Sir John Vanbrugh, Storyteller in Stone, and: The Country Houses of Sir John Vanbrugh (review)

Modern scholarship on Vanbrugh began nearly ninety years ago with the appearance in 1924 of Christian Barman’s short monograph on the architect. The same decade saw the publication of Vanbrugh’s dramatic works and letters edited by Bonamy Dobrée and Geoffrey Webb (1927–1928), and the first major consideration of his buildings accompanied by high quality photographs in the Country Life series English Homes by H. Avray Tipping and Christopher Hussey (1928). Thereafter Vanbrugh has been the focus of a major monograph every ten years or so with distinguished publications by Laurence Whistler (in 1938 and 1954) and Kerry Downes (in 1977 and 1987). In 1964 the Elton Hall album of drawings edited by Howard Colvin was published, and a steady flow of books and articles have dealt with his plays, architecture, contribution to landscape architecture, and his work at Castle Howard; in 1999, most exciting of all, came the discovery that Vanbrugh had spent the years 1683 to 1685 as an East India Company trader at the port of Surat.

What more can we possibly learn about Vanbrugh? By turns a merchant, soldier, playwright, architect, and herald he has always been difficult to pin down. Few architects can claim the same level of attention from architectural as well as literary historians. This binary focus can offer exciting ways into the man and his works, but it is also problematic. Mr. Hart claims that his book is not a biography of Vanbrugh; rather his aim is to “explain why each of Vanbrugh’s buildings looks the way it does.” But the thread of Vanbrugh’s life runs throughout the book, revealing much about Vanbrugh’s own interests in literature, history, and heraldry, as well as determining how his famous country houses took shape.

Above all, he is keen to read each of Vanbrugh’s buildings as a reflection of the patron’s “mythology or ‘story.”’ This approach’s dividends are at the expense of consideration of the formal and typological significances of the buildings. The key document for Mr. Hart is Vanbrugh’s memorandum of 1709 on the old manor at Woodstock in which he set out the reasons for preserving the ancient structure just a stone’s throw from the new Blenheim Palace that he was building for the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. Vanbrugh drew attention to the associative trigger in buildings, which can inspire reflections on who built them and who lived in them. Such narratives may lie in the distant past, as with the exploits of Henry II at Woodstock, or with a new set of associations that may be in their first incarnation; thus in years to come Vanbrugh claimed people would look at Blenheim and “read the Duke of Marlborough in Story.” Other houses reflect “the nuances of site and patron”: Castle Howard is a grand exercise in heraldry, with Lord Carlisle’s house both a home and the seat for a new dynasty; Seaton Delaval is a statement of Admiral Delaval’s patron’s naval prowess. Mr. Hart quotes extensively from Vanbrugh’s letters, which often contain forthright opinions about architecture along with contemporary gossip. Less convincingly, in his frequent excursions into Vanbrugh’s plays, he tries to marry the words of characters with Vanbrugh’s beliefs and development as an architect. But can one really use the dramas to “read” the architecture, and vice versa? Notwithstanding the affinities between rhetorical and architectural structures, recognized long before Vanbrugh’s time, moving between two such registers is a bit like eating one’s cake and having it. The buildings are rich in associative and dramatic content; they are also immensely complex three-dimensional constructions that owe their form to a number of architectural styles, rules, and traditions. It is impossible to tell if Vanbrugh was thinking as a dramatist when he set to work on his country house commissions. But...