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:-