworth greenhouse, which could indeed have been added as wings to the house:-

I also hadn’t realised that Samuel Watson who did so much of the detailed woodcarving, particularly in the chapel, left detailed drawings:-

Here’s some of the woodcarving:-

Day Two of the great Vanbrugh Tour.

Castle Howard in high summer:-

The Entrance Hall:-

The classical statuary:-

The details of the fireplace:-

The details of the fireplace:-

We walked out along the terrace:-

To the Temple of the Four Winds:-

To the mausoleum:-

Upstairs, the exhibition includes the account books of the third Earl of Carlisle.  I have not seen in a long while the scrupulous way in which he checked and itemised all aspects of his expenditure right up until the last year of his life:-

And the last letter of Vanbrugh’s life, dated 8 March 1726, less than two weeks before his death:-

The north front:-

And the domestic wing:-

Day One of the great Vanbrugh tour.

We started at Seaton Delaval.  I didn’t photograph the north front because the coach was parked outside.  But I was able to study the south front, which is equally original, with its powerful colonnade and octagonal corner turrets, the local stone presumably blackened by coal dust:-

Here is a view of the entrance front with its ringed columns:-

The staircases are to the side away from the entrance hall:-

Its Vanbrugh at his most inventive and original – late Vanbrugh when he was playing around with architectural form in the sketches he was doing for smaller houses on his Greenwich estate.

And the ruined statuary is always impressive, burned by the fire of 1822:-

One of the highlights of Vanbrugh300 was this morning’s discussion of Vanbrugh’s life and work at the Chalke Valley History Festival.  The panel included Ophelia Field who wrote an excellent biography of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough and a study of the Kit-Cat Club; Rory Fraser who is publishing a biography of Vanbrugh; and was chaired by Geoffrey Heath-Taylor, who runs the Country House podcast with Rory.

There is always more to discuss because Vanbrugh lived such an astonishingly multifarious life: wine merchant, East India Company factor, soldier, playwright, architect, theatrical impresario.  We ended with the question why Vanbrugh300 has been such a success.  I gave the prosaic answer – it’s thanks to funding from NLHF and the work of the Georgian Group.  Ophelia gave a more interesting answer – that the diversity of his interests is precisely what has caught people’s imagination.  And then Rory talked about the fact that nobody studies this period of English history.  It’s complicated and remote.  But important.

I may have misrepresented their views because I wasn’t taking notes, but they will appear in due course on the Country House podcast.

Some time ago, I posted the obituary of my aunt, Faith Raven.  It detailed all of her less attractive characteristics, which mainly consisted of the fact that she would say exactly what she thought without regard for the consequences, which she thought was being plain-speaking, but could be, and indeed sometimes was, offensive.

But we spent yesterday in the garden of Docwra’s Manor, which reminded me of some of her better characteristics.  For example, she encouraged Sir Leslie Martin to give advice on the planting of rare varieties of apple tree (this is one of his less well known activities).  She allowed local residents to use part of the garden for allotments.  When the barn burnt down, she commissioned new housing designed by Christophe Grillet. 

Her garden was very beautiful and she allowed pretty free public access to it, for a £5 donation:-

En route to Hunstanton, we called in on St. Mary’s, Snettisham, an improbably magnificent 14th. century church in a beautiful position set some distance away from the village, not far from Sandringham:-

In one of the transepts were pictures of all the vicars from the early nineteenth century on, a wonderful social history of the life of the parish priest – worldly in the nineteenth century, a few more spiritual, all pillars of respectability.

This is perhaps not surprising when you see the Old Vicarage next door to the church:-