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The Impact of Inigo Jones on London Decorative Plasterwork

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Claire Gapper
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Extract

There can be little doubt that to those decorative plasterers who were working in the royal palaces and courtier houses in the early seventeenth century the appointment of Inigo Jones as Surveyor to the Royal Works in 1615 must soon have taken on the appearance of a catastrophe. Just as they had acquired the skills to exploit to the full the potential of their material and were demonstrating their expertise with wonderfully imaginative flair, as can be seen at Audley End, the Surveyor decreed an entirely new mode of interior decoration, affecting both ceiling design and construction.

Type
Section 4: Growth & Change in London
Information
Architectural History , Volume 44 , 2001 , pp. 82 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2001

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References

Notes

1 Examination of Inigo Jones’s annotation in his own copy of Palladio (p. 81, Book IV) shows that the right-hand side of the page has been spattered with ink blots, making it impossible to be certain how Jones spelled ‘stucco’ on this occasion. However, in at least two other entries Jones employed the standard Italian spelling (Book II, pp. 19 and 23), and the variant spelling offered in Harris, J. & Higgott, G., Inigo Jones Complete Architectural Drawings (London, 1989), p. 53 Google Scholar, has not been followed here.

2 Biddle, M., ‘The stuccoes of Nonsuch’, The Burlington Magazine, 126, No. 976 (July 1984), pp. 411-17Google Scholar.

3 In The Elements of Architecture (1624), p. 108, Sir Henry Wotton draws a distinction between English and Italian uses of plaster: ‘the chiefe vse with vs is in the gracefull fretting of roofes: but the Italians applie it, to the manteling of Chimneys, with great Figures.’ Wotton was ambassador to Venice three times between 1604 and 1624 and must have been aware of the numerous exceptions to this generalization.

4 Transcription taken from Harris & Higgott, op. cit., p. 56.

5 See ibid., pp. 100 and 107. The accounts refer to ‘haunst’ ceilings in the presence, withdrawing and privy chambers at Newmarket, which Summerson assumes to mean coved ceilings (History of the King’s Works, iv, p. 178), and no further decoration is described.

6 This drawing is illustrated in colour in Harris & Higgott, op. cit., p. 159.

7 PRO, E 351/3260, St James’s Palace, Task-work entries. For all his plain plastering work on walls and ceilings Martin Eastbourne was paid, £57 17s. 4d.; the task-work of the carvers working on the wooden coffering alone amounted to £141 3s. d. The ceiling is illustrated in Summerson, J., lnigo Jones (Harmondsworth, 1966, reprinted 1983), p. 65 Google Scholar.

8 PRO, E 351/3258, Task-work: John de Critz. The ceiling was repaired and partially repainted, in black and white, in 1639-40 (PRO, АО 1/2429/71, Task-work: George Cary). Hollar provides some record of the appearance of this ceiling in his engraving of Laud’s trial in 1645, but he provides only the sketchiest record of the ‘curious stoneworke in distemper’. A painting of the House of Lords by Peter Tillemans (dated between 1708 and 1714) is illustrated in Harris & Higgott, op. cit., p. 184, which depicts more clearly the painted ceiling. Illustrations of the ceiling drawn in 1742 and 1823 are contained in History of the King’s Works, VI, pls 51 and 52. Both of these show the ceiling to have been canted, rather than semi-circular.

9 PRO, E 351/3262, Denmark House, Task-work: Mathew Goodericke Painter.

10 Unlike Sir Henry Wotton, who uses the term ‘plastique’ to describe both materials, whether the plasterer is English or Italian.

11 The carved and gilded ‘boys’ of the previous banqueting house ceiling at Whitehall had been provided by woodworkers to decorate Richard Dungan’s fretwork in plaster (PRO, E 351 /3243, 1607-09).

12 I am indebted to John Newman for this suggestion and for pointing me to the quotation from Jonson ( C. H., & Herford, P. and Simpson, E. (eds), Ben Jonson, Complete Works, III (Oxford, 1925-52), p. 78 Google Scholar).

13 Esdaile, K. A., ‘William Cure II and his work at Trinity College, Cambridge’, The Burlington Magazine, 80 (1942), pp. 21–23 Google Scholar.

14 From ‘Timber: or Discoveries’ in Herford, & Simpson, , Ben Jonson, Complete Works, VIII (ed. cit.), pp. 607-08Google Scholar, cited by McClung, W. A., The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London, 1977), pp. 67–68 Google Scholar.

15 SirWotton, Henry, The Elements of Architecture (London, 1624), pp. 107-08Google Scholar.

16 de Beer, E. S. (ed.), The Diary of John Evelyn, 11 (Oxford, 1955), pp. 308-09Google Scholar; cited by Stoye, J., English Travellers Abroad (London, revised edn, 1989), p. 139 Google Scholar.

17 PRO, E 351/3272, Task-work: Joseph Kinseman.