John Vanbrugh

English playwright and architect

• Born: January 24, 1664 (baptized)
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: March 26, 1726
• Place of death: London, England

The most versatile of the English gentlemen-amateurs, Vanbrugh has an equally distinguished reputation as a playwright and an architect, having produced two of the finest Restoration comedies and at least three of the finest English Baroque buildings.

Early Life

John Vanbrugh’s grandfather was a refugee from Catholic religious persecution in Flanders; he came to England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and established himself as a merchant in the city of London. Vanbrugh’s father also went into business, first in London, and later as a sugar merchant in the city of Chester, where it is likely that Vanbrugh was educated at the distinguished local grammar school. His mother, Elizabeth, was the daughter of Sir Dudley Carrington, through whom there were connections of social and political importance; one of the uncles had been secretary of state and ambassador to Holland. Vanbrugh may have had some education on the Continent, and he may have been apprenticed to a London merchant for a time, but there is no certain evidence for either suggestion.

His first job of record was in the military, and he was commissioned in Lord Huntingdon’s Regiment of Foot but resigned later in the same year, 1686. In 1688, he was arrested in France. The reason for his internment has never been fully explained; he may have been spying for the British, or he simply might have been detained as a pawn by Louis XIV to obtain release of a French national held by the British on an espionage charge. Whatever the case, he was eventually housed in the Bastille and was finally released in late 1692.

A genial, attractive, witty man, Vanbrugh was able to make his way through the labyrinth of London society and politics, and in 1693, he obtained a sinecure as auditor for the Southern Division of the Duchy of Lancaster. In 1695, he was back in the military as a captain of Marines in Lord Berkeley’s regiment. He seems never to have seen active combat service, and he was on half-pay by 1698, for all purposes virtually retired.

It was during the 1690’s that Vanbrugh was to become involved in the two arts of theater and architecture. He may have had some training in architecture in his early years on the Continent, although there is no proof of this. He did, however, start to write plays while in prison in France. If the military seemed to go only so far for him, he was not a man easily discouraged or without ambition, and in 1696, his life as an artist, if within gentlemanly restraints, began with some considerable success and promise.

Life’s Work

Vanbrugh came to the theater in the last decade of the Restoration period, which takes its name from the restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the throne, from which his father, Charles I, had been deposed in the 1640’s. The latter Charles, having lived so long in France and personally inclined to a life of pleasure, liked his theater to be lively and sexually improper. He was joined in this enthusiasm not only by his court but also by many of the members of the upper classes, tired of the rigorous religiosity of the Commonwealth period.

What they wanted to see were idealized mirror images of themselves on the stage: richly dressed, handsome men and women at the top of the social scale, talking smartly and often cruelly about success in society and in love. That so many of their own marriages were loveless arrangements of money and class (as was the general custom of the time) intensified their skepticism about matrimony. Restoration comedy imitated life (if only a small part of it) and improved on it. In these plays, romantic feeling was less important than is usually the case in comedies. If the handsomest man could be expected to gain the prettiest woman, it did not necessarily follow in a Restoration comedy that they would marry or that they could marry, since marital infidelity was a part of the game. The touchstone of success, aside from sex appeal, was intelligence: The wittiest man won the wittiest woman. Those who knew how to use society for their own ends, within certain severely limited bounds of honor, won out in this world of smart-set smart talk.

There was considerable criticism of the Restoration comedy of manners, not simply from the Puritans, who saw the theater as a symbol of the ungodliness of the Stuart regime, but also among some members of the ruling majority, who saw the theater as going too far in its celebration of the conjunction between high intelligence and high life. Some authors attempted to assuage the moralist attacks by bringing some genuine feeling into the plays of social and sexual impropriety, but Vanbrugh eschewed such sentimentality in his work, which suggested that rare individuals might try to be sexually faithful, and might even succeed in doing so, but that their example had little effect on others.

His first play, The Relapse: Or, Virtue in Danger (1696), was a continuation of a play written earlier by Colley Cibber, the actor-manager, titled Love’s Last Shift (1696). Cibber had taken the leading part in his own work, and he returned to the same part in Vanbrugh’s exploration of the simple proposition that a man, however he tried, was doomed to fail in any attempt to be faithful to one woman, however much he loved her. Vanbrugh’s best play, The Provok’d Wife (1697), was, in fact, the work with which he had occupied himself while in prison and underlined the impossibility of marital fidelity in the sophisticated world of the London upper-middle class. Vanbrugh became a specific target for Jeremy Collier, the cleric determined to clean up the London stage, whose essay A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of English Stage (1698) became the focus for social concern about the stage. Vanbrugh attempted to answer the charges, but he never really reformed his work or seriously intended to do so. He was involved in the adaptation of several French comedies throughout the 1690’s and the first decade of the eighteenth century, during which he tried, with limited success and regular disaster, to run theaters and theater companies in collaboration with other theatrical figures. He was one of the first promoters of the opera in England, which also proved to be, on its first appearance, too new for London audiences.

The Relapse and The Provok’d Wife were to join that small group of Restoration comedies that were to be revived over and over, and which are still played regularly in theaters all over the world, enchanting audiences with their splendid flights of saucily improper, brightly intelligent dialogue, and with their canny insights into the waywardness of human sexuality. The idea might be, as critics have always claimed, a thin one, but it has a galvanic kernel of truth about it—one that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was to use much later, in the eighteenth century, in his opera Così fan tutte (1786), proving, as the Restoration playwrights had, that art is often a matter of execution, how it is done, rather than a matter of content, what is being done.

By the late 1690’s, Vanbrugh had firmly established himself at the center of London life, not only as a theatrical figure but also as a member of the Whig political and social hierarchy that was to provide him with modest political rewards, leading ultimately to his being the first man knighted by George I on his accession to the throne in 1714.

The real reward of those connections, however, came in a surprisingly different way. Charles Howard, the earl of Carlisle, determined to build himself a country estate of grandeur in Yorkshire, found himself in difficulty in dealing with the famous, irascible architect, William Talman. Vanbrugh, a friend of the earl, seems to have offered his services as a substitute for Talman. In short, he seems to have invented himself as an architect, for there is no evidence of any prior interest or activity in that art. He was, however, a gentleman, and a gentleman of taste and discrimination, and it was not unusual for such to try their hand at house design. Castle Howard, however, is more than simply a house; it is one of the great masterpieces of English Baroque architecture, and it revealed Vanbrugh as a natural genius of formidable proportions. Vanbrugh, however, had more than talent. In 1699, when he took on the project, he also took on a partner, the experienced, gifted, longtime assistant to Sir Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, and it was Hawksmoor who was to provide the technical knowledge required to carry off the major endeavor of Castle Howard. The union was more than that for both men; they seemed to complement each other aesthetically quite as much as they did technically, and although the bulk of the work at Castle Howard (the great country house used so extensively in the television version of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited) is clearly by Vanbrugh, there are piquant embellishments (such as in the towers) that are clearly examples of Hawksmoor’s peculiar Baroque imagination.

The Baroque style in architecture came to Great Britain considerably later than to the Continent. Wren may be seen, particularly in St. Paul’s Cathedral, as the first major practitioner of the style in England, although there are minor traces of it previous to him. Neither in his buildings nor in the buildings of Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor (together or independently) does English Baroque develop into the richly, sometimes overripe fulsomeness of the bulging curves and lavish ornamentation that is common on the mainland. It is significantly “Englished,” if still committed to an eclectic mixing of classical, Gothic, and Renaissance motifs and devices (which horrified purist thinkers about architecture, and which gave impetus in England to the neo-Palladians who came into their own in the second decade of the eighteenth century, determined to reject such stylistic ragouts). Still enchanted by the massing of grand, dramatic, balanced facades and sonorous cyclopean arches and cupolas, it is nevertheless much less sinuous, less fleshy, and much more angular and solid, with a sense of English no-nonsense manliness about it even in its breaking of the rules.

However improvisatory Vanbrugh’s beginnings as an architect might have been, Castle Howard established him firmly as a major designer, and in 1702, with help from Whig friends including Carlisle, he was made comptroller of the Board of Works in London, a position his partner Hawksmoor had wanted and was probably more qualified to fill. Nevertheless, their collaborations continued, and in 1705 they became involved in their most ambitious work, Blenheim Palace, a gift from the nation to the great general, the duke of Marlborough, for his military service. Money was abundant, and the ambitions for the estate the duke had were amply complemented by those of his wife, the infamous virago, Sarah Churchill.

Such projects were carried out over years, not only because of their size and technical difficulties, but also because funding was uncertain and because owners and architects changed their minds, and quite as often, the buildings. Castle Howard, for example, was only occupied by Carlisle in 1712. Blenheim, dependent for support on the public purse, was, in a sense, in and out of politics for much of its history as an unfinished building. Added to the difficulties at Blenheim was the task of pleasing the duchess, and in 1716, the buildings still unfinished, Vanbrugh ran out of charm insofar as the duchess was concerned, and he and Hawksmoor were ordered off the project. Hawksmoor was to be allowed back on the premises in the early 1720’s and was to do some of his finest work in the interiors and in the garden works at that time, but Vanbrugh was never to be forgiven. In 1724, Blenheim was finished, without Vanbrugh.

In spite of his exclusion, it is accepted that Blenheim is, in the main, Vanbrugh’s for good or ill. There was much complaint about it: about its preposterous size, its swaggering pomposities, its inappropriateness as a place for human beings to live comfortably. Yet it is to be remembered that the duke and duchess (particularly the duchess personally, and the duke publicly) were somewhat larger than life themselves. British architectural historian Mark Girouard has suggested that the complaints must be balanced against the fact that it was the home of the greatest military hero of the period.

The idea of the massive central block between long, elaborate balancing wings that had been used at Castle Howard was repeated at Blenheim. In each case, faint echoes of Versailles or even of the Palladian farm villas might be sensed, but in Vanbrugh’s hands, particularly at Blenheim, the idea was magnified, given tremendous weight in the dressing of both the exterior and interior. The surfaces of the facade are thick and crowded, busily coming and going in dramatic confrontations of pilaster, window, and arch. There is often, in all of his buildings, but particularly in Blenheim, the grand gesture of preposterously lavish stage sets metamorphosed into stone, fantasy turned into reality, but with little loss of dream.

Vanbrugh built several more modest variations on the Baroque country house, but it was perhaps with Seaton Delaval, a late work, that he again reached the greatness of Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace. Deep in the northern county of Northumberland, close to the cold, misty power of the North Sea, Seaton Delaval, much smaller than his castles, is nevertheless a forbidding example of his fusion of classicism and medievalism, its fortressed main block set in a vast forecourt, flanked by arcaded wings. It would be an appropriate setting for a gothic novel (which was still some years away from being invented by Horace Walpole). It sits brooding on the often-stormy skyline, its huge rusticated stones blackened by time and a terrible fire that gutted its interior, manifesting the capacity of English Baroque, particularly in the hands of Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor, to occasionally go beyond the grand to the Guignol.

It was not all work and plays, although Vanbrugh continued to work on architectural commissions until his death; and at that time, he was working on a comedy that was finished by Colley Cibber and produced by him (The Provok’d Husband, 1728). He married in 1719 and had three children with a wife less than half his age. He died, quite suddenly, of a throat infection and was buried in the family vault at St. Stephen Walbrook, the small Baroque gem by Sir Christopher Wren, which remains standing, just a few streets from where Vanbrugh was born.

Significance

John Locke the philosopher once performed a major surgical operation on a member of the prominent Shaftesbury family; Sir Christopher Wren, albeit a mathematician and scientist of note, had no formal training as an architect; and William Congreve preferred to be known as a gentleman rather than a playwright. It was a common aspect of upper-class life to do something well while remembering that it ought not to be taken too seriously. Sir John Vanbrugh is the phenomenon of this tradition that can be traced to the idea of the gentlemen-courtiers of the Tudor and Stuart courts with their gifts not only as politicians but also as men of letters. Vanbrugh is unique in coming with seeming casualness into two artistic fields and establishing lasting reputations in both of them while pursuing his continuing connections to the world of high social and political moment. If the taste for his plays and for his buildings has occasionally faltered, it has never been lost, and in the twentieth century he is generally considered to be one of the great English Baroque architects as well as one of the finest playwrights of the Restoration period. It is not unusual to find major artists with capacities in arts with a common connection. Michelangelo was, for example, equally powerful as painter, sculptor, and architect and has some much more limited claim as a man of letters. Vanbrugh stands with equal reputation astride two arts that seem to have little common ground. He spans them with unchallenged reputation and some considerable panache—to be expected of the English gentleman-amateur at his best.

Bibliography

Bingham, Madeleine. Masks and Facades: Sir John Vanbrugh, the Man in His Setting. London: Allen & Unwin, 1974. A good popular biography with some care taken in developing the background of Vanbrugh’s very complicated life. Strongest on the social side and modestly cautious about the architecture.

Bull, John. Vanbrugh and Farquhar. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Bull views Vanbrugh and George Farquhar as playwrights working at the end of the period of post-Restoration comedy, a time when England was entering the modern age. Bull describes their lives and careers within the context of their times, and examines how their plays reflect this transition from the old to the new.

Downes, Kerry. Vanbrugh. London: A. Zwemmer, 1977. Written by one of the best of the authorities on English Baroque architecture. In-depth discussion of Vanbrugh’s architecture and family background. Splendidly illustrated. The scholarship is excellent.

Huseboe, Arthur R. Sir John Vanbrugh. Boston: Twayne, 1976. A short but accurate critical biography of Vanbrugh with emphasis on his work as a dramatist, and nothing of importance made of his work as an architect. Good chapters on the two major plays, and one on his work as an adapter of French dramas. Very good short bibliography.

McCormick, Frank. Sir John Vanbrugh: The Playwright as Architect. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. McCormick analyzes the interrelationship between Vanbrugh’s two disparate careers.

Pevsner, Nikolaus. An Outline of European Architecture. 1942. 6th ed. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961. Pevsner is a fine commentator on British architecture, and any book by him on the subject is worth reading. This particular text is chosen to put the English Baroque movement into context with its European counterparts. Well illustrated, written with clarity and with sensitivity to the general reader.

Service, Alastair. The Architects of London. London: Architectural Press, 1979. A survey with site guides to all the architects. There is not much Vanbrugh left in London, but there is a very good short chapter on him, as well as chapters on the other Baroque architects of the time. Very well illustrated.

Whistler, Laurence. Sir John Vanbrugh: Architect and Dramatist, 1664-1726. New York: Macmillan, 1939. The best biography, written with charm and intelligence. An attempt to see Vanbrugh whole and to unify his multiple interests.