Holkham Hall
Holkham Hall in Norfolk , England , is an 18th century country house built in the Palladian style. It was built by the British architect William Kent for Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester . Kent was advised by the architect Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington , whose Chiswick House is considered the prototype of neo-Palladianism.
Holkham House is one of the best known and most prominent examples of 18th century British neo-Palladianism. The rigor of the design comes closer to Andrea Palladio's ideals than many other buildings of this era. The estate, then known as Neals , was acquired in 1609 by Sir Edward Coke , the founder of the family fortune. Since then it has been the ancestral home of the Coke family, the Earls of Leicester of Holkham.
Architects and Patrons
The client and builder of the Holkham Hall was Thomas Coke (1697-1759), the later 1st Earl of Leicester. First, Coke had the previous Elizabethan building, Hill Hall, demolished. During his youth (between 1712 and 1718) he had undertaken a major educational tour ( Grand Tour ) through Europe, particularly Italy. There he met the aristocratic architect Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington , pioneer of English Neo-Palladianism, and William Kent in Italy, probably in 1715 , where the idea for the construction of Holkham Hall could have originated. After his return from the trip, during which he had bought a large number of books as well as paintings and sculptures to furnish the planned house, Coke invested a large part of his fortune in the South Sea Company . When it went bankrupt in 1720, Coke - like many other donors - lost this money, which postponed his house building plans for years. Thomas Coke became Earl of Leicester in 1744 and died in 1759; however, the house was not completed until five years later.
Although Thomas Coke had hired Colen Campbell for the construction in the early 1720s , the oldest surviving execution plans and designs were not created until 1726 by Matthew Brettingham under the supervision of Coke himself. These followed the ideals and guidelines formulated by Burlington and Kent. Palladianism was making its big comeback in England at this point. The style first appeared briefly in England before the English Civil War (1641–1652), primarily through the work of Inigo Jones , but was replaced by the Baroque after the Stuart Restoration . The phase known as Palladian revival (Neo-Palladianism) in the 18th century was based primarily on the buildings of the eponymous Italian architect Andrea Palladio from the 16th century, although the strict rules of proportions were not implemented. The style then developed further in the direction of Georgian architecture , which is still popular in England today. The new Palladianism was applied to a number of town and country houses, with Holkham Hall being known for its clean design and thus its close proximity to Palladio's ideals.
Thomas Coke, the intellectual father of the project, delegated all architectural tasks on site to the local architect Matthew Brettingham from Norfolk, who was hired as construction manager. Brettingham was probably the manor's house architect before that. William Kent was responsible for the interior design of the Southwest Pavilion, the family wing, especially for the "Long Library" ( long library ). He also worked out a number of designs for the exterior design, with a significantly richer exterior decoration in mind than Thomas Coke wanted. The foundation was laid in 1734, and construction was not completed until 30 years later (1764).
design
The Palladian style was particularly popular with the Whigs - the supporters of the British Whig Party - which included Thomas Coke. Like many of his party comrades, he liked identifying with the ancient Romans . William Kent was responsible for the exterior of Holkham Hall, with modifications based on Palladio's unbuilt Villa Mocenigo, which is described in I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura . The plans envisaged a central block of flats with only two floors. The main floor ( piano nobile ) consisted of two symmetrical lines of representative rooms around two inner courtyards, which, however, are not visible from the outside. They are only used for lighting and have no architectural function. This central block is flanked by four smaller wings, which are not connected to the main block at the corners by long colonnades , as is intended in Palladianism , but only by short two-story wings with only one window axis.
Exterior design
The external appearance of Holkham Hall is reminiscent of a large Roman palace . But even for Palladian standards it is very strict, designed to be almost repellent and almost completely dispenses with ornamentation . This is probably due to the direct influence of Thomas Coke, who, according to the local architect, Matthew Brettingham , attached great importance to commodiousness , i.e. comfort. Correspondingly, rooms that were sufficiently illuminated with just one window were given only this one, a second, which would have improved the facade design, was dispensed with in order not to make the room cold or drafty. As a result, the few windows on the main floor, although they were arranged symmetrically and carefully, appear somewhat lost in the solid brick wall - even though these yellow bricks were made especially for Holkham based on the pattern of ancient Roman bricks.
A mezzanine floor , with a series of low windows above the main floor, as the Palladian style actually dictates, was omitted. The reason for this lies in the height of the rooms in the Piano Nobile, which are twice as high as the rooms in comparable buildings. Blind windows, which could have softened the severity of the facade, were also omitted. On the ground floor, the rustic walls are pierced by small windows, which are more reminiscent of a prison than a castle. Because of its functional appearance, the building reminded architecture critic Nigel Nicolson of "a Prussian riding school."
The main or south facade - including the side wings - is 104.9 meters long. The severity in the area of the main floor is only interrupted by the central six-column portico. Two projections at the corners of the building visually frame the main building. They are designed with a Venetian window and covered by a single-storey square turret with a trimmed roof similar to that of Inigo Jones' Wilton House , which was built almost 100 years earlier . Jones and Isaac de Caus had planned an almost identical portico there, but it was never built.
In the corner pavilions there are mainly ancillary and utility rooms. They are constructed almost identically - with three segments, separated from each other by a small recess with simple pediments . The stones used, recesses, pediments and chimneys let the English Baroque resonate, a style of about ten years before construction of the Holkham Hall and especially by the Seaton Delaval Hall of John Vanbrugh famous and was appreciated. One of these pavilions was an independent country house that the family could use when the representative rooms of the main building were unused.
inside rooms
Inside the house, the Palladian style reaches a size and magnificence that hardly any other English castle - a deliberate contrast to the rather unwelcoming facade. It is noteworthy that this unique splendor is precisely the result of the lack of exuberant ornamentation. You enter the building through a marble hall in which Kent is modeled on a Roman basilica , although the main material for the cladding is in fact Alabaster from Derbyshire . The room is 15.2 meters high and is dominated by the wide flight of stairs made of white marble that lead to the gallery or the peristyle . The gilded ceiling of the room rests on Ionic columns made of alabaster, a design by Inigo Jones that is based on the Roman Pantheon . The pillars are said to represent copies of the Roman Portune temple of Fortuna Virilis. In the niches around the entrance hall are statues, mainly plaster copies of representations of Roman deities.
The flight of stairs from the entrance hall leads into the piano nobile of the house and the representative state rooms . The most important room, the salon, is located directly behind the portico. The walls are lined with velvet from Genoa and the coffered ceiling is gilded. The painting “Return from Egypt” by Peter Paul Rubens also hangs here . On his Grand Tour , Thomas Coke also bought a number of ancient Roman and Greek statues that are displayed in the Statue Gallery , which runs the length of the building from north to south. The northern dining room ( North Dining Room ), a square room having 8.2 meters wall length, with a carpet of Axminster designed that exactly reflects the pattern of the ceiling of the room. In a niche in this room there is a bust of Aelius Verus , which was found during the restoration of Nettuno . A classic apse gives the room the flair of a temple. In reality, the Aspis conceals the entrances to a labyrinth of hallways that lead to distant kitchens and other utility rooms. The two corner rooms on the east side of the main building are square salons, each illuminated by a huge Venetian window . In one of the two, the Landscape Room , there are paintings by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin . Most of the furniture in the state rooms was designed by William Kent in a representative baroque style with borrowings from classic forms.
Overall, the decoration of the main rooms is so restrained (or in the words of James Lees-Milne : “chaste”) that the smaller and more intimate rooms of the family wing are designed in a similar style without appearing overloaded. The library runs through the entire wing and to this day mainly contains the books that Thomas Coke bought on his Grand Tour in Italy. Armand Hammer acquired the Codex Leicester from it , now owned by Bill Gates .
Holkham today
The cost of building Holkham Hall was likely around £ 90,000, which is a conservative estimate today (2006) around £ 8 million. These enormous costs almost completely ruined the 1st Earl of Leicester and the family was subsequently financially barely able to make major changes to the house and adapt it to the respective fashion. For this reason the house has remained almost unchanged since its completion in 1764. Only the vestibule on the north side and the terraced gardens on the south side were added by the 2nd Earl in the 1850s. Today this perfectly preserved example of Palladianism is a prosperous private company. The family of the Earls of Leicester of Holkham still live in Holkham Hall, which is open to visitors during the summer months. The extensive collections are open to researchers and are often loaned to museums in Germany and abroad. Holkham Hall is a member of the Historic Houses Association and is part of the Treasure Houses of England consortium .
literature
- Leo Schmidt (Ed.): Holkham . Prestel, Munich, Berlin, London, New York 2005, ISBN 3-7913-3414-X .
- Mark Girouard: Life in the English Country House . Yale University Press, 1978, ISBN 0-300-02273-5 .
- Trewin Cropplestone: World Architecture . Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1963.
- EE Halliday: Cultural History of England . Thames and Hudson, London 1967.
- Nigel Nicolson: Great houses of Britain . Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1965.
Web links
- Homepage of Holkham Hall
- Database with Holkham entry ( Memento from April 12, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
Coordinates: 52 ° 57 ′ 0 ″ N , 0 ° 48 ′ 10 ″ E