John Vanbrugh

Baptised January 24 1664, died March 26 1726. Dramatist and architect. Most known for his comedies The Relapse (1696) and The Provok’d Wife (1697) as well as for Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard which he designed (together with Nicholas Hawksmoor).

Vanbrugh was born as the son of a businessman in Chester and educated there. In 1686 he joined the army and in 1690 he was arrested in Calais, France, for possibly being an English spy. He was released in 1692. In prison, he wrote his first piece of drama.

His first comedies The Relapse and The Provok’d Wife were major successes. Jeremy Collier’s Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) also aimed at Vanbrugh’s works because of their (relative) explicitness.

In 1702 Vanbrugh started working as an architect by designing Castle Howard (Yorkshire). Christopher Wren’s clerk Nicholas Hawksmoor became Vanbrugh’s assistant, i.e. partner who knew what he was doing (as opposed to the gentleman architect). Their buildings are marked by a “rhythmic effect of diversified masses” (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Vanbrugh usually worked on the general plans of their constructions and Hawksmoor was concerned with the details.

In 1705 Vanbrugh established the Queen’s Theatre at the Haymarket in London and afterwards became its manager and principal author (as the acoustics were bad for theatre performances, the building later was turned into an opera house). The theatrical means of surprise and illusion that he learned there can supposedly be traced in his architecture, too. From 1705 till 1716 he and Hawksmoor built their most famous construction: Blenheim Palace.

In 1714 George I knighted him and made him comptroller (i.e. he was in charge of arranging royal ceremonial affairs), an office that he had already held in 1702 under Queen Anne I. This office also brought him to Hannover during the arrangements of an orderly succession from the Stuarts to the Hanoverians.

Vanbrugh was a member of the exclusive Kit Cat Club that from 1703 onward became the place to be for Whigs. Vanbrugh was a Whig in his early days himself and therefore, Whig aristocrats also were his patrons.

Sources

"Sir John Vanbrugh." Encyclopædia Britannica Online, first published online 4 May 1999, <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/622815/Sir-John-Vanbrugh>. Accessed 19 Jul. 2009.

Hook, Judith. The Baroque Age in England. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976.