I had been tipped off that the first review of my book would appear in this week’s Country Life and, indeed, it has – a very nice, generous and well-informed account of it by Michael Hall, the former editor of both Apollo and the Burlington Magazine.
He makes the point that Vanbrugh may have been good at making sketches of his projects in the same way that Norman Shaw would do designs on the cuffs of his shirts at dinner parties. I think this is exactly right, as suggested by the two sketches of the garden front of Castle Howard which surfaced in the collection of the Marquess of Bute in the mid-1990s – not finished drawings, but showing just enough to give an idea as to what the garden front would look like.
More on this tomorrow in my talk at the Wigmore Hall for which there are still a small number of tickets available:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 