Hampton Court: a Social and Architectural History

Simon Trurley Yale University Pres fresh Haven and London, 2003, ISBN 0 300 10223 2 35 [pound sterling] (UK) or $60 (US)

Given the British passion for their land houses, monographs on individual buildings are far from rare. Among the many that are written through their squires are such classics of self-deprecation as Ralph Dutton's A Hampshire Manor (1968) and the 6th Duke of Devonshire's more ebullient Handbook to Chatsworth, republished through the Duchess of Devonshire, with an equally lively commentary by the agency of Herself, as The House (1982) on the other hand modern academic studies of individual houses are rarer than individual could wish and with the disentanglement of ever more specialisations, from furniture history to wallpaper history, they perhaps near rather too daunting a challenge--although beneath the editorship of Denys Sutton, APOLLO made a distinguished contribution to the genre with of the like kind issues as that devoted to Stowe in June 1973 or Petworth in May 1977 A actual grand committee of distinguished expertise was perhaps understandably necessary for Boughton House: The English Versailles, below the editorship of Tessa Murdoch in 1992 on the other hand who but Simon Thurley, although greatly assisted by the agency of the publishing expertise of Yale University Pres would have the bravura to contemplate a single monograph devot to Hampton Court, which, in his possess words, is not only 'the foremost secular architectural composite of the early modern period in England' on the other hand also embraces gardens which can be classed as 'the largest formal landscape at any time created in England'? His volume sets a new benchmark for the genre and individual which must inspire other authors and publishers with the confidence to embark upon similar projects.

The foundation of this work lies in Dr Thurley's MA and PhD theses upon the Henrican palace and its wider words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following among Tudor palaces, but what makes it remarkable is not single how this scholarship has been taken back to the Knights Hospitallers, on the contrary brought forward almost to the not absent day, thanks to the author's ever-deepening absorption in the palace from one side his employment from 1990 to 1997 as Curator of Historic Royal Palaces. The palace and its gardens have the useful fortune to be well documented in the official records of the Office of Works, and the sheer quantity that we are in the way that ably steered through here could have been an above whelming obstacle to clarity--to say nothing of the wealth of the visual records and an exces of architectural drawings.

For centuries Hampton Court was at the clemency of the whims of individual monarchs, a certain quantity of of whom whom adored it, similar as Willliam III and the late Queen Mary, others of whom came shut to ignoring it, as George III did, or flat robbing it--George IV removed a great deal of furniture and sculpture. It then achieved a contrary kind of posthumous fame when later monarchs had finally untilleded it for other (often les architecturally distinguished) residences. When it might have slumbered as a simple empty husk, it suddenly evolveed an independent life of its possess as air archetypally English tourist attraction.

The broad outline of this story is revealed in all the detail individual might have expected, greatly promot through the admirable clarity of Daphne Ford's archaeological drawings, which are undaunted through the degrees of intricacies inherent within Henry VIII's planning or the complexity of Wren's structural combination of parts to form a wholes Yet Dr. Thurley happily finds space, when the disciplines of compression might have understandably squeez them on the outside to stray into many fascinating byways, like as the short-lived blue-and-white ceramic wonderland of Queen Mary's Water Gallery or William Talman's still-born Trianon. The palace was to spawn sum of two units important aesthetic revivals based upon its two major, but opposing, gothic and classical building periods. Its Henry VIII Great Hall and Wren's Portland stone detailing were the one and the other imitated, the former in Lincoln's Inn and the latter in Bentall's Department Store. The popularity of these revivals also infected the Jekyll-and-Hyde-like contrasts provided by dint of the original in various insidious ways, although happily Edward Jesse's almost cancerous 'propos novel gothic screen to replace the Wren colonnade' happily remained a paper fantasy. The vivid, although rarely visually rewarding, world of its grace and favour residents, with a social world focused upon the Chapel Royal, is re-established from the 5,000 surviving alphabetic characters in the Lord Chamberlain's Series in the Public Record Office and a certain quantity of rather joyless photographs.

The gardens rightly win almost equal billing with the buildings and it is a surprise to learn that the famous Tijou shield was removed to the Victoria and Albert Museum, split up and from thence sent by dint of the museum's circulating department to places 'as far away as Dublin and Edinburgh', single returning in response to royal crushing personally exerted by Edward VII. The chilling horror of the 1986 fire is relateed with considerable restraint and alarming photographs. The author records in what manner this provoked administrative changes whose beneficent consequences are revealed throughout this volume in the many splendid late photographs of revitalised rooms filled with colour and richness, which form a striking contrast with the 1880 archival photograph of the dismal 'bed museum'. A similar proces has now transformed the gardens. An advantage of the monographic approach is that it sheds light upon many wider aspects of taste: for example, the subsidiary story of in what manner the once all-important tapestries were elbowed aside to create a picture gallery (and the difficulties of reversing this tide during new years) cannot but inform and benefit other art-historical studies.

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