Banqueting House
Banqueting House | |
---|---|
Type | Banqueting house |
Location | Whitehall, Westminster |
Coordinates | 51°30′16″N 0°07′32″W / 51.5044°N 0.1256°W |
Built | 1622 |
Architect | Inigo Jones |
Architectural style(s) | Palladian |
Governing body | Historic Royal Palaces |
Listed Building – Grade I | |
Official name | Banqueting House |
Designated | 1 December 1987 |
Reference no. | 1357353 |
The Banqueting House, on
Begun in 1619 and designed by Inigo Jones in a style influenced by Andrea Palladio,[2] the Banqueting House was completed in 1622 at a cost of £15,618, 27 years before King Charles I of England was beheaded on a scaffold in front of it in January 1649. The building was controversially re-faced in Portland stone in the 19th century, though the details of the original façade were faithfully preserved.[3] Today, the Banqueting House is a national monument, open to the public and preserved as a Grade I listed building.[4] It is cared for by an independent charity, Historic Royal Palaces, which receives no funding from the British Government or the Crown.[5]
History
The
During Henry's reign, the palace had no designated banqueting house, the king preferring to banquet in a temporary structure purpose-built in the gardens. The Keeper of the Banqueting House was a position enhanced by
The Elizabethan banqueting house
A more permanent Banqueting house was built at Whitehall in 1581, costing £1,744-19 shillings.[9] Raphael Holinshed described the building, with its timbered structure covered with canvas painted in imitation of stone, and a painted ceiling including the queen's devices and heraldry. The new building was intended as the venue for entertaining Francis, Duke of Anjou and Alençon. In subsequent years, the decorative scheme was enhanced by the painters George Gower and Lewis Lizard.[10]
The ceiling of this Elizabethan banqueting house, inherited by King James I at the Union of the Crowns, was painted with clouds by Leonard Fryer in 1604.[11] Othello was performed in the Banqueting House on 1 November 1605 by the King's Players.[12]
The first Jacobean banqueting house at Whitehall
King James began building a new banqueting house in 1607, which was destined to only have a short life. The building was probably designed by Robert Stickells.[13] A "geometrical model" for the roof was made by a Scottish designer, James Acheson.[14] William Portington was the carpenter, and Peter Street made a special augur to hollow out the columns. The interior was painted and gilded by John de Critz.[15] King James visited the construction site in September 1607 and was displeased with the placing of pillars which obscured the windows.[16] A Venetian diplomat, Orazio Busino, praised the proportions of the space, and the decoration and carving of the wooden columns (in two Classical orders) which supported viewing galleries on three sides.[17]
The new banqueting house was the venue for The Masque of Beauty in January 1608,[18] the Venetian ambassador, Zorzi Giustinian, wrote that "the apparatus and the cunning of the stage machinery was a miracle".[19] Stage mechanisms for the The Masque of Queens in February 1609 included "sundry seats above for the Queen and ladies to sit on and be turned round about". Alterations for staging masques were made by Andrew Kerwyn, paymaster of the royal works.[20] Prince Henry's Barriers was performed in January 1610.[21]
Robert Smythson made a drawing of the ground plan.[22][23] An adjacent chamber was built to host events for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V of the Palatinate in 1613.[24] Pocahontas and Tomocomo came to see the masque The Vision of Delight on 6 January 1617.[25] The banqueting house was destroyed by fire in January 1619,[26] when workmen, clearing up after New Year's festivities, decided to incinerate the rubbish or oil rags inside the building.[27][6]
Architecture
The replacement Banqueting House was commissioned from the fashionable architect Inigo Jones. Jones had spent time in Italy studying the architecture evolving from the Renaissance and that of Andrea Palladio, and returned to England with what were, at the time, revolutionary ideas: to replace the eclectic style of the Jacobean English Renaissance with a more pure, classical design, which made no attempt to harmonise with the Tudor palace of which it was to be part.
The design of the Banqueting House is classical in concept. It introduced a refined Italianate
The building is on three floors: The ground floor, a warren of cellars and store rooms, is low; its small windows indicating by their size the lowly status and usage of the floor, above which is the double-height banqueting hall, which falsely appears from the outside as a first-floor
Much of the work on the Banqueting House was overseen by
In 1638, Jones drew the designs for a new and massive palace at Whitehall in which his banqueting house was to be incorporated as one wing enclosing a series of seven courtyards, visible on the monumental main façade as only a small flanking wing. These revealed the ideas behind Jones' concept of Palladianism. However, King Charles I, who commissioned the plans, never amassed the resources to execute them;[31] his lack of funds and the tensions that eventually led to the Civil War intervened and the plans were permanently shelved. The Second English Civil War resulted in Charles I's own execution outside Banqueting House following the defeat of Royalist forces.[32]
In January 1698, the Tudor Palace was razed by fire that raged for 17 hours. All that remained was the Banqueting House, Whitehall Gate, and
Interior
The term Banqueting House was something of a misnomer. The hall within the house was, in fact, used not only for banqueting, but also royal receptions, ceremonies, and the performance of
Inside the building is a single two-storey, double-cube room. The double-cube, in which the length of the room is twice its equal width and height,[36] is another Palladianism, where all proportions are mathematically related. At the upper level, the room is surrounded by what is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a minstrels' gallery. While musicians may have played from this vantage point, its true purpose was to admit an audience; at the time of the Banqueting House's construction, kings still lived in "splendour and state", or publicly. The less exalted and the general public would be permitted to crowd the gallery in order to watch the king dine. The lower status of those in the gallery was emphasised by the lack of an internal staircase, the gallery only being accessible by an external staircase. The building was, however, later extended to accommodate an internal staircase.
James I, for whom the Banqueting House was created, died in 1625 and was succeeded by his son, Charles I. The accession of Charles I heralded a new era in the cultural history of England. The new king was a great patron of the arts. He added to the Royal Collection and encouraged the great painters of Europe to come to England. In 1623 he visited Spain where he was impressed by Titian, Rubens, and Velázquez.[37] It became his ambition to find a comparable painter for his own court. Rubens while in England as a diplomat was asked to design and paint the Banqueting House ceiling which was sketched in London but completed at his studio in Antwerp due to the scale of the job. It was probably commissioned in 1629–30, and finally installed in 1636, the ceiling having been completely remodelled to frame the various sections. The subject, commissioned by the king, was the glorification of his father, titled The Apotheosis of James I, and was an allegory of his own birth.[38] To the king's chagrin, Rubens took his knighthood and decamped back to Antwerp, leaving Anthony van Dyck, lured not only with a knighthood but also a pension and a house, to remain in England as the court painter.[38] The panels for the ceiling were all painted in Rubens' atelier in Antwerp and sent to London by ship. Inigo Jones later designed another double-cube room at Wilton House, to display Van Dyck's portraits of the aristocratic Pembroke family.
Although Charles I lavished attention and effort on the Banqueting House, it was the scene of his death. On the afternoon of 30 January 1649, he stepped out of a first-floor window of Banqueting House onto the scaffold that had been erected outside for the purpose of his own execution.[39] The actual window no longer exists, as it was not in the main hall but just outside it in an adjacent part of the building which has now gone. Seen from the outside, it would have been the next window along at the north end, roughly above the current visitors' entrance.[40]
Legacy
Unlike the architecture of the more southern European countries, English architecture went through no period of evolution to classicism. Through Jones it arrived suddenly and fully formed. Before this, English architecture had still been based on the styles of the Middle Ages, if for the previous century influenced by Netherlandish and French renaissance classicism, which had resulted in an English renaissance style during the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.[41] However, as can be seen at prodigy houses like Hatfield House, one of England's first purpose-built "Renaissance" houses, even during this era, English domestic architecture never quite lost its "castle air".
Although English architecture had been influenced, mostly indirectly, by Italian classicism for a century or so, resulting in the use of classical forms and motifs in late Tudor, Elizabethan and Jacobean buildings, on his return from Italy Jones brought with him far more thorough and up to date understanding of the underlying principles of late Renaissance classicism. With his work at the Queen's House in Greenwich, and the Banqueting House, Jones transformed English architecture.
The overthrow of the monarch and establishment of the puritanical
Today, the banqueting hall is open for tours and use as a venue space.
References
- ^ While the Queen's House at Greenwich is often referred to as England's first consciously classical building, its completion was delayed until 1635, some thirteen years after the completion of the Banqueting House. Halliday, p 149
- ^ Coppelstone, p 835
- ^ William, p 47
- ^ Historic England. "Banqueting House (1357353)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 3 November 2019.
- ^ "Who We Are". Historic Royal Palaces. Archived from the original on 1 September 2011. Retrieved 31 January 2012.
- ^ a b Williams, p 45
- ^ H.E. Malden, ed. (1911). "Parishes: Cuddington". A History of the County of Surrey: Volume 3. Institute of Historical Research. Retrieved 25 October 2013.
- ^ Wikimedia photograph of Banqueting House Junction in the forest of Nonsuch Park. Retrieved 2013-10-25
- ^ Jane Ashelford, Dress in the Age of Elizabeth I (Batsford, 1988), p. 126.
- ^ John H. Astington, English Court Theatre, 1558-1642 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 133-4.
- ^ Edward Town, 'A Biographical Dictionary of London Painters, 1547-1625', Walpole Society Volume, 76 (2014), p. 83.
- ^ Peter Cunningham, Extracts from the Accounts of Revels at Court (London, 1842), 203.
- ^ Simon Thurley, Palaces of the Revolution, Life, Death & Art at the Stuart Court (William Collins, 2021), pp. 91-3.
- ^ Frederick Devon, Issues of the Exchequer (London, 1836), p. 302.
- ^ John Orrell, 'Architecture of the Fortune Playhouse', Shakespeare Survey, 47 (Cambridge, 1992), 17.
- ^ Maurice Lee, Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603-1624 (Rutgers UP, 1972), p. 99.
- ^ Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 257.
- ^ Simon Thurley, Palaces of the Revolution, Life, Death & Art at the Stuart Court (William Collins, 2021), p. 92.
- ^ Herford & Simpson, Ben Jonson, 10 (Oxford, 1965), p. 457.
- ^ Oliver Jones, 'Evidence for Indoor Theatre', Andrew Gurr & Farah Karim-Cooper, Moving Shakespeare Indoors: Performance and Repertoire in the Jacobean Playhouse (Cambridge, 2014), 75–76: Herford & Simpson, Ben Jonson, 10 (Oxford, 1965), pp. 494, 548.
- ^ Janette Dillon, The Language of Space in Court Performance, 1400-1625 (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 145-6.
- ^ Simon Thurley, Whitehall Palace: An Architectural History (London: HRP, 1999), 79–80.
- ^ RIBA Banqueting House, Robert Smythson
- ^ Thomas Birch & Folkestone Williams, Court and Times of James the First, vol. 1 (London, 1848), p. 229.
- ^ Dagmar Wernitznig, Europe's Indians, Indians in Europe: European Perceptions and Appropriations (University Press of America, 2007), 16.
- ^ HMC 12th report part I, Earl Cowper, Coke (London, 1888), p. 103.
- ^ John Sherren Brewer, Court of King James, 2 (London, 1839), 187–188.
- ^ Fletcher, p 715
- ^ a b Fletcher, p 716
- ^ Halliday, p 154
- ^ The completed palace would have been 1,280 by 950 feet (390 by 290 m) and the central courtyard would have been twice the size of the courtyard of the Louvre. Fletcher, p 711 & 715
- ^ Edwards 1999, p. 176
- ^ a b Williams, p 50
- ^ Great Buildings
- ^ Halliday, p 156
- ^ "The Banqueting House". Survey of London: volume 13: St Margaret, Westminster, part II: Whitehall I. 1930. Retrieved 17 July 2009.
beinge in Lengthe 110 foote, and in breadth 55 foote, the under story being arched 16 foote in haight, the upper story 55 foote highe
- ^ Halliday
- ^ a b Halliday, p 152
- ^ Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War: 1642–1649 (Volume 4), Longmans, 1893, at page 321
- ^ Plaque above doorway on Banqueting House
- ^ Halliday, p 148
- ^ Coppelstone, p 249
- ^ Dunning, p 21
- ^ "History of the Building". Royal United Services Institute. Archived from the original on 18 January 2012. Retrieved 2012-01-31.
Bibliography
- Copplestone, Trewin (1963). World Architecture. London: Hamlyn.
- Dunning, Robert (1991). Somerset Country Houses. Wimborne, Dorset: The Dovecote Press.
- The ISBN 0-86056-106-2.
- Edwards, Graham (1999), The Last Days of Charles I, Sutton: Sutton Publishing Ltd, ISBN 978-0-7509-2679-9
- Fletcher, B (1921). A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method. London: B.T. Batsford, Ltd.
- Halliday, F. E. (1967). Cultural History of England. London: Thames & Hudson.
- Hart, V. (2002). '"Immaginacy set free": Aristotelian Ethics and Inigo Jones's Banqueting House at Whitehall', RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, vol.39, pp. 151–67.
- Hart, V. (2011). Inigo Jones: The Architect of Kings. Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300141498
- Williams, Neville (1971). Royal Homes. Lutterworth Press. ISBN 0-7188-0803-7