Rousham, Oxfordshire

A touch of the baroque, 2

My second photograph from Rousham shows a doorway in the stable block* near the house. The stable block has a central pediment under which is a tall, narrow round-headed arch; blind windows and minimal capitals abound, giving the whole facade a heavy appearance that is relieved to a certain extent by an octagonal turret capped with an ogee cupola. The smaller doorways like the one in my picture have Gibbs surrounds – alternating long and short blocks with the long ones protruding – plus heavy lintels with prominent keystones.

Gibbs surrounds can look very refined on Georgian townhouses in London or Stamford, where they will have smoothly finished blocks. Here the effect is more rustic, because of the roughness of the stone, the simple plank door, and the plain window above. That, perhaps, is not inappropriate for a service building of a great house, and other evidence of good upkeep (such as the pristine paintwork here) makes me feel sure that the estate is keeping an eye on the stonework – this place is as well looked after as the very fancy chickens and cockerels that cluck and crow in the yard. In all it’s not, I’d say, a bad sight to greet the eye as one drives under the adjacent arch to park and emerges, ticket in hand, to enjoy a masterpiece of English landscape gardening.

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* It’s ‘almost certainly by Kent’, Pevsner opines.

Rousham, Oxfordshire

 A touch of the baroque, 1 

After my recent visit to Stowe, I was inspired to revisit another favourite landscape garden, the one at Rousham in Oxfordshire. As at Stowe, the work of the architect and designer William Kent is seen here, but the garden is much smaller than at Stowe and the mark of Kent is writ large on it – in fact it’s almost as it was when Kent left it after working here in the first half of the 18th century, except that the trees are of course older and maturer.* It’s still the miniature Arcadia that it was said to be in Kent’s time. 

I’ve posted about this place before, but I wanted to show a detail or two that struck chords with me after my visit to the much larger garden at Stowe. One of the architects who worked at Stowe was William Kent’s predecessor Sir John Vanbrugh, a baroque enthusiast whose work there included a ‘Pyramid House’ that does not survive. Rousham, however, still has its Pyramid House, actually a gazebo designed to provide somewhere to sit and contemplate views across the landscape towards distant eye-catchers.

The Rousham Pyramid House is small, fronted with a classical arch, and with a pointed roof that gives the building its name. It’s thought to be a small homage by Kent to Vanbrugh and its chunky proportions and pyramidal roof give it a baroque air that the elder architect might well have admired if he’d lived to see it. The roof is not the only Egyptian touch: there are sloping buttresses that seem to recall the battered walls of Egyptian temples and the small carved relief in the pediment also has an Egyptian look.

There is something generous about a landscape in which structures like this, which enable one to sit, rest on one’s walk, and take in the view. In a similar way, the owners of Rousham are to be commended on the generous way in which they open their garden. There’s a fee, of course, but you buy your ticket with a minimum of fuss from a machine near where you park, and you wander around impeded only minimally by barriers or ‘keep out’ signs. While I’m at Stowe, I feel awed by the scale of everything and amazed by the sheer verve and grandeur of the buildings; at Rousham, I feel pleased I’m in an 18th-century version of a rural paradise.

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* Or are more recently planted replacements.

Stowe, Buckinghamshire

 

Buildings in a landscape, 3

Set on a rise, looking across Stowe’s Elysian Fields towards the Temple of British Worthies (see previous post), the Temple of Ancient Virtue is circular, domed, and surrounded by 16 Ionic columns. By making the temple round, William Kent chose one of the purest, most symbolically perfect architectural forms to house a shrine to four exemplary ancient Greeks: the general Epaminondas, the law-maker Lycurgus, the philosopher Socrates, and the epic poet Homer. Viscount Cobham, owner of the house and garden when Kent was doing some of his most notable work there, chose Greeks, not ancient Romans, for his ancient heroes, because he and his Whig friends were suspicious of the ruthless empire-building Romans (who after all conquered Britain), preferring the Greeks, who invented democracy and stood high for them as founders of western civilisation.

Peter Scheemakers was commissioned to create full-length statues of these great Greeks, but the originals were sold off in 1921 when the owners fell on hard times, and today the temple contains plaster replicas. This itself might be seen to symbolise the decline of the ancient virtues in the modern era, but by the 1730s, Cobham had already thought of this. Near to this temple he also commissioned a Temple of Modern Virtue. This was conceived from the beginning as a ruin and has since decayed so badly that there are only a few traces left, walls poking out of the soil here and there and promising more evidence of what once was hidden beneath the accreted earth. How pleasing that so much else in this remarkable garden has fared better, or has been sensitively restored thanks to the various efforts of Stowe School, the Stowe House Preservation Trust, and the National Trust.

Stowe: the remains of the Temple of Modern Virtue

Stowe, Buckinghamshire

Buildings in a landscape, 2

The many buildings and monuments in the landscape garden at Stowe are beautifully positioned, to catch the eye, to form the climaxes of vistas, or simply to enhance the landscape features around them. One of the most effectively placed of all is the Temple of British Worthies, the exedra or semi-circular structure designed by William Kent to display a series of busts of figures who were among the heroes of the garden’s owner, Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham. Sited in the part of the garden known as the Elysian Fields, the building is positioned close to a stretch of water that is actually a narrow lake but is called the River Styx. The water catches its reflection and draws the viewer to cross a nearby bridge and take a closer look.

The inhabitants of this English Elysium are portrayed in sixteen busts (eight by John Michael Rysbrack, eight by Peter Scheemakers) and represent the Whig philosophy that Cobham himself espoused (see previous post). Each bust is accompanied by a text rather like a citation for a Nobel prize that explains the virtues of the particular worthy, in each case bringing out the particular qualities or ideas of the individual that bear most on the values that Cobham espoused – love of liberty, the primacy of human reason, opposition to Roman Catholicism, and so on. Thus John Hampden opposed ‘an arbitrary Court, in Defence of the Liberties of the Country’; Queen Elizabeth I ‘destroy’d the Power that threaten’d to oppress the Liberties of Europe’; William III ‘preserv’d the Liberty and Religion of Great Britain’; King Alfred ‘crush’d Corruption’, and so on. Other worthies, such as Isaac Newton, William Shakespeare, and Alexander Pope and praised in more general terms for their understanding of nature and humankind.

All this is very specific – it doesn’t take one long, equipped with a transcript of the texts (the original inscriptions are rather worn) to work out the ideas behind this curious pantheon in which the Black Prince and Cobham’s contemporary Sir John Barnard are neighbours to Locke and Newton. However there’s a curious and very British twist to all this. Resting in the heart of the temple, beneath the pyramidal roof of the centrepiece, are the remains of one Signor Fido, a much mourned companion of Cobham, who ‘neither learnt not flatter’d any Vice’ and who ‘doubted none of the 39 Articles’. This very British worthy was not a man but a greyhound.

Such changes of perspective might make us smile, but they remind us too that there are more ways than one of appreciating such a monument. This in turn should also encourage us to take a step back from all the seriousness and actually look at the building, and remember what drew us to it in the first place. Set in its landscape, on a bright winter's day, it simply looks really good.

Rousham, Oxfordshire

The foolish and the wise

The use of the word ‘folly’ in my previous post set some readers scratching their heads. What is a folly, exactly? That’s a good question, and one that has had many people stumped. A folly is a building without a practical purpose, some say. But what do we call a practical purpose? A house has a practical purpose, so does a mill, so does a garden shelter that protects people from a sudden shower of rain. But can an ornamental arch have a practical purpose – if it can also be a shelter, for example? And is a purely ornamental role enough for us to pigeonhole it as a folly? If the word ‘folly’ implies foolishness of some sort, we’re on difficult ground straight away: ‘where is the line drawn between foolishness and good sense?’ asks Stuart Barton.* Where indeed?

In what is perhaps the best book on follies, Gwyn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp look at it another way. ‘A folly is a misunderstood building,’ they say.† Why would anyone build a tower on a hill, or construct a concrete zoo in their garden, or spend a lifetime tunnelling under Liverpool? The people who did these things had their reasons, but we may very well not know what those reasons were. We have lost touch with the purpose of the building, which may have been practical, or may have seemed so to its creator. So we simplify matters by calling the results ‘follies’.

The writer and illustrator Barbara Jones, in another very good book on the subject, admits that defining a folly is tricky, and offers instead a list of qualities that such buildings often share.§ Follies are produced by people who have money, security and peace; they are most often Gothic (or Gothick) in style; they have much to do with their creator’s mood and emotions; they are fragile; they are very personal; they rely a lot on their setting; the relate to the Romantic movement in literature and painting; their great age was the 18th and 19th centuries. In bringing together these various qualities, Barbara Jones doesn’t get us any closer to a definition, but she at least evokes the mood of many of these structures – and that is a step towards understanding them, at least.

Some 18th-century gardens, like the one at Rousham in Oxfordshire, are full of what people have called follies. A number of these are actually very useful buildings that have a bit of extra adornment added on to them. In my photograph above, the building in the middle distance falls into this category.¶ It is known as the Temple of the Mill, and it is a mill with a fancy ornamental Gothic bit (quatrefoil window, pinnacles, flying buttresses) built on one end. Nowadays it seems to be used as a house. But it also serves as a picturesque feature in the landscape. It’s both useful and amusing.

In the far distance, on the hillside in front of the trees, is the Rousham Eye-catcher. It simply consists of a wall with three arches in it. It is designed to look like part of a ruined building of some kind, and acts as a focus for the viewer’s gaze when admiring the scenery from Rousham’s enchanting garden. It might also offer a little shelter from a stiff breeze, but its principal function is to enhance the view, to give people something to look at, just like Scheemakers’ striking, indeed somewhat disturbing, sculpture in the foreground, which shows a lion attacking a horse.

That’s purpose enough for me, and enough to make me doubt that the term ‘folly’ is really very helpful at all.**

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* Stuart Barton, Monumental Follies, Lyle Publications, 1972

† Gwyn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp, Follies, Grottoes and Garden Buildings, Aurum Press, 1986, reprinted1999

§ Barbara Jones, Follies and Grottoes, Constable & Co, 1953, reprinted with revisions 1973

¶ It may be clearer if you click on the photograph to enlarge it.

** Thanks however, to those who raised the question and sent me off to do some interesting reading and rereading.

Rousham, Oxfordshire

A house and its garden

I first saw Rousham when I was a teenager, and I can remember being somehow surprised by the house. There seemed to be something hard and uncompromising about it, and I wasn't quite sure why I reacted in this way. Looking again at Rousham's 17th-century south front the other day, I think I was reacting not to the stone walls, the pale colour of which warms up beautifully in the sun, but to the windows. What I didn't know back then was that these were originally glazed with small octagonal panes, which were replaced with much larger sheets of plate glass during a 19th-century restoration project. Rousham is a house dating from the 1630s and, apart from the plate-glass windows, one other alteration is visible in my photograph of the south front. About 100 years after the house was built, William Kent was employed to redesign the gardens. Kent also made some changes to the house, including adding the crenellations that top the walls – if you look closely at the picture you can see a slight change in the colour of the stonework towards the top.

So today the front of the house reveals a 17th-century building that has changed with the times, and which still looks impressive in its green frame of trees. And at Rousham, the trees are very much the point. This place is rightly famous for William Kent's work in its garden, an arcadian landscape of conifers and hardwoods, paths and glades by the River Cherwell, punctuated by temples, a grotto, classical statues, cascades, and streams. I've posted about this remarkable garden before. It is one of the best places in Britain to go to savour the atmosphere and architecture of the Georgian landscape garden. From the Venus Vale to the serpentine rill, from statues of Bacchus to the Dying Gaul, it is an enchanting garden, all set against a background of varied greens, displaying real a lightness of touch. Curving paths and distant vistas lead the visitor through a series of spaces, and often, as one contemplates a temple or a statue, there is the sudden realization that, in a gap between trees, another view is beckoning. In Arcadia indeed.

Rousham: behind the statue a triangle of light leads the eye towards another glade.