Painswick, Gloucestershire

 

Welcome to the Eagle House

The Eagle House is a building on the edge of Painswick Rococo Garden and is one of those that the garden’s restorers had to reconstruct in part. The building is in two storeys – a lower section with a large Gothic archway and an upper level which is a small hexagonal pavilion, generously supplied with pointed Gothic windows that give views over the gardens. The good views from this cliff-top, eyrie-like structure form one reason for the building’s name; the other reason is that an eagle did live in it for a while, during the 19th century.

A drawing by Thomas Robins from the 1750s gave the restorers the best clues as to how to rebuild the upper storey, which had perished some time after the eagle’s period in residence. The present design, with the hexagon peeping up from above the row of stone battlements that top the arch below, follows Robins’s drawing closely. Archaeology revealed not only the foundations of the upper storey but also some fragments of its structure, including pieces of plaster in the pink colour used for the finish. The Gothic windows, the unusual hexagonal shape, the lightness of the upper section, and the pink colour are all features associated with the Rococo manner that give the garden its current name.

Another interesting aspect of the building is that it is possible to see the upper storey as one enters the garden, without realising that there is also a lower portion, which is revealed only when the visitor descends via a looping path. This element of surprise in the layout of a garden was something else Rococo designers and garden-owners of the 18th and 19th centuries relished. The novelist Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) satirised this preoccupation with surprise in his novel Headlong Hall, when Squire Headlong and two of his guests discuss landscape gardening:

‘Allow me,’ said Mr Gall. ‘I distinguish the picturesque and the beautiful and add to them, in the laying out of grounds, a third and distinct character, which I call unexpectedness.’
‘Pray, sir,’ said Mr Milestone, ‘by what name do you distinguish this character, when a person walks round the grounds for a second time?’
Mr Gall bit his lips, and inwardly vowed to revenge himself on Miletsone, by cutting up his next publication.

Poor Mr Gall, being taken to task for, admittedly, being rather pompous about something light-hearted. For that, to my mind, is the point of gardens like this. They are a world away from the philosophical gardens of the period, in which buildings are freighted with moral or political meanings – Stowe is a wonderful example of this kind of outlook. The Rococo Garden seems to be above all about pleasure and delight, and is no worse for that.

How lucky were the 18th-century owners of the garden to be able to sit in this hexagonal pavilion and look out over their creation. How fortunate are those who, like me, paid up at the entrance and looked out through these windows. Or browsed through the selection of second-hand books now stocked on shelves beneath the windows. Gardens, architecture, literature: how much better can it get?

Painswick, Gloucestershire

Cotswold Rococo

In 1984 Lord and Lady Dickinson, owners of the Painswick House estate, decided to restore the 18th-century garden in a hidden valley behind the house. The area had been neglected for years, the garden abandoned, and part of the site eventually made over to a commercial conifer plantation. Restoration meant clearing decades of rubbish, working out what remained of the original structures, no doubt uprooting any remaining conifers, and repairing (and sometimes reconstructing) garden buildings. This was a huge undertaking and would have been impossible were it not for a painting (and drawings) of the garden in its mid-18th century prime by local artist Thomas Robins.

What has emerged over the decades since 1984 is a garden in the Rococo taste, with walks, pools, vistas, a wooded glade, a kitchen garden, a vineyard, planting with species available in the 18th century, and numerous pavilions and other architectural structures. Some of the buildings were restored to something close to their 18th-century state, some were rebuilt completely following the Robins pictures, for some a compromise was achieved, with certain structures restored to a state similar to the way they were in the 19th century.

One of the most striking buildings is the Red House, which sits at one end of the garden, at a point where formal beds and clipped hedges give way to a riot of natural vegetation and wild flowers. It is not only a belter of an eyectacher, but also exemplifies some of the key features of the Rococo. These are: asymmetry, the interesting use of colour, scrolls and curlicues, rich ornamentation, playfulness, and eclecticism of style (the building owes much to Gothic, but the roofline of the right-hand room takes a concave form derived from Chinese sources). This building of the 1740s adopts a fancy and fanciful kind of Gothic detailing with an ogee (double-curved) gable, deep cusped ogee canopies to windows and doorway, large finials, upside-down trefoil-shaped openings, exaggerated buttress-like stone uprights with concave-slopes to the gables. This is similar to the kind of Gothic used by Horace Walpole at his Twickenham house, Strawberry Hill, at around the same time as the Rococo Garden was begin constructed.

A further Rococo feature of the Red House is the way in which the two wings are set at a slight angle, another piece of asymmetry that seems odd until one realises that the two rooms face two different paths that converge here, one leading along the edge of the garden, the other heading towards its centre. So whichever path you take to approach the Red House, one of its wings acts as a focal point: the building is ingeniously integrated into the plan of the garden.

Painswick Rococo Garden, as it’s now known, is a unique example of a Rococo garden in England. To those interested in architecture, it offers half a dozen small delights like the Red House. For those whose main interest is the horticultural side of things, the place is stunning in the snowdrop season (it has one of the best collections of snowdrops anywhere), delightful in the late spring when we visited (though we were a little late to see the bluebells at their best), and its wooded sections must be beautiful in autumn too. But the point is not to separate buildings and plants, but to appreciate how well they are integrated. The effect is a triumph of 18th-century design and 20th-century restoration.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Loitering in tents

The Cheltenham Festival of Literature has just been on. A large tented village appeared – or rather two tented villages, filling two of the gardens lined with terraces of Regency houses that are among the highlights of Cheltenham’s town centre. As the canvas was alternately heated by the sun and buffeted by the wind, thousands of us sat around while hundreds of authors got on their hind legs to entertain and instruct us on every subject from the Spanish Civil War to the history of the bathroom, from Charles Dickens to Eric Gill. Most of the tents used at the festival are standard-issue white canvas jobs of various sizes but, as I discovered when I went in search of a coffee between events, one of them is nothing less than a Spiegeltent, one of those early-20th-century rococo confections imported from the Low Countries as palaces of entertainment or boudoirs of burlesque.

Spiegeltents originated in Belgium and now a number of these antique structures have been restored and are on hire to those who want a venue a cut above the usual marquee. As I went for my coffee I understood the attraction. Gilded fronds and curlicues run up and down the walls, putti and scrolls hang from columns, surfaces are covered with bits of mirror or painted in a fairground palette. Carefully positioned light fittings accentuate the glitter. The richly coloured canvas roof completes the exotic ensemble. Now, I was here in the morning, so did not experience the joys of Kiki de Montparnasse or the provocatively named Ophelia Bitz, two entertainers I believe were billed to appear later in these seductive surroundings. But the rococo environment still delighted my eye as I sipped my coffee and waited to return to the more elevated matters on offer in the rather puritanical white marquees.

* * *

Apologies for my quick-fire iPhone photo, taken on the hoof and somewhat blurred, but atmospheric nonetheless, I hope.

You can find more about Spiegeltents and see more images of them here.

Ten of the best

I’ve refreshed my ‘Ten of the Best’ feature, with ten new links in the right-hand column to some favourite posts from the English Buildings blog from the past months and years. This time the theme is places of worship, and I’ve gone for a selection of unusual post-medieval churches and chapels from the Tudor period to the Arts and Crafts movement of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. I hope you find something to enjoy here, especially if you’ve come to this blog recently and missed many earlier posts.