- Queen's House
The Queen's House, Greenwich, built 1614-1617 was designed by
architect Inigo Jones , early in his architectural career, forAnne of Denmark , the queen of KingJames I of England . It was altered and completed by Jones, in a second campaign about 1635 for Henrietta Maria, queen of King Charles I. [The detailed accounting of the building project is laid out in London County Council, "Survey of London", Howard Colvin, ed. "The History of The King's Works", Volume IV, 1485-1660, Part II 9) and in John Bold, "Greenwich: An Architectural History of the Royal Hospital for Seamen and the Queen's House" (Yales University Press) 2000.] The Queen's House is one of the most important buildings in British architectural history, being the first consciously classical building to have been constructed in Britain. It was Jones's first major commission after returning from his 1613-1615grand tour [The phrase 'Grand Tour' was unknown until approximately 1670, but in essence, Jones's tour of Germany, Italy and France, incorporated many of the elements of the later tour.] of Roman, Renaissance andPalladian architecture in Italy. Some earlier English buildings, such asLongleat , had made borrowings from the classical style; but these were restricted to small details and were not applied in a systematic way. Nor was the form of these buildings informed by an understanding of classical precedents. The Queen's House would have appeared revolutionary to English eyes in its day. Jones is credited with the introduction ofPalladianism with the construction of the Queen's House. Although it diverges from the mathematical constraints of Palladio and it is likely that the immediate precedent for the H shaped plan, straddling a road is the Villa Medici atPoggio a Caiano byGiuliano da Sangallo . Today it is both agrade I listed building and aScheduled ancient monument , a status which includes the 115-foot wide, axial vista to the River Thames.Early history
The Queen's House is located in
Greenwich, London ,England . It was built as an adjunct to the Tudor Palace of Greenwich, previously known, before its redevelopment by Henry VII [The Palace of Placentia was redeveloped circa 1500] as the Palace of Placentia, which was a rambling, mainly red-brick building in a more vernacular style. This would have presented a dramatic contrast of appearance to the newer, white-painted House, although the latter was much smaller and really a modern version of an older tradition of private 'garden houses', not a public building, and one used only by the queen's privileged inner circle. However, the House's original use was short - no more than seven years - before theEnglish Civil War began in 1642 and swept away the court culture from which it sprang. Of its interiors, three ceilings [A further ceiling "Allegory of Peace and the Arts", byOrazio Gentileschi , is installed atMarlborough House , London (R.W. Bissell, "Orazio Gentileschi and the Poetic Tradition in Caravaggiesque Painting" [1981] , cat. no. 70, pp 195-98).] and some wall decorations survive in part, but no interior remains in its original state. This process began as early as 1662, when masons removed a niche and term figures and a chimneypiece. [John Newman, noting this, identified a chimneypiece likely to have come from the Queen's House, atCharlton House , barely three miles away; for its design it drew upon an engraving inJean Barbet 's "Livre d'architecture" (1633); Newman, "Strayed from the Queen's House?" "Architectural History" 27, Design and Practice in British Architecture: Studies in Architectural History Presented to Howard Colvin (1984:33-35). ] the Queen's House, though it was scarcely being used, provided the distant focal center for SirChristopher Wren 'sGreenwich Hospital , with a logic and grandeur that has seemed inevitable to architectural historians but were motivated by Mary II's insistence that the vista to the water from the Queen's House not be impaired. [Bold 2000.]Construction of the Greenwich Hospital
Although the House survived as an official building—being used for the lying-in-state of Commonwealth Generals-at-Sea Richard Dean (1653) and Robert Blake (1657)—the main palace was progressively demolished from the 1660s to 1690s and replaced by the Royal Hospital for Seamen, [The Royal Hospital for Seamen is usually known as Greenwich Hospital.] built 1696-1751 to the master-plan of Sir
Christopher Wren . This is now called the Old Royal Naval College, after its later use from 1873 to 1998. The position of the House, and Queen Mary II's order that it retain its view to the river (only gained on demolition of the older Palace), dictated Wren's Hospital design of two matching pairs of 'courts' separated by a grand 'visto' exactly the width of the House (115 ft). The whole forms an impressive architectural ensemble that stretches from theThames toGreenwich Park and is one of the principal features that in 1997 ledUNESCO to inscribe 'Maritime Greenwich' as aWorld Heritage Site .19th Century additions
From 1806 the House itself was the centre of what, from 1892, became the
Royal Hospital School for the sons of seamen. This necessitated new accommodation wings, and a flanking pair to east and west were added and connected to the House bycolonnade s from 1807 (designed byLondon Docks architectDaniel Asher Alexander ), with further surviving extensions up to 1876. In 1933 the school moved toHolbrook, Suffolk . Its Greenwich buildings, including the House, were converted and restored to become the newNational Maritime Museum (NMM), created byAct of Parliament in 1934 and opened in 1937.The grounds immediately to the north of the House were reinstated in the late 1870s following construction of the cut-and-cover
tunnel between Greenwich and Maze Hill stations. The tunnel comprised the continuation of theLondon and Greenwich Railway and opened in 1878.Recent years
The House was further restored between 1986 and 1999, and it is now largely used to display the Museum's substantial collection of marine paintings and portraits (mainly of the 17th to 20th centuries, and for other public and private events. It is normally open to the public daily, free of charge, along with the other museum galleries and the 17th-century Royal Observatory, Greenwich, which is also part of the National Maritime Museum.
The "Queen's House" was also the name used for Buckingham House, later to be rebuilt as
Buckingham Palace , when it was Queen Charlotte's residence during the reign of George III.Notes
External links
* [http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=Queen%27s+House+Greenwich&m=text Flickr images tagged Queen's House Greenwich]
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