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Holkham Hall: An Architectural ‘Whodunnit’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2016
Extract
Horace Walpole had to put his oar in. ‘How the designs of that house [Holkham], which I have seen an hundred times in Kent’s original drawings, came to be published under another name, and without the slightest mention of the real architect, is beyond my comprehension’. Indeed, The Plans, Elevations, and Sections, of Holkham in Norfolk, The Seat of the Late Earl of Leicester had been published by Matthew Brettingham senior (1699–1769) ten years earlier (1761) without any mention of William Kent (c. 1685–1748). But Walpole’s well-publicised remark completely turned the scales, establishing Kent as the creator and architect of this intriguing work (built 1734-64), which is seen by many as the beau idéal of Anglo-Palladian architecture (Fig. 1).
An alternative view of Holkham’s genesis has seen the patron, Thomas Coke, later Earl of Leicester, as the driving force in the creation of the house and its setting — a view confirmed by a great number of drawings and letters discovered since the 1980s. But a ‘reassessment’, recently published in this journal, has now cast doubt on such a conclusion and has attempted to re-establish Kent as Holkham’s architect.
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- Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. 2015
References
Notes
1 Walpole, Horace, Anecdotes of Painting in England, 4 vols (Twickenham, 1762–71), IV, p. 115.Google Scholar
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47 Salmon, , ‘“Our Great Master Kent”’, p. 91 Google Scholar, n. 42: ‘It should be noted that the British Library set “idealizes” the Holkham plan, in that the piano nobile […] does not incorporate the changes to the dining room that Leicester and Brettingham made in 1753, nor those they made to the Marble Hall in 1757 — where Kent’s original scheme which had remained current since the mid–1730S […] is preferred.’
48 As specified in the Catalogue of Maps, Prints, Drawings Attached to the Library of His Late Majesty King George the Third, 2 vols (London 1829), I, p. 323.Google Scholar
49 Cf. Colvin et al., Lowther. I am grateful to Jim Lowther for permission to study these drawings.
50 Carlisle, Cumbria Archives, DLONS, L II/4/13; Colvin, et al, Lowther, p. 29 Google Scholar, cat. 46.
51 Ibid., L II/4/14; Colvin, et al., Lowther, p.29 Google Scholar, cat.47.
52 The mezzanine storey (ibid., L II/4/15; Colvin, et al., Lowther, p. 29 Google Scholar, cat. 48) is practically identical to the one in the Holkham I drawings, although incorporating a few improvements particularly in respect to access.
53 For visualisation of these various stages, see Holkham, eds Schmidt et al., pp. 116–17.
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57 Desgodetz, Antoine, Les Edifices antiques de Rome dessinés et mesurés très exactement (Paris, 1682)Google Scholar was one of the main sources used in the decoration of the rooms.
58 The bricklayer, John Elliott received payment for ‘digging out foundation and carrying up a wall for the Dining Room Beaufet’; see Holkham Hall, Archive, Holkham Country Accounts, 6.
59 Evidence illustrating a similarly empirical approach can be seen in the void over the Sculpture Gallery, where the height of the entablature and the sizes of various features of the room are marked on the naked brick walls in charcoal.
60 See above n. 8.
61 The figure of a draped male was joined with the head of a bearded god by an Italian ‘restorer’ and offered as Jupiter; the sculpture as a whole measures 2.23 m in height. For the figure and the head, see Angelicoussis, Elizabeth, The Holkham Collection of Classical Sculptures (Mainz, 2001), pp. 115–16Google Scholar, cat. 21 and pp. 140–41, cat. 42.
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63 The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Roscoe, William, 9 vols (London, 1824), v, p. 403.Google Scholar
64 Mowl, , William Kent, p. 217 Google Scholar; Mowl also pronounced (p. 222) that the building was ‘impossible not to admire but difficult to like’.
65 Ibid., p. xx.