Sir John Vanbrugh
baptized Jan. 24, 1664, London, Eng.
died March 26, 1726, London
British architect who brought the English
Baroque style to its culmination in Blenheim
Palace, Oxfordshire. He was also one of the
dramatists of the Restoration comedy of manners.
Vanbrugh’s grandfather was a Flemish
merchant, and his father was a businessman in
Chester, Cheshire, Eng., where the young
Vanbrugh (by tradition) went to the King’s
School. In 1686 he was commissioned in a
regiment of foot soldiers and in 1690, while
visiting Calais, France, was arrested as a
suspected English agent. While imprisoned in the
Bastille, he wrote the first draft of a comedy.
After his release in 1692, he was a soldier
again for six years but appears to have seen no
active service.
Vanbrugh’s first comedy, The Relapse: Or
Virtue in Danger, was written as a sequel to
Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift. It opened in
1696 and was highly successful. His next
important piece, The Provok’d Wife (1697), was
also a triumph. In 1698 the churchman Jeremy
Collier published an attack on the immorality of
the theatre aimed especially at Vanbrugh, whose
plays were more robust than those of such
contemporaries as William Congreve. Vanbrugh and
others responded, but to little effect, and
Vanbrugh kept silent until 1700. Then came a
sequence of free and lively adaptations from the
French, more farce than comedy, including The
Country House (first performed 1703) and The
Confederacy (1705).
In 1702 Vanbrugh entered another field: he
designed Castle Howard in Yorkshire, for Lord
Carlisle. His first design was far simpler than
the richly articulated palace that resulted.
Probably he was untrained, but aptly at hand was
Nicholas Hawksmoor, the accomplished clerk of
the great architect Sir Christopher Wren.
Hawksmoor played the assistant to Vanbrugh but
was in effect the partner. These two men brought
to its peak English Baroque—an architecture
concerned with the rhythmic effect of
diversified masses, using Classical
architectural elements to that end. The
Vanbrugh-Hawksmoor Baroque manner is often
called “heavy,” but the heaviness is in the
service of the dramatic. The style they evolved
was a joint creation: Hawksmoor had already
begun to develop it in the 1690s and acted as
draftsman, administrator, and architectural
detailer, while Vanbrugh is credited with the
buildings’ general plan and heroic scale.
Through Lord Carlisle, who was head of the
Treasury, Vanbrugh became in 1702 comptroller of
the queen’s works. In 1703 he designed the
Queen’s Theatre, or Opera House, in the
Haymarket. Though a magnificent building, it
proved a failure, partly because of its poor
acoustics, and he lost considerable money in the
venture.
In 1705 Vanbrugh was chosen by John
Churchill, 1st duke of Marlborough, to design
the palace at Woodstock, Oxfordshire, which was
the nation’s gift to that hero of many
campaigns. Blenheim Palace, named for
Marlborough’s most famous victory, was the
architectural prize of Queen Anne’s reign. Again
Hawksmoor was indispensable to Vanbrugh:
Blenheim (1705–16) is their joint masterpiece.
Any one of its powerful components may have been
of Hawksmoor’s shaping, but the planning and
broad conception were surely Vanbrugh’s, and the
massive effect was the result of the
hero-worshipping soldier-architect. Though the
duke approved the plans, the duchess did not;
there was trouble over costs and payments, and
Vanbrugh left the project. He continued to
design picturesque country houses in the style
of castles, however, and in such buildings as
Kimbolton Castle in Huntingdon (1707–10) and
Kings Weston in Gloucestershire (now in Bristol;
c. 1710–14), his style became simpler in its use
of decoration and of starkly geometric masses of
masonry. The setting of the houses was
important, and Vanbrugh appears to have been
engaged to some extent in considerations of
landscape. However, he was never credited as a
garden designer.
Under George I, Vanbrugh was knighted in 1714
and made comptroller again in 1715. Influenced
by the art of fortification and Elizabethan
building, Vanbrugh’s great last works were
Eastbury (1718–26) in Dorset, Seaton Delaval
(1720–28) in Northumberland (1720–28), and
Grimsthorpe Castle (1722–26) in Lincolnshire.
Without Hawksmoor, he adopted a simple style in
these designs, using a few elementary forms with
increasing audacity, until in Seaton Delaval he
achieved the height of drama with a
comparatively small house.
