In Popular Culture
Such was the fame of the house that the Duke had to introduce crowd control measures - including a one-way system - to manage the large numbers of visitors who flocked to the estate. Cannons was featured in early travel guides including a 1725 travelogue by Daniel Defoe where he described Cannons extravagance thus:
This palace is so beautiful in its situation, so lofty, so majestick the appearance of it, that a pen can but ill describe it... 'tis only fit to be talk'd of upon the very spot... The whole structure is built with such a Profusion of Expense and finished with such a Brightness of Fancy and Delicacy of Judgment.
A few years later Alexander Pope was seen as satirising Cannons in his poem Of Taste (1731), which ridicules the villa of an aristocrat called "Timon" and includes the lines:
Light quirks of music, broken and uneven,
Make the soul dance upon a jig to heaven,
On painted ceilings you devoutly stare
Where sprawl the saints of Verrio or Laguerre...
Timon, like Chandos, is a patron of the painter Louis Laguerre and listens to elaborate music in his chapel. After adverse comment, including a caricature by William Hogarth of Pope splattering Chandos' carriage, the poet apologised to the Duke, denying that any comparison with Cannons was intended, but it has been suggested that Pope could have anticipated that some people would see a connection. Within a few years another point of comparison had emerged - Pope had prophesied the demolition of Timon's villa.
Read more about this topic: Cannons (house)
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“... we’ve allowed a youth-centered culture to leave us so estranged from our future selves that, when asked about the years beyond fifty, sixty, or seventy—all part of the average human life span providing we can escape hunger, violence, and other epidemics—many people can see only a blank screen, or one on which they project fear of disease and democracy.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)