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Vanbrugh 300, presented by the Georgian Group and supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, marks the life and work of Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726), a man who managed to pack multiple careers into his 62 years. By the time he came to design his first grand house, he had already been a wine merchant, an East India Company agent (1681-1685), and a soldier (1685-1688). He was arrested in France as a spy, spending four-and-a-half years in the Bastille until he was released in 1692 during an exchange of political prisoners – and, his spirits evidently undimmed by imprisonment, he then ventured into the creative arts. While visiting the theatre in 1696 to see Love’s Last Shift by Colley Cibber, he thought, ‘I can do better than that’, and his play The Relapse was performed in Drury Lane later that year to great acclaim, followed by The Provoked Wife. That these satirical plays about marital disharmony were attacked by the Church as lewd, immoral, and profane only made them more popular.
Vanbrugh’s architecture, too, is blatantly theatrical. ‘Bold’, ‘flamboyant’, and ‘highly original’ are the epithets used by architectural historians to describe his masterworks: Castle Howard (North Yorkshire), Blenheim Palace (Oxfordshire), Seaton Delaval Hall (Northumberland), and Stowe House (Buckinghamshire). One could add ‘expensive’: the budget for Blenheim was £40,000 but the final bill was £300,000, about £45 million today. Vanbrugh was not one to ‘starve the design’, as a client put it. Yet he also stands accused of scorning homely comforts, confiding to a friend that ‘one may find a great deal of pleasure in building a palace for another when one should find very little in living in it oneself’.
The Georgian Group has pulled out the stops for this immensely talented descendant of Flemish merchants (his Protestant paternal grandfather fled religious persecution in Antwerp and came to London in 1616), with talks, special exhibitions, and events taking place at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, as well as at the six houses he designed (see the free, fortnightly Vanbrugh 300 newsletter for more details). Extracts from Vanbrugh’s plays will be performed in the Great Hall of his last house, Grimsthorpe Castle (Lincolnshire). With the aim of inspiring a new generation of architects and historians, the society has arranged workshops for families throughout the summer, as well as an ambitious schools programme.
Further information: www.vanbrugh300.co.uk
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