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<\/p>\nIt\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
This affinity comes through strongly in the current exhibition at Sir John Soane\u2019s Museum, marking 300 years since Vanbrugh\u2019s death and co-curated by Charles Saumarez Smith and architect Roz Barr.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Soane cited Vanbrugh as one of his greatest influences, referring to him as the \u2018Shakespeare of architecture\u2019 and referencing his buildings in the lectures he gave at the Royal Academy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Of particular delight in this exhibition are the three horizontal watercolours depicting the fa\u00e7ade of Vanbrugh\u2019s Blenheim Palace seen in three different lights \u2013 drawn up by Soane\u2019s office for use as illustrations in these lectures. One shows the fa\u00e7ade in full detail, one stripped of its decoration and one silhouetted \u2018at dusk\u2019. Together, they elucidate the play of shape, form and shadow in the architecture \u2013 underlining the theatricality of Vanbrugh\u2019s work, which was the closest brush English architecture had with full Baroque. It\u2019s reflected too in the exhibition\u2019s subtitle: \u2018The Drama of Architecture\u2019. \u00a0<\/p>\n
This theatrical bent in Vanbrugh\u2019s work is perhaps inevitably always connected to his having first been a celebrated dramatist before becoming an architect, writing risqu\u00e9 plays such as The Provoked Wife (1697). Indeed, his pivot to architecture came through the theatre, with a theatrical business venture at the Queen\u2019s Theatre Haymarket seeing him end up designing the venue too, despite having no architectural training.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Elevational drawing of Blenheim Palace courtesy of Soane office, Royal Academy Lecture<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s precisely this sense of Vanbrugh as a gentleman amateur, dilettante even, that means often today it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Certainly, aside from the Queen\u2019s Theatre, Vanbrugh, unlike Hawksmoor, designed no churches nor other public buildings, just huge luxury private country houses, for aristocratic clients in the main.<\/p>\n
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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.<\/p>\n
However, there\u2019s one sketch in the front gallery in Vanbrugh\u2019s own hand \u2013 a bird\u2019s-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 \u2013 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 \u2018overwhelming\u2019: \u2018They demonstrate the rigour and thought process of how he worked.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n
These drawings are the surprise of this exhibition, demonstrating Vanbrugh\u2019s restless inventiveness in sketching out ideas for houses big and small \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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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\u2019s Foyle Space downstairs, there\u2019s a new short film of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown by filmmaker Jim Venturi, their son, and writer Anita Naughton.<\/p>\n
It shows them visiting Blenheim Palace for the first time in years, providing a fascinating snapshot not only of their reaction to Vanbrugh\u2019s work but of their relationship with each other. Their appreciation and commentary on the wit of Vanbrugh\u2019s architecture gives an insight into their own work too: Blenheim\u2019s broken upper pediment directly inspired that of Venturi\u2019s famous Mother\u2019s House, completed in 1964.<\/p>\n
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This small exhibition gives great insight into Vanbrugh\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n