William Aslet looks at Moor Park, Hertfordshire, where the ambitious work of the painter and architect Sir James Thornhill recast a major 17th-century house as a Baroque masterpiece. Photographs by Paul Highnam for Country Life.
‘Did ever golf club have a 19th hole so sumptuous as this?’ asked John Betjeman of Moor Park, now the clubhouse of Moor Park Golf Club in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, in Metroland, his 1973 television essay on London’s commuter belt. As he hinted, there is something incongruous about Moor Park as we find it today. With its own eponymous stop on the Metropolitan Line, which opened in 1910, it is now in classic Metroland territory. Yet the majesty of the house itself speaks to a time when Hertfordshire was a place of retreat for some of Britain’s most powerful families.
Built 1,000 yards away from the location of the vanished Manor of the More, which historian A. F. Pollard termed Cardinal Wolsey’s ‘favourite country house’, Moor Park stands on the site of a lodge built by the Earl of Bedford in 1616. Rather than for its architecture, in the early 17th century it was famed for its magnificent formal gardens, laid out by the Countess of Bedford and developed by later owner William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke. Diplomat Sir William Temple, who stayed at Moor Park for his honeymoon in 1655, thought it ‘the perfectest figure of a garden I ever saw’ and named his own house in Surrey after it.
Fig 2: The Cube Room designed by Thornhill, with its splendid stuccowork. ©Paul Highnam for Country Life
Temple’s remarks were written retrospectively in 1685. By then, the house had taken on a far more impressive aspect. In 1670, the site had been given by Charles II to his illegitimate son, James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, who had just reached his majority. Nine years later, Monmouth ordered the construction there of a splendid triple-pile country house. Driven, as John Cornforth suggested (Country Life, March 10, 1988), by a clear desire to emulate his father, Monmouth engaged much of the team that was working for Comptroller of the King’s Works, Hugh May, at nearby Windsor Castle. In an article in The Antiquaries Journal (2016), Paul Drury, Sally Jeffery and David Wrightson showed that this almost certainly included May himself, who had recently been engaged in building new ranges at Cassiobury Park, also Hertfordshire, for Arthur Capell, 1st Earl of Essex. The interiors of Monmouth’s house must have been truly splendid, as can be seen in Antonio Verrio’s surviving Apollo being Pulled in his Chariot, which will be illustrated next week.
Monmouth had little time to enjoy all this grandeur, however. In 1685, a year after the house’s completion, he was executed, following his failed rebellion against his uncle James II. The house was re-granted to his widow, Anne, Duchess of Monmouth, but she appears to have had little love for it. She eventually moved the majority of its contents to a residence in which she took a far greater interest, Dalkeith Palace, Midlothian, recently remodelled for her by James Smith.
In August 1720, the Duchess sold Moor Park to Benjamin Hoskyns Styles. It is to the period of his ownership that the present-day appearance can largely be attributed. When he bought the house, Styles had recently made a fortune, having sold all his stock in the South Sea Company shortly before it spectacularly collapsed in value from September 1720 (it can hardly have done him much harm that his brother-in-law was the company’s sub-governor). With a vast budget and a keen desire to make an impression, he set about having May’s unshowy brick exterior transformed into a palace of gleaming stone.
Fig 3: The Cube Room ceiling. ©Paul Highnam for Country Life
Sir James Thornhill was the architect Styles hired for the task. The choice might at first seem a little surprising. Thornhill was best known as a painter, having executed the two most important decorative commissions of the age: the Painted Hall at Greenwich and the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. In recognition of these works, he had recently been appointed sergeant-painter to the King. As an architect, however, Thornhill was relatively untried and an unknown quantity. That is not to say that his architectural aspirations were not serious. Indeed, they were too serious for some of his contemporaries. Sir John Vanbrugh thought him ‘volatile’ for attempting to procure himself the comptrollership of the Office of Works in 1719. The diarist and art world observer George Vertue believed it caused him to lose out in 1720 on the commission to decorate Kensington Palace, to the benefit of William Kent, a painter who himself would later become an architect.
Rather than rebuild the house, Thornhill encased what was already there in Portland stone, with the result that much 17th-century fabric still remains at the core. This was by no means a money-saving device. The process of adjusting new work to earlier fabric often brought with it additional costs, as Cornforth observed, a point that is borne out by the impressive depth of the casing, particularly on the east front of the house.
When Thornhill cased the house, he also reconceived it. On the western side, he turned what had been its rear into its principal elevation, giving it emphasis by way of a magnificent tetrastyle portico of the Corinthian order, the superbly carved capitals of which attest to the capaciousness of Styles’s budget. This is repeated on the eastern side of the house, but as an order of applied pilasters. The two elevations are knitted together by way of a continuous Corinthian entablature that runs from the front to the back and begins roughly at the bottom of the roof level of the original house.
Fig 4: The naturalism of Bagutti and the Artaris’ modelling of the stucco figures is masterly. ©Paul Highnam for Country Life
Although we do not have Thornhill’s original drawings for the remodelling, evidence survives to show how he developed his ideas. Drawings in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, attributed to Charles Bridgeman — whom Styles hired to redesign the gardens — indicate that Thornhill considered twinning the western portico with another on the eastern side and even, at one point, contemplated adding a portico to every face of the house. A visitor who saw the works in progress in 1724 noted that the building was then seven bays wide, ‘but will have eleven’. This suggests Thornhill had not initially planned to extend the earlier house by adding two bays at either side, accounting for the curious rhythm of the pilasters, which appear at every other bay (Fig 1).
The ‘dotted rhythm’ and vertiginous proportions make the design seem Baroque in spirit, an aesthetic then passing out of fashion. In reality, however, Thornhill was attempting to synthesise Baroque stridency with Palladian refinement. This has been masked somewhat by the near-total disappearance of the Ionic fronted quadrant wings that he originally had built on the eastern front of the house. Only part of the north wing now survives, the rest having been pulled down in 1785 by a later owner for the value of the materials. Had they survived, these wings, which take their inspiration from buildings by Palladio such as the Villa Badoer in Italy, would have made the building’s height appear less exaggerated, as can be seen in Woolfe and Gandon’s fifth volume of Vitruvius Britannicus (1771).
Internally, Thornhill remodelled the plan to create a series of rooms that could match the grandeur of the new elevations. By far the most spectacular of these is the great hall he created behind the portico at the western side, the Cube Room (Fig 2). To assert its superiority over the Saloon that had been retained from the Restoration house, with its splendid paintings by Verrio, Thornhill had to create a room that would outcompete it both in terms of scale and opulence. He succeeded, by removing two staircases from the old house to create a double-height room of such magnificence that it can lay claim to being one of the finest English rooms of the period.
As with the exterior, the room is born of a fusion of styles. Older trends are put in a state of creative tension with the latest fashions. The architectural keynote of the design is suitably Palladian; the Cube Room’s perfect proportions derive from the celebrated Cube Room by Inigo Jones at the Queen’s House in Greenwich, as does its gallery, supported on elegant consoles. This room, which Thornhill would have known well through his work at Greenwich, had become one of the most widely admired in the country, thanks to the revival of interest in Jones’s work that formed such an important part of 18th-century English Palladianism.
Fig 5: The south wall of the Cube Room. A gallery divides the interior into equal sections above and below. Surmounting each door are pairs of fully modelled plaster figures. ©Paul Highnam for Country Life
Yet, the profusion of ornament on the walls and ceilings is of a different flavour entirely. It is opulent where Jones’s interior is calculatedly restrained. At Moor Park, painting, sculpture and stucco jostle with each other for prominence against a muted blue background. As ever, it is hard to lose sight of the depth of Styles’s pockets. Both on the upper and the lower levels, the doorcases are made out of veined marble. In a particularly lavish touch, this marble is used to create the dado that runs around the bottom third of the ground floor, where the doorcases are framed with finely carved Corinthian capitals. The pediments they support carry reclining stucco figures of a breathtaking naturalism that must surely identify them as being the work of the Ticinese stuccatori Giuseppe and Adalbertus Artari and Giovanni Bagutti (Fig 5). They had recently started working in England, largely promoted by Thornhill’s friend and sometime collaborator James Gibbs. Looking at the seemingly effortless skill with which they approached their work on this interior, it is clear why their expertise was so keenly sought after.
Elsewhere in the interior, their work both complements and competes with Thornhill’s trompe l’oeil painting. This can most clearly be seen in the illusionistic painted dome on the Cube Room’s ceiling (Fig 3). Thornhill’s inspiration here must surely have been the fictive dome painted by Andrea Pozzo at the Church of Sant’Ignazio in Rome, as published in his popular book on perspective (translated into English by John James in 1707), although it must be said that Thornhill’s illusionism doesn’t dazzle in quite the same way as Pozzo’s. At its corners, fictive balconies have been painted to give the impression of being open to the sky. They are surrounded by cartouches with putti perched atop, executed in stucco manipulated with such skill that it could be made of royal icing. At the main points of the border, recumbent semi-nude figures in stucco sit back to back, with great heaps of arms and armour piled behind them (Fig 4). Further trophies of arms rise in tottering piles at the corners of the room, raised on chubby putti, straining arms upheld.
In this, Thornhill’s work is extremely daring. He seems to have aimed to reconcile the painted illusionism with which he had made his name with the figurative stuccowork of the Artari and Bagutti. He was in effect trying to create a new approach to the English house interior, one in which the position of painting — then seemingly near extinction — was assured. The Cube Room is the introduction to a further series of splendid interiors, which we will explore next week.
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