Queen's House is a former royal residence built between 1616 and 1635. It was built near the now demolished Greenwich Palace, a few miles downriver from the City of London and is now in the London borough of Greenwich. It presently forms a central focus of what is now the Old Royal Naval College with a grand vista leading to the River Thames. The Queen's House architect, Inigo Jones, was commissioned by Queen Anne of Denmark in 1616 and again to finish the house in 1635 by Queen Henrietta Maria. The Queen's House was commissioned by both Anne and Henrietta as a place to display artworks they had accumulated and commissioned; this includes a ceiling of the Great Hall that features a work by Orazio Gentileschi titled Allegory of Peace and the Arts.
Queen's House is one of the most important buildings in British architectural history, due to it being the first consciously classical building to have been constructed in the country. It was Jones's first major commission after returning from his 1613–1615 grand tour[1] of Roman, Renaissance, and Palladian architecture in Italy. Some earlier English buildings, such as Longleat and Burghley House, had made borrowings from the classical style, but the structure of these buildings was not informed by an understanding of classical precedents. Queen's House would have appeared revolutionary during this period. Although it diverges from the mathematical constraints of Palladio, Jones is often credited with the introduction of Palladianism with the construction of the Queen's House. Jones' unique architecture of the Queen's House also includes features like the Tulip Stairs, an intricate wrought iron staircase that holds itself up, and the Great Hall, a perfect cube.
After its brief use as a home for Royalty, the Queen's House was renovated into the Royal Hospital for Seamen. Today the building is both a Grade I listed building and a scheduled monument; A status that includes the 115-foot-wide (35m) axial vista to the River Thames. The house is now part of the National Maritime Museum and is used to display parts of its substantial collection of maritime paintings and portraits.
Early history
Queen's House is located in Greenwich, London. It was built as an adjunct to the Tudor Palace of Greenwich, previously known before its redevelopment by Henry VII,[2] as the Palace of Placentia; Which was a rambling, red-brick, building in a vernacular style. This would have presented a dramatic contrast of appearance to the newer, white-painted House. The original building was intended as a pavilion with a bridge over the London-Dover road, running between high walls through the park of the palace.[3] Construction of the house began in 1616, but work on the house stopped in April 1618 when Anne became ill and died the following year. Work restarted when the house was given to the queen consort, Henrietta Maria, in 1629 by King Charles I. The house was structurally complete by 1635.[4][5]
However, the house's original use was short, no more than seven years; The English Civil War began in 1642 and swept away the court culture from which it sprang. Although some of the house's interiors survive, including three ceilings and some wall decorations, none of the interior remains in its original state. The process of dismantling the house began as early as 1662, when masons removed a niche and term figures and a chimneypiece.[6]
Artworks that had been commissioned by Charles I for the house, now reside elsewhere; These include a ceiling panel by Orazio Gentileschi, Allegory of Peace and the Arts, which is now installed at Marlborough House, London,[7] a large Finding of Moses, now on loan from a private collection to the National Gallery, London,[8] and a matching Joseph and Potiphar's Wife, still in the Royal Collection.[9]
Plans of the Queen's House. The salon is a 40-foot (12.2 m) cube.
The Queen's House, though it was scarcely being used, provided the distant focal centre for Sir Christopher Wren's Greenwich Hospital, with a logic and grandeur that has seemed inevitable to architectural historians but in fact depended on Mary II's insistence that the vista to the water from the Queen's House not be impaired.[10]
Architecture
Built by Inigo Jones in the seventeenth century, the Queen's House is England's first classical building. Inigo Jones was commissioned by Anne of Denmark in 1616 to build the unique house. At her death in 1619, the house was unfinished. Jones completed the house for Queen Henrietta Maria in 1635.[11] The Queen's House is unique in style and characteristics compared to other English buildings of the time. Jones created a first-floor central bridge that joined the two halves of the building. Inigo Jones was heavily influenced by Italian Renaissance architecture and the Palladian style, created by Andrea Palladio. Jones applied the characteristics of harmony, detail, and proportion to the commission. Rather than being in the traditional, red-brick Tudor style like the then existing palace, the house is white and is known for its elegant proportions. Jones felt compelled to reflect political circumstances of the time through his use of his Orders, reflected in his "Roman Sketchbook" notes. In early designs of the Queen's house, Jones experimented with using the Corinthian Order in public, which at the time was used as court architecture and was viewed as "masculine and unaffected".[12]
Two preliminary drawings have been associated with Anne of Denmark's commission. The first plan includes a rectangular villa with a circular staircase adjacent to a vaulted square hall with six pilasters along the exterior. The second plan is composed of an H-shaped building with a columnar bay and a balcony, which fits two of the elevations of the Queen's House.[12] The completed Queen's House, finished under the request of Queen Henrietta Maria, reflects a public restraint mentioned in Jones' "Roman Sketchbook". Between 1632 and 1635 a central loggia was added to the south front and Columns were limited to this area. The columns were switched from Corinthian to Ionic to reflect the strictures of Serlio, being made for matrons.[12]
The Tulip Stairs and lantern; the first centrally unsupported helical stairs constructed in England. The stairs are supported by a cantilever from the walls with each tread resting on the one below.
Inigo Jones' design is famous for two of its aspects: the Great Hall and the Tulip Staircase. The Great Hall is the centerpiece of the Queen's House and holds a first-floor gallery that overlooks geometric-styled black and white marble flooring. The Great Hall is recognizable and innovative for its architecture; The shape of this hall is perfect cube, measuring 40ft in each direction.[13] Much like Jones' inspiration for the rest of the Queen's House, Jones used the rules of proportion created by Palladio.[13]
The Tulip Staircase was an unusual feature during this period and the first of its kind. Made of ornate wrought iron, it is Britain's first geometric and unsupported staircase. Each tread is cantilevered from the wall and supported by the step below, a design invented by the mason, Nicholas Stone. Each step is interlocked along the bottom of the riser.[18] Jones found inspiration for the staircase, and the glass lantern above, from Palladio's Carita Monastery, where he noted that the staircases with a void in the center "succeed very well because they can have light from above".[13] Jones hired Nicholas Stone to lay the black and white flooring which mirrored the design of the ceiling.
Patron
Anne of Denmark
Anne of Denmark, the wife of James I of England, was an important patron of the arts. Anne commissioned her frequent collaborator, Inigo Jones, to refurbish the Queen's House in Greenwich.[14] Although the Queen's House was not completed before her death in 1619, Anne was able to use the palace at Greenwich as a personal gallery before her death. Both James I and Anne had private galleries and fashioned them in similar ways. Jemma Field describes the spaces as a place of political significance; "All objects and furnishings were appraised as signs of Stuart wealth, merit, and honour".[15][16] Anne of Denmark's project may have been influenced by her knowledge of garden buildings and hunting lodges in Denmark, and her brother Christian IV of Denmark sent two Danish stonemasons to work for her at Greenwich for nine months.[17]
Queen Henrietta Maria
Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I, son of Anne and James, inherited the rights to Greenwich Park in 1629. She commissioned Inigo Jones to return and finish the Queen's House between approximately 1629 and 1638.[14] As an important patron for contemporary artists, Henrietta acquired and commissioned many works of art for the Queen's House. Henrietta used the palace as a "House of Delights" and filled the home with spectacular pieces of art, including the Great Ceiling.[18]
Allegory of Peace and the Arts (Ceiling by Orazio Gentileschi)
Allegory of Peace and the Arts under the English Crown, by Orazio Gentileschi
Orazio Gentileschi, a favorite at the court of Charles I, was commissioned by Queen Henrietta Maria to decorate her "House of Delights". By Gentileschi's death in 1639, the Queen's House contained about half of Gentileschi's English works, including the ceiling of the Great Hall from 1635 to 1638.[19] The central work of this hall features the Allegory of Peace and the Arts, a central tondo surrounded by eight other canvases. The ceiling creates a visual celebration of the reign of King Charles I and his encouragement of peace and the liberal arts.[20] Gentileschi Illuminates the taste and patronage of Henrietta Marie by embodying the power of women throughout the ceiling, all but one of the twenty-six figures are women.[20]
The composition of the ceiling includes a large central tondo with four rectangular canvases on each side of the ceiling and four smaller tondos on the corners. The central tondo, the personification of Peace is depicted floating on a cloud and is surrounded by the figures representing the Liberal Arts, Victory, and Fortune. The surrounding panels depict the nine Muses, and the personifications of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and Music.[20] The image of Peace, in the central tondo, is seated on a cloud and holding an olive branch in one hand and a staff in the other, embodying the message that Peace is a product of good government and rule because of the encouragement of knowledge, learning, creativity while remaining within the realm of Reason.[20] Peace, the only male figure, is positioned in the center of the panel portraying him as the most important and the central quality by allowing the others to be around him. The other twelve females are the personifications of the trivium(Grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and quadrivium(arithmetic, astronomy, music, and geometry) that make up the Liberal Arts.[20]
In 1708, Gentileschi's series of nine paintings were removed, given by Queen Anne to Sarah Churchhill.[21] They were installed in Marlborough House, St James, where they can still be viewed today.[21]
For the first time since 1639, when Gentileschi worked on the ceiling, another artist has recently worked on the ceiling, Turner Prize winner, Richard Wright.[21] In 2016, Wright and his team of five assistants worked together to fill the empty spaces of the ceiling left behind by the Gentileschi panels.[22] The team used a series of scaffolded flat beds to support them while they transferred a sketch to the ceiling, applied size to the outline, and then covered it with gold leaf.[22] Wright took influence from the geometric patterning on the floor, the intricate details of the tulip staircase, and created a ceiling that reflects the Queen's House's geometry, beauty, and intracity.
Although the house survived as an official building, being used for the lying-in-state of Commonwealth Generals-at-Sea Richard Dean (1653) and Robert Blake (1657), the main palace was progressively demolished between 1660 and 1690. Between 1696 and 1751, to the master-plan of Sir Christopher Wren, the palace was replaced by the Royal Hospital for Seamen (now referred to as the Old Royal Naval College).[23] Due to the positioning of Queen's House, and Queen Mary II's request that it retain its view of the river, Wren's Hospital architectural design was composed of two matching pairs of courts that were separated by a grand 'visto' the exact width of the house(115ft).
Wren's first plan, which was blocking the view to the Thames, became known to history as "Christopher Wren's faux pas". The whole ensemble at Greenwich forms an architectural vista that stretches from the Thames to Greenwich Park, and is one of the principal features that in 1997 led UNESCO to inscribe 'Maritime Greenwich' as a World Heritage Site.
19th-century additions
From 1806 the house was used as the center of the Royal Hospital School for the sons of seamen. This change in use necessitated new accommodations; Wings and a flanking pair were added to east and west and connected to the house by colonnades (designed by London Docks architect Daniel Asher Alexander). In 1933, the school moved to Holbrook, Suffolk and it's Greenwich buildings, including the house, were converted and restored; They became the new National Maritime Museum (NMM), created by Act of Parliament in 1934 and opened in 1937.
Following construction of the cut-and-cover tunnel between Greenwich and Maze Hill stations, the grounds immediately to the north of the house were reinstated in the late 1870s. The tunnel comprised the continuation of the London and Greenwich Railway and opened in 1878.
The Queen's House viewed from the foot of Observatory Hill, showing the original house (1635) and the additional wings linked by colonnades (1807). Canary Wharf looms behind.
The Old Royal Naval College, on the south bank of the river Thames in Greenwich, London, viewed from the north. Between the two college buildings is the Queen's House.
Recent years
The Queen's House, Greenwich
In 2012, the grounds to the south of the Queen's House were used to house a stadium for the equestrian events of the Olympic Games.[24] The grounds were used to stage the modern pentathlon, while the Queen's House in particular was used as a VIP center for the games.
Work to prepare the Queen's House involved some internal re-modelling and work on the lead roof to prepare it for security and camera installations.[citation needed] The house underwent a 14-month restoration beginning in 2015, and reopened on 11 October 2016.[25] The house had previously been restored between 1986 and 1999, with contemporary insertions that modernised the building. The modernization created controversial due to the new ceiling in the main hall created by artist Richard Wright, a Turner prize winner. In some quarters, it provoked some debate: an editorial in The Burlington Magazine, November 1995, alluded to "the recent transformation of the Queen's House into a theme-park interior of fake furniture and fireplaces, tatty modern plaster casts and clip-on chandeliers".[26]
Current use
The house is now primarily used to display the museum's substantial collection of marine paintings and portraits of the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, and for other public and private events. It is normally open to the public daily, free of charge, as well as other museum galleries and the seventeenth-century Royal Observatory, Greenwich, which is also part of the National Maritime Museum.
↑ The phrase 'Grand Tour' was unknown until approximately 1670, but in essence, Jones's tour of Germany, Italy and France, incorporated many of the elements of the later tour.
↑ The Palace of Placentia was redeveloped circa 1500
↑ Cook, Olive (1974). The English Country House. London: Thames & Hudson. pp.112–116. ISBN0-500-24090-6.
↑ Detailed accounts of the building project are given in London County Council, Survey of London, Howard Colvin, ed. The History of The King's Works, Volume IV, 1485–1660, Part II 9) and in John Bold, Greenwich: An Architectural History of the Royal Hospital for Seamen and the Queen's House (Yale University Press) 2000.
↑ John Newman, noting this, identified a chimneypiece likely to have come from the Queen's House, at Charlton House, barely three miles away; for its design it drew upon an engraving in Jean Barbet's Livre d'architecture (1633); Newman, "Strayed from the Queen's House?" Architectural History27, Design and Practice in British Architecture: Studies in Architectural History Presented to Howard Colvin (1984:33–35).
↑ R. W. Bissell, Orazio Gentileschi and the Poetic Tradition in Caravaggiesque Painting[1981], cat. no. 70, pp 195–98.
↑ "Greenwich grotesquerie", The Burlington Magazine137 No. 1112 (November 1995:719); the occasion was the Ministry of Defence and the Department of National Heritage's issuance of a glossy brochure through estate agents soliciting long-term leases for Wren's Old Royal Naval Hospital, Greenwich.
Nicholas Hawksmoor was an English architect. He was a leading figure of the English Baroque style of architecture in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Hawksmoor worked alongside the principal architects of the time, Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh, and contributed to the design of some of the most notable buildings of the period, including St Paul's Cathedral, Wren's City of London churches, Greenwich Hospital, Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard. Part of his work has been correctly attributed to him only relatively recently, and his influence has reached several poets and authors of the twentieth century.
Greenwich is a town in south-east London, England, within the ceremonial county of Greater London. It is situated 5.5 miles (8.9 km) east-south-east of Charing Cross.
Inigo Jones was the first significant architect in England in the early modern period, and the first to employ Vitruvian rules of proportion and symmetry in his buildings. As the most notable architect in England, Jones was the first person to introduce the classical architecture of Rome and the Italian Renaissance to Britain. He left his mark on London by his design of single buildings, such as the Queen's House which is the first building in England designed in a pure classical style, and the Banqueting House, Whitehall, as well as the layout for Covent Garden square which became a model for future developments in the West End. He made major contributions to stage design by his work as a theatrical designer for several dozen masques, most by royal command and many in collaboration with Ben Jonson.
Marlborough House, a Grade I listed mansion on The Mall in St James's, City of Westminster, London, is the headquarters of the Commonwealth of Nations and the seat of the Commonwealth Secretariat. It is adjacent to St James's Palace.
The Palace of Whitehall – also spelled White Hall – at Westminster was the main residence of the English monarchs from 1530 until 1698, when most of its structures, with the notable exception of Inigo Jones's Banqueting House of 1622, were destroyed by fire. Henry VIII moved the royal residence to White Hall after the old royal apartments at the nearby Palace of Westminster were themselves destroyed by fire. Although the Whitehall palace has not survived, the area where it was located is still called Whitehall and has remained a centre of the British government.
Greenwich Hospital was a permanent home for retired sailors of the Royal Navy, which operated from 1692 to 1869. Its buildings, in Greenwich, London, were later used by the Royal Naval College, Greenwich and the University of Greenwich, and are now known as the Old Royal Naval College. The word "hospital" was used in its original sense of a place providing hospitality for those in need of it, and did not refer to medical care, although the buildings included an infirmary which, after Greenwich Hospital closed, operated as Dreadnought Seaman's Hospital until 1986.
The Palace of Placentia, also known as Greenwich Palace, was an English royal residence that was initially built by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, in 1443. The palace was a place designed for pleasure, entertainment and an escape from the city. It was located at Greenwich on the south bank of the River Thames, downstream from London. On a hill behind the palace he built Duke Humphrey's Tower, later known as Greenwich Castle; it was subsequently demolished to make way for the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, which survives. The original river-side residence was extensively rebuilt around 1500 by Henry VII. A detached residence, the Queen's House, was built on the estate in the early 1600s and also survives. In 1660, the main palace was demolished by Charles II to make way for a proposed new palace, which was never constructed. Nearly forty years later, the Greenwich Hospital was built on the site.
John Webb was an English architect and scholar, who collaborated on some works with Inigo Jones.
Baroque architecture is a highly decorative and theatrical style which appeared in Italy in the early 17th century and gradually spread across Europe. It was originally introduced by the Catholic Church, particularly by the Jesuits, as a means to combat the Reformation and the Protestant church with a new architecture that inspired surprise and awe. It reached its peak in the High Baroque (1625–1675), when it was used in churches and palaces in Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Bavaria and Austria. In the Late Baroque period (1675–1750), it reached as far as Russia, the Ottoman Empire and the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Latin America. In about 1730, an even more elaborately decorative variant called Rococo appeared and flourished in Central Europe.
St James's Palace is the most senior royal palace in London, the capital of the United Kingdom. The palace gives its name to the Court of St James's, which is the monarch's royal court, and is located in the City of Westminster in London. Although no longer the principal residence of the monarch, it is the ceremonial meeting place of the Accession Council, the office of the Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps, and the London residence of several members of the royal family.
Wilton House is an English country house at Wilton near Salisbury in Wiltshire, which has been the country seat of the Earls of Pembroke for over 400 years. It was built on the site of the medieval Wilton Abbey. Following the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII presented Wilton Abbey and its attached estates to William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke. The house is linked by some with the premiere of Shakespeare's As You Like It, and an important literary saloon culture under its occupation by Mary Sidney, wife of the first Earl.
Somerset House is a large Neoclassical complex situated on the south side of the Strand in central London, overlooking the River Thames, just east of Waterloo Bridge. The Georgian era quadrangle was built on the site of a Tudor palace originally belonging to the Duke of Somerset. The present Somerset House was designed by Sir William Chambers, begun in 1776, and was further extended with Victorian era outer wings to the east and west in 1831 and 1856 respectively. The site of Somerset House stood directly on the River Thames until the Victoria Embankment parkway was built in the late 1860s.
Orazio Lomi Gentileschi (1563–1639) was an Italian painter. Born in Tuscany, he began his career in Rome, painting in a Mannerist style, much of his work consisting of painting the figures within the decorative schemes of other artists.
York House was one of a series of grand mansions that formerly stood on the Strand, the principal route from the City of London to the Palace of Westminster.
The Queen's Chapel is a chapel in central London, England. Designed by Inigo Jones, it was built between 1623 and 1625 as an adjunct to St. James's Palace, initially as a Catholic chapel for the Infanta Maria Anna of Spain, Holy Roman Empress, and then for Queen Henrietta Maria of England. It is one of the facilities of the British monarch's household religious establishment, the Chapel Royal, but should not be confused with the 1540 liturgical building also known as the Chapel Royal, which is within the palace, just across Marlborough Road. Queen's Chapel is a Grade I listed building.
The Banqueting House, on Whitehall in the City of Westminster, central London, is the grandest and best-known survivor of the architectural genre of banqueting houses, constructed for elaborate entertaining. It is the only large surviving component of the Palace of Whitehall, the residence of English monarchs from 1530 to 1698. The building is important in the history of English architecture as the first structure to be completed in the classical style of Palladian architecture which was to transform English architecture.
The Old Royal Naval College are buildings that serve as the architectural centrepiece of Maritime Greenwich, a World Heritage Site in Greenwich, London, described by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) as being of "outstanding universal value" and reckoned to be the "finest and most dramatically sited architectural and landscape ensemble in the British Isles". The buildings were originally constructed to serve as Greenwich Hospital, designed by Christopher Wren, and built between 1696 and 1712. The hospital closed in 1869 and so between 1873 and 1998 the buildings were used as a training establishment for the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. The site is now managed by the Greenwich Foundation for the Old Royal Naval College, established in 1997 to conserve the buildings and grounds and convert them into a cultural destination.
The Old Court House is a Grade II* listed house located off Hampton Court Green in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames; its origins date back to 1536. The architect Sir Christopher Wren, who lived there from 1708 to 1723, was given a 50-year lease on the property by Queen Anne in lieu of overdue payments for his work on St Paul's Cathedral. The lease passed from Wren's son to his grandson. It was purchased from the Crown Estate in 1984.
Joseph and Potiphar's Wife is a painting by Orazio Gentileschi, painted around 1630-1632 during his time in Charles I's court. Along with The Finding of Moses and an Apollo and the Muses(Private Collection), it was created for Queen Henrietta to hang in the Queen's House in Greenwich.
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