Heythrop Park - Architecture

Architecture

Heythrop Park was designed by the architect Thomas Archer for Charles Talbot, 1st Duke of Shrewsbury. Shrewsbury had travelled in Italy on an extensive Grand Tour, between 1700 and 1705. Apparently the duke had already decided to build in 1700, before he left for Italy, because of his failure to purchase Cornbury House near Charlbury, Oxfordshire. Cornbury was a regular classical house designed by Inigo Jones' mason, Nicholas Stone, which had been brought up to date for the Earl of Clarendon more recently by Hugh May; Shrewsbury's disappointment evinces the enthusiasm for classical architecture that he had acquired before he left England. Modern architecture in Italy had evolved into its Baroque form, a style quite unknown in England. The travelling duke was quickly won over: in Rome, Shrewsbury visited the villa of Domenico de' Rossi in 1702, to "lay aside some prints" by the architectural engraver of the Studio di architettura civile di Roma, full of designs by Borromini and Bernini. In 1704 Shrewsbury obtained a plan for a house from Paolo Falconieri. On his return to England, apparently possessing at least Rossi's first volume (of 1702), Shrewsbury called upon Archer to create a modern Italian palazzo set in the Oxfordshire countryside. At this time, Archer was one of the few English architects to have studied in Italy and become conversant with the Baroque forms of architecture, but many of the details of Heythrop were adapted from Roman precedents through engravings in Rossi's publication, though none were directly imitated.

Work on the house began in 1706. By 1709 the roof was in place and by 1713 the house was ready for partial occupation, but John Vanbrugh noted in April 1716 that it was incomplete, and so it was still, on Shrewsbury's death in 1718. The building contractors were William and Francis Smith of Warwick.

Archer's design was, as requested, in the Italian Baroque style. On the entrance facade of eleven bays, the giant order with a level balustraded roof is very similar to the design which William Talman had executed for the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth House just few years earlier. Archer's Corinthian order shifts restlessly against the wall plane, varying on the entrance front from flat pilasters to attached columns, to a free-standing screen that marches across the recessed entrance bays. The wall plane is ashlar on the entrance front but with strictly conventionalized channeled rustication the full height of the garden front. On the side elevations, the channeled rustication appears only on the rusticated pilaster-like corner quoins of the lightly projecting five central bays. In the frieze under the main cornice, occasional discreet square openings give light to the low attics.

The inspiration for the Baroque facade at Heythrop was Gian Lorenzo Bernini's final design for the Louvre, a plan never executed. Like Chatsworth, Heythrop Park comprises two floors linked by the giant order standing upon a raised semi-basement; the bays are articulated by a giant order with the Baroque inturned Corinthian volutes invented by Francesco Borromini. The elevation is broken by three projections, the centre being the central portico with Corinthian columns; this has no pediment to break the roof-line. In a break from his usual style, Archer has given the fenestration unusual emphasis by contrasting architectural detailing: the windows on the ground floor are from a design by Bernini, while those on the floor above are in a mannerist style with overlarge keystones penetrating the cornice, as at Talman's Chatsworth. The central nine bays of the 13-bay garden front carry the rustication of the half-basement right up the wall to the cornice, with perfectly plain window openings and a central door framed in a very sober Doric order; this severe front is relieved by its richly treated two-bay end pavilions, which take up all the rich motifs of the entrance front.

In 1831 a fire swept through the house destroying the interiors, many designed by James Gibbs, including a quatrefoil hall, a feature believed to have been unique in England. Other features of the rooms included a saloon which had an entablature supported by life-sized statues of Ceres and Flora beneath a stuccoed ceiling depicting the four corners of the globe. Mrs. Philip Lybbe Powys, who visited Heythrop in 1778 remarked that the stucco work was by "the famous Roberts of Oxford", though the plasterer Thomas Roberts was born in 1711; "In the arches over the doorways", Mrs. Lybbe Powys noted "fables of Aesop, finely executed in stucco, with wreathes of vine leaves."

After the fire the house remained derelict until sold to the railway contractor Thomas Brassey in 1870 as a wedding present for his third son Albert Brassey (1840–1918). Brassey commissioned the eminent architect Alfred Waterhouse to rebuild the interior. Waterhouse, a noted Gothic Revival architect, in deference to the history of the house worked in a neo-classical style; his double-height arcaded hall, being more redolent of the Baroque of John Vanbrugh than Archer. However, Waterhouse did add Gothic motifs to the hall's clerestory in the form of stained glass windows, by Morris and Co, depicting Faith, Hope and Charity.