Easton Neston

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Easton Neston, east facade (July 1987)

Easton Neston is a country house near Towcester in Northamptonshire , England . It was built in the English Baroque style by the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor . Easton Neston is believed to be the only country house designed solely by Hawksmoor. From about 1700 Hawksmoor worked on many buildings, including Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace , with Sir John Vanbrugh , often providing his technical knowledge to the less qualified Vanbrugh. Even after many joint projects, Hawksmoor's work was always classically stricter than Vanbrugh's. However, Easton Neston was formed about six years before this partnership. The house is listed on the Statutory List of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest in the 1st degree.

architect

A proposal for the building by Easton Neston, published in Vitruvius Britannicus in 1715 . The central wing was built according to this proposal, but without the dome structure. The side wings, the entrance gate and the courtyard wall were not built.

Hawksmoor was commissioned by Sir William Fermor, 2nd Baronet , later Baron Leominster . Hawksmoor was recommended by Fermor's cousin by marriage, Christopher Wren , who advised him to build a new country house on the property in around 1680. However, no details of what Wren recommended survived, and work appears to have halted after the construction of two outbuildings, only one of which remains. After Fermor's marriage to the heiress Catherine Poulett in 1692, he decided to take up the idea of ​​a new country house again, and so Wren's pupil Hawksmoor was finally commissioned in 1694.

On March 29, 2011, a rare 300 word letter, written and signed in 1685 by Wren offering advice on the construction of Easton Neston, was said to fetch up to £ 9,000 at auction but was eventually auctioned off for £ 19,200. The letter, dated 1685 or 1686, was addressed to William Fermor, offering advice on the design and selection of building materials for the house.

In May 2011, the BBC aired an edition of The Country House Revealed , which dealt with Easton Neston. There the question was raised whether Wren or Hawksmoor designed the building. Chunks of wood from the roof of the house were examined and it was found that the trees must have been felled around 1700–1701, proving that Hawksmoor was the architect.

Plant and facades

The south entrance to Easton Neston branches off from Old Towcester Road. The property extends along the tree-lined banks of the river Tove , which can be seen in the background.

The statues (originally part of the Arundel Marbles ) were removed by George Fermor, 2nd Earl of Pomfret (1722–1785) and sold in a distress sale. His mother bought it and donated it to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 1755 .

The country house that Hawksmoor built in Easton Neston can best be described as a miniature palace that adopted the colossal order of pilasters and crowning balustrade from Michelangelo's palazzi on the Capitol in Rome and, in return, through the engravings in Vitruvius Britannicus, Gabriel's construction of the Petit Trianon in Versailles , which was only created 50 years later, may have influenced. Both main facades are of a simple structure and avoid ostentatious display. The rectangular house has three main floors. The first is a rusticated cellar , the two upper floors are equivalent - nine sections, separated by composite pilasters , with all sections on each floor containing a narrow, tall, framed window of the same height. The entrance is in the middle section and is flanked by two full columns. These two columns support a small, rounded gable field, which represents the coat of arms and the motto of the Fermors. A massive Palladian window sits above the entrance on the upper floor . The roof line is covered by a balustrade, which is decorated with covered stone urns at the ten interruptions above the pilasters. The design language and the window division of the front facade are repeated on the back in the garden facade. Only there is no gable field and no urns as decoration. The house is made of stones from the village of '' Helmdon '', stones of beige color and extremely good quality, which ensure that the reliefs are as clear today as they were in the year of completion in 1702.

The two side facades of the house show the story of life in a country house before the age of bells for the servants. Until the invention of the remote-controlled bells, which could be operated by ropes from distant places in the house, it was necessary to have the servants within calling distance. In older houses, like the Montacute House , the servants slept on the floor of the hall or in front of the bedroom doors of their masters. In the 17th century, however, this practice became increasingly undesirable. From this time on the houses had corridors and the gentlemen tended to accommodate their servants in small rooms in order not to have to constantly climb over sleeping servants. These small rooms still had to be within shouting distance. In a newly built house like Easton Neston, this was accomplished by adding two very low mezzanines for servants above each of the two upper floors. The two main facades of Easton Neston (east and west) show three storeys, while the two less important facades show that there are actually five storeys: the windows of the two mezzanine storeys are barely half as high as those of the main storeys above and below . This makes the window division of the side facades complicated, but interesting.

A few years after the country house was completed in 1702, Hawksmoor drew a few more plans for a huge entrance courtyard. These drawings, which were never completed but published in Vitruvius Britannicus , provided for the addition of two side wings to the main house, one for the stables and one for the servants' rooms. The fourth side of the courtyard was to form a colonnade with an Etera . Apart from the main house, however, no building was realized and the two red brick buildings previously constructed (probably based on plans by Christopher Wren) remained after the main house was built. The western building, which contained stables, was later demolished after new stables were built. Many architects believe that these plans would have made Hawkesmoor's country house less important if they had been realized. They are more in line with Vanbrugh's than Hawksmoor's architectural concept. The entire conception was depicted in Colen Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus . Two large ozymandic entrance figures in the park are all that is left of this conception.

inside rooms

The main rooms of the house have windows that run almost from floor to ceiling. The rooms are large and well-proportioned without suffering from the oppressive grandeur that is so typical of Vanbrugh's and Hawksmoor's joint works. The massive main staircase with its winding iron balustrade in the style of Jean Tijou shows two long, narrow lines that lead up to the gallery on the first floor. This gallery is decorated with grisailles by Sir James Thornhill .

Easton Neston's interiors have seen a few changes since the house was completed by Hawksmoor. Hawksmoor's great hall, with its tall, bare walls, flanking vestibules and Corinthian columns, was divided in the 19th century when Sir Thomas Hesketh inherited the property from his uncle, creating three more bedrooms on the upper floor. The main salon, the only heavily decorated room in the mansion, has also been changed: it now shows stucco work done by Artari in the mid-18th century for Lord Lempster's son, the Earl of Pomfret. A high relief ceiling with huge panels is surrounded by paintings and trophies with hunting problems, which would have pleased the charismatic Hawksmoor.

Gardens

On the property, Hawksmoor designed a canal in the park to complement the country house called Long Water . It is in one axis with the door in the middle of the garden facade. The gardens were expanded in the 20th century by Lord Thomas Fermor-Hesketh , the great-nephew of the 5th and last Earl of Pomfret, with the construction of a water terrace overlooked by the west or garden facade. It is decorated with shaped hedges and roses that surround the large pool of water in which the house is reflected.

history

Easton Neston has always been a private home and never open to the public. Hence it is little known. Until recently, the house belonged to Lord Hesketh , whose family descended directly from the builder, Sir William Fermor. It was decorated with valuable paintings, tapestries and furniture from the 18th century.

In March 1876 the Empress Sisi of Austria visited England and rented the manor house in Easton Heston with the beautiful stables for her horses. From the train station Blisworth of them often went to London .

In 2004 Lord Hesketh offered the manor house and the surrounding land with Towcester Racecourse for £ 50 million. In 2005 part of the property including the manor house, some outbuildings and 2.2 km² of land was sold to the Russian fashion designer and textile retailer Leon Max for £ 15 million . Lord Hesketh, who otherwise sold the fields and the Gothic village of Hulcote , still owns the racecourse. Max plans to house his European headquarters in the Wren-designed building and live in the Hawksmoor-built mansion himself.

literature

  • Nigel Nicolson: Great Houses of Britain . George Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1965
  • Kerry Downes: Hawksmoor . Thames and Hudson, London 1979.
  • Mark Girouard: Life in the English Country House . Yale University, Yale 1978

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kerry Downes: Hawksmoor's house at Easton Neston in Architectural History , 30 (1987) .; Howard Colvin: svHawksmoor, Nicholas in A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600–1840 , 3rd edition. Yale University Press, Yale 1995.
  2. ^ Easton Neston House, and Attached Wings, Easton Neston . British Listed Buildings . Retrieved December 19, 2014.
  3. ↑ Sir William Fermor, the Younger, (ca.1648–7 December 1711), son of Sir William Fermor, the Elder, (1621–1661), a member of the gentry who inherited the estate of Easton Neston in Northamptonshire in 1640 and a year later Charles I was appointed baronet. A staunch royalist, Sir William Fermor, the elder, was a member of the Privy Council , which restored the monarchy in 1660. His son, William Fermor, the younger, took Lady Sophia Osborne , daughter of Sir Thomas Osborne, 1st Duke of Leeds , as his third wife on March 5, 1662 . Lady Sophia Osborne . thepeerage.com . Retrieved December 19, 2014.
  4. ↑ May 2005 auction at Sotheby's . Retrieved May 26, 2011.
  5. ^ Christopher Wren's Easton Neston letter up for sale for £ 9,000 . Northampton Chronicle & Echo, March 13, 2011 . Retrieved December 19, 2014.
  6. ↑ Rare Wren letter sells for £ 19,200 . Salisbury Journal, March 31, 2011 . Retrieved December 19, 2014.
  7. ↑ BBC i-player . Retrieved May 26, 2011.
  8. ↑ Helmdon Trail - Helmdon Stone in J Morton: The Natural History of Northamptonshire . ISBN 978-1236131171 . ( Online , accessed December 19, 2014).
  9. ^ Easton Neston, Towcester, Northamptonshire Arrival of the Empress of Austria at the Towcester Station . mkheritage.co.uk . Retrieved December 19, 2014.
  10. ^ Daily Telegraph, July 13, 2005.
  11. ↑ Rag trade to riches . The Times, July 17, 2005

Web links

Commons : Easton Neston  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 52 ° 8 '14.3 "  N , 0 ° 58' 32.9"  W.