It’s perhaps no surprise that Sir John Soane admired John Vanbrugh. The two architects, practising at either end of the 18th century and similarly expressive in their design sensibilities, appear like exuberant outliers compared with the restrained neo-Palladian Classicism that dominated British architecture in between.
This affinity comes through strongly in the current exhibition at Sir John Soane’s Museum, marking 300 years since Vanbrugh’s death and co-curated by Charles Saumarez Smith and architect Roz Barr.
Soane cited Vanbrugh as one of his greatest influences, referring to him as the ‘Shakespeare of architecture’ and referencing his buildings in the lectures he gave at the Royal Academy.
Of particular delight in this exhibition are the three horizontal watercolours depicting the façade of Vanbrugh’s Blenheim Palace seen in three different lights – drawn up by Soane’s office for use as illustrations in these lectures. One shows the façade in full detail, one stripped of its decoration and one silhouetted ‘at dusk’. Together, they elucidate the play of shape, form and shadow in the architecture – underlining the theatricality of Vanbrugh’s work, which was the closest brush English architecture had with full Baroque. It’s reflected too in the exhibition’s subtitle: ‘The Drama of Architecture’.
This theatrical bent in Vanbrugh’s work is perhaps inevitably always connected to his having first been a celebrated dramatist before becoming an architect, writing risqué plays such as The Provoked Wife (1697). Indeed, his pivot to architecture came through the theatre, with a theatrical business venture at the Queen’s Theatre Haymarket seeing him end up designing the venue too, despite having no architectural training.
Elevational drawing of Blenheim Palace courtesy of Soane office, Royal Academy Lecture
On the back of this project, though, the Earl of Carlisle, who was an acquaintance at the aristocratic Kit Kat club where Vanbrugh was a member, then asked him to design a country house, which would become Castle Howard.
It’s precisely this sense of Vanbrugh as a gentleman amateur, dilettante even, that means often today it’s his contemporary and collaborator Nicholas Hawksmoor, clerk of works at Castle Howard and Blenheim, who is more admired among architects as somehow being more cerebral and serious in comparison.
Certainly, aside from the Queen’s Theatre, Vanbrugh, unlike Hawksmoor, designed no churches nor other public buildings, just huge luxury private country houses, for aristocratic clients in the main.
These are the focus of the first room in this exhibition, and in truth, many of the house elevations do look rather like stage flats, with oddly little focus on the interiors. Even the intricate plans, with their thickly modelled walls, feel more about the enfilade of shapes and patterns they form rather than the spaces they enclose.
However, there’s one sketch in the front gallery in Vanbrugh’s own hand – a bird’s-eye perspective of Castle Howard (see top image) that immediately takes you beyond the set pieces to his inventive spirit. This is a taster for the plethora of sketches shown in the second gallery – chosen by Barr, who unearthed them from a sketchbook only acquired by the V&A in the 1990s and here being shown in public for the first time. She describes coming across these as ‘overwhelming’: ‘They demonstrate the rigour and thought process of how he worked.’
These drawings are the surprise of this exhibition, demonstrating Vanbrugh’s restless inventiveness in sketching out ideas for houses big and small – not just grand ones. Many are just fantasy doodles, but they include those he built for himself and his family on a piece of land he bought in Greenwich, which he seemed to use as a test bed for his ideas.
This spirit of excitement and experimentation, of the sheer enjoyment and play with the architecture, is also picked up in a brilliant coda to the exhibition. In the Museum’s Foyle Space downstairs, there’s a new short film of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown by filmmaker Jim Venturi, their son, and writer Anita Naughton.
It shows them visiting Blenheim Palace for the first time in years, providing a fascinating snapshot not only of their reaction to Vanbrugh’s work but of their relationship with each other. Their appreciation and commentary on the wit of Vanbrugh’s architecture gives an insight into their own work too: Blenheim’s broken upper pediment directly inspired that of Venturi’s famous Mother’s House, completed in 1964.
This small exhibition gives great insight into Vanbrugh’s work from different perspectives and is a taster for other events during this anniversary year, including the exhibition Staging the Baroque, also curated by Barr, that has just opened at Castle Howard.
Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture runs at Sir John Soane’s Museum, 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, until 28 June
Top image: Perspective view of Castle Howard by Sir John Vanbrugh in pencil, ink and wash courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London