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Strayed from the Queen’s House?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Extract

Early Stuart palace decoration has, apart from the Banqueting House, Whitehall, been almost wholly lost. In the Queen’s House, Greenwich, of Inigo Jones’s work three ceilings and some wall-decorations partially survive, but no room remains in its entirety. In particular the chimney-pieces have all gone. This process began as early as March 16621 when masons removed not only ‘the marble neech and tearmes with the marble head in a lower roome’ but also ‘a marble Chimny peice wth the white marble in another lower roome’ and bricklayers were paid for ‘making good the brickwork where the stone chimneypeices were taken downe’.

Type
Section 1: Royal Works and The Office of Works
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1984

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References

Notes

1 PRO Works 5/2.

2 Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, London, v, East London (1930), p. 33 and pi. 12, where it is described as‘early 17th century’; N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England, London, n (1952), 161,‘Jacobean’; B. Cherry and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England, London 2: South (1983), 251, however quote Roger White as apparently having observed the similarity which is the basis of this article. .

3 Illustrated e.g. in Harris, j. (Catalogue of the RIBA Drawings Collection: Jones/Webb (1971), figs 18-20, and The King’s Arcadia (Arts Council, 1973), nos 277-78.Google Scholar

4 They measure respectively 5 ft 6 in by 4 ft 7 in and 5 ft 6 in by 4 ft 6 in. The two rooms immediately below are the only others in the Queen's House with apertures as wide, though the height of these is only 3 ft 11 in. It should be noted that the present chimney-pieces date only from the 1930s. Information from Mr Richard Ormond.

5 Harris, J. ‘Inigojones and his French Sources’, Metropolitan Museum Bulletin, xix (1960-61), 25364 Google Scholar, especially pis 2 and 4.

6 The reference to Serlio is L’Architettura Book iv, 50v and 5 T in the folio edition, 173' and v in the quarto edition.

7 Walpole Society, vu, 118-19.