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:-

I had wanted to see Hunstanton School, a building of such importance in the modernist canon, won in competition by Alison and Peter Smithson in 1950, when Alison was only twenty, and completed in 1954, a post-war dream of the future.

I had been warned that it might be under scaffolding which it will be from September when it becomes a building site and it sounds as if it will have to be totally reconstructed, as well as properly insulated, which it never was.  And, of course, one isn’t allowed to visit.  So, all one gets is a distant view across the playing fields of a low-lying Miesian box:-

This is a day late for father’s day.

I wondered if there was a picture of my father in the small leather poche of family photographs which I inherited from my older brother, Richard, and which he must have retrieved, probably from my father’s desk, after my father’s death in 1994.

There is indeed a picture of him at Winchester, taken in October 1927:-

I don’t normally pay much attention to Father’s Day.

Then, I remembered that our friend, Mariana Cook, a wonderful photographer of the psychology of human relationships, took a photograph of the three of us for what I assume was to be a companion volume of her book Mothers and Sons, published in 1996.

She has very generously allowed me to reproduce it (©Cook):-

It was the greatest possible pleasure to discuss all aspects of Vanbrugh’s life last night with Jeremy Musson, who has worked on Vanbrugh for much longer than I have, having published The Country Houses of Vanbrugh in 2008. 

It hadn’t previously struck me, as Jeremy suggested, that the interest in Vanbrugh in the 1920s, with the publication of the big Country Life book, The Work of Sir John Vanbrugh and his School in 1928, still worth reading, may have been sparked as much by Vanbrugh’s bicentenary in 1926 as the taste in the 1920s for grand classicism.

I hope we covered most topics: Vanbrugh’s amazing networking skills; getting jobs through his family connections, first in the wine trade, in India, in the army and then working for the Earl of Abingdon, before going out to The Hague to support William of Orange with Robert Bertie, heir to Grimsthorpe, and living with Bertie’s younger brother, Peregrine, in Whitehall, after Vanbrugh’s release from the Bastille. 

Jeremy read from several of Vanbrugh’s letters which give such a strong sense of his personality – quick-witted, clever, funny, full of gossip, but, also, when required, very business-like and good with people, the qualities of his personality, maybe inherited from his father, which have been less recognised.

Grimsthorpe looked amazing in the evening light.  Robert Bertie decided to rebuild the entrance front after being made a Duke.  As the inscription under his coat-of-arms says LOYALTY ME OBLIGE:-

We left it nearly too late to see the Michaelina Wautier exhibition in the Sackler Gallery at the Royal Academy.  It is an extraordinary and revelatory exhibition of the work of an artist who, until recently, has been almost completely overlooked in spite of having an immense work in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and having signed much of her work Invenit et fecit – sometimes extremely prominently.

If you haven’t seen it, I would urge you to in the four days that are left before the exhibition closes.