Architecture · Classical & Renaissance

John Vanbrugh

1664–1726 · English

English Baroque

Sir John Vanbrugh was a Restoration playwright, a soldier imprisoned in the Bastille, a herald and a theatre manager who became, with no training whatever, England's most theatrical architect. Working with Nicholas Hawksmoor he built Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace, piling up masses of stone for dramatic effect rather than correctness. His bruising quarrel with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, over the costs of Blenheim ended with his being barred from the finished house.

How to spot them

▸Enormous, heavy, theatrical masses of stone; towers, arches and skylines built for the approach view
▸A playwright first: The Relapse and The Provoked Wife
▸Always paired with Hawksmoor, who did the drawing and the detail
▸Blenheim, the Duchess of Marlborough, and the lawsuit over unpaid bills

Key buildings

A palace given by a grateful nation to a victorious duke, its cost and its duchess ruining the architect's career (1705–1722)

Woodstock, Oxfordshire

Blenheim Palace, built for the 1st Duke of Marlborough after his 1704 victory; Winston Churchill was born there in 1874.

A vast Yorkshire house with a domed hall, built for an earl by a playwright who had never designed a building before (begun 1699)

North Yorkshire, England

Castle Howard, for the 3rd Earl of Carlisle; the setting of both television versions of Brideshead Revisited.

A grim, fire-gutted Northumberland house by the sea, its giant pilasters and towers called the architect's most romantic work (1718–1728)

Northumberland, England

Seaton Delaval Hall, built for Admiral George Delaval; the central block burned in 1822 and stands roofless within its shell.

A Bristol house with a rank of chimneys linked by arches across the roofline like a row of giant staples (c. 1712–1719)

Bristol, England

Kings Weston House, built for Edward Southwell.

A miniature fortified house on Greenwich hill, built by the architect for himself and nicknamed the Bastille (1718–1719)

Greenwich, London

Vanbrugh Castle, said to recall the Paris prison in which he spent four years.

A 1696 comedy answering a rival's play, in which Lord Foppington is created and Amanda resists seduction (1696)

Drury Lane, London

The Relapse, or Virtue in Danger — a sequel to Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift; Sheridan later rewrote it as A Trip to Scarborough.

A comedy of 1697 about a drunken, brutish knight and the wife he provokes, singled out for attack in a clergyman's pamphlet (1697)

Lincoln's Inn Fields, London

The Provoked Wife, condemned in Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698).

Key ideas

Architecture should produce 'masculine shew' and movement — the effect of a building seen from a carriage, not on paper
The picturesque before the word existed: keep the old ruin in the park because of the associations it stirs
The country house as a stage set, with a dramatic sequence of hall, saloon and vista

Quick-fire facts

•Of Flemish descent; he spent four years imprisoned in France, including time in the Bastille, apparently as a suspected spy
•He wrote The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), both attacked in Jeremy Collier's Short View of 1698
•He had no architectural training when the Earl of Carlisle gave him Castle Howard in 1699
•Appointed Comptroller of the Royal Works in 1702 and Clarenceux King of Arms in 1704, a heraldic post he obtained largely as a joke against the College of Arms
•He built the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket and managed it with William Congreve
•Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, fell out with him over Blenheim's costs; when he visited in 1725 he was refused entry to the house
•He argued unsuccessfully for preserving the ruins of Woodstock Manor in Blenheim's park, in a letter often called the first plea for conservation on picturesque grounds
•His own epitaph, by Abel Evans, runs: 'Lie heavy on him, Earth! for he / Laid many heavy loads on thee'

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Sources

UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Blenheim Palace
John Summerson — Architecture in Britain 1530–1830