Enfilade

Proposed ‘Glass House’ Restoration for Menokin in Warsaw, Virginia
from the website Menokin: Rubble with a Cause

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From the blog of the National Trust for Historic Preservation:

Meghan O’Connor, “Eighteenth-Century House Ruin to Be Restored…With Glass,” Preservation Nation Blog (3 December 2014).

What some people see when they look at Menokin is a collapsed house, an old ruin, a testament to the perils of ignoring preservation. What the staff and Board at Menokin see, however, is a cutting-edge preservation opportunity.

The Menokin Foundation does not want to restore the house to its original condition. Instead, the Foundation believes Menokin is more valuable to the public in pieces. Menokin was home to Declaration of Independence signer, Francis Lightfoot Lee. The land was given to Lee and his wife Rebecca Tayloe by his father-in-law as a wedding gift. The house was built around 1769. . . .

Re-imagining a Ruin: Exterior Structure Cutaway View

Dubbed the “Glass House Project,” the Foundation floated the idea around the preservation community. Pope says, “We started getting really positive responses to it. We got some raised eyebrows, believe me, but we came to [the] consensus that this was an approach worth pursuing.”

To design the Glass House Project, the Foundation hired world-renowned architecture firm Machado and Silvetti Associates in 2012.  Designing projects ranging from an addition to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art to the expansion of the Getty Villa, Machado and Silvetti focus on creating contemporary and innovative designs that merge with historic contexts. . . .

The Foundation is currently developing and implementing Phase 1 of the Glass House Project — to build a glass shell around the current remaining structure.

Menokin’s innovation does not just stop at glass. The Foundation’s ultimate goal for the site is to be an internationally known learning and teaching center. In a departure from many historic house museum models, Menokin does not want to focus solely on one story or one time period. The site will not just be a colonial relic, but a place that can have modern implications for, and showcase in a revolutionary way, preservation, history, architecture, and natural resources. . .

Meghan O’Connor is the member services assistant at the National Trust. She enjoys learning, writing, and talking about museums, art, architecture, and anything historic. She worked with Menokin on the museum’s historical interpretation as part of a graduate school class.

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Note (added 15 December 2014) — The original version of this posting included a photo from the original concept team; the current photos comes from the Menokin blog.

Restoration of the West Wall of the Painted Hall at Greenwich, included in Phase I of the conservation project, was completed in the spring of 2013. Phase II is expected to begin in the summer of 2016.

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Press release, via Art Daily (29 November 2014). . .

The Heritage Lottery Fund today announced that it has earmarked funding of £2.77 million, including a development grant of £98,800, to The Greenwich Foundation towards its £7m scheme to complete the conservation of the Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College (ORNC). This first round pass will enable the Foundation to proceed with it plans for the conservation of the remaining 3,700 square metres of paintings: one of the most ambitious painting conservation projects ever undertaken within a historic interior. It will also support improved interpretation and accessibility, the delivery of conservation skills training, and a programme of associated community, learning and public events including scaffolding tours which proved immensely popular during Phase I of the conservation.

Created in the early 18th century by Sir James Thornhill for Sir Christopher Wren’s Royal Hospital for Seamen, the spectacular, Grade 1 Listed, Painted Hall is one of Europe’s most important architectural interiors and is considered to be the greatest achievement of English Baroque art. Phase I of the conservation, which was also supported by a grant from the Heritage Lottery Foundation, saw the west wall and upper hall ceiling restored to their former glory [opened in May 2013]. Phase II will see the lower hall, with its spectacular ceiling, the entrance vestibule and cupola similarly restored.

Sue Bowers, Head of the Heritage Lottery Fund for London, said, “This Baroque masterpiece is one of the lesser-known treasures at the heart of the Greenwich World Heritage Site. HLF funded the first stage of restoration works and we are now delighted to support plans to complete the project.”

“This is absolutely wonderful news,” adds Brendan McCarthy, Chief Executive of the Greenwich Foundation. “Ever since the first phase of conservation was completed, we’ve been looking forward to restoring the rest of the Painted Hall and the HLF stage 1 pass has taken us a long way towards that—although much fundraising remains to be done. The next few months will be very interesting and great fun. There will be changing exhibitions, information, exciting talks and hands-on workshops as part of our overall approach to involving the public as the project develops. Phase II of the Painted Hall conservation will transform the experience of visiting and viewing this remarkable painted interior, and people can also be part of the exciting project by helping us to reach our £7m target.”

The Foundation will submit detailed project proposals, based on a feasibility study by Martin Ashley Architects, to HLF at the end of 2015 with a view to starting work on the project in the summer of 2016. The Painted Hall will be under scaffolding for around two years after the start of works, however the public will have access to the Hall, including on the scaffolding itself. Visitors—including wheelchair users—will be able to get close up to the painted surfaces and watch conservators at work—an exciting element of project.

Key elements of the Phase II programme include
• Cleaning and conservation of the remaining 3,700 square metres of painted wall surface, including the great ceiling in the Lower Hall, executed by James Thornhill between 1708 and 1712. This will remove layers of dirt and varnish, unlocking the colour and vibrancy of these great paintings. The work will be undertaken by Paine & Stewart, leading specialists in the conservation of historic wall paintings who also undertook the conservation work in Phase I.
• Re-presentation of the interior with improved lighting, new seating and interpretation.
• Introduction of environmental improvements to ensure the best possible conditions for the painted surfaces.
• Creation of a new, fully accessible visitor reception in the King William Undercroft with improved facilities, innovative interpretation, dedicated retail, and a new café.
• Improved visibility of the Painted Hall within the Discover Greenwich visitor centre, including a new audio-visual exhibit.

The conservation work is expected to be completed by the summer 2018 with the overall project completed the following year.

A masterpiece that was almost 20 years in the making
With over 4,250 square metres of painted surfaces, the Painted Hall was Thornhill’s most extensive commission, taking the artist almost 20 years to complete. In the dining hall proposed for the Royal Hospital for Seamen the artist was asked to create an homage to Britain’s maritime power and royal family. The astonishing ceiling of the lower hall shows the contribution the British navy made to the prosperity of the nation at the time of William III and Mary II, under during whose reign the Hospital was commissioned, and the Upper Hall ceiling features the last of the Stuart monarchs, Queen Anne, during whose reign the Lower Hall paintings were made. The allegorical theme of the huge and exuberant Lower Hall ceiling is the Triumph of Peace and Liberty over Tyranny, and pays due tribute to Stuart monarchs William and Mary and British maritime power. Within the oval frame are the four seasons and other references to the passing of time including the signs of the zodiac. Beyond the arch in the Upper Hall Queen Anne surveys the continents of the world, while on the west wall her Hanoverian successors, George I and his family, are shown in sober glory. Elsewhere much use is made of trompe l’oeil painting, on the columns, windowsills and in the vestibule. During the period when he working on the painting Thornhill became court Painter to the new King, George I, and was subsequently knighted. After completion in 1727, the Greenwich pensioners moved their dining room to the undercrofts below, and the Hall became a popular visitor attraction with an admission price of 6d. In the early 19th century the Painted Hall became the home of the National Gallery of Naval Art—one of Britain’s first public art galleries. It was not used again as a dining room until 1936, when the paintings were moved to the newly-established National Maritime Museum.

Sir James Thornhill (1675–1734)
Born in Dorset in 1675, artist James Thornhill was to rise to become a court painter and sergeant painter to George I and George II, a master of the Painters’ Company and a fellow of the Royal Society. He was the first English painter to be knighted for his work, in 1720, and sat as a Member of Parliament for 12 years from 1722 until his death in 1734. The eight scenes in the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral (1715–19) and the allegories in the Painted Hall, Royal Hospital for Seamen (1708–27), are his two most considerable commissions with the majority of his paintings largely executed on the ceilings and stairs of country houses and palaces such as Hampton Court, Blenheim, and Chatsworth. Among Thornhill’s few canvases are the altarpiece for St. Mary’s Parish Church, Weymouth, and a group portrait of the members of the House of Commons in which he was assisted by William Hogarth (who eloped with Thornhill’s daughter in 1729). Thornhill also made a number of portraits (his sitters including Sir Isaac Newton and co-founder of The Spectator Magazine, Richard Steele), book illustrations, theatre scenery, and the rose window of the north transept of Westminster Abbey. Thornhill’s works can be seen in collections across the globe including The Louvre, Paris; Metropolitan Museum, New York; and National Portrait Gallery, Tate, Royal Academy and Courtauld Institute, London.

by Michael Yonan

In traveling through the forested plains of eastern Sweden, one encounters a Nordic rural idyll. Abundantly verdant, dotted with charming red houses, and home to the occasional moose, it is a region seemingly far removed from the bustle of Stockholm or the university culture of nearby Uppsala. The presence of scattered Viking runestones in the landscape only adds to the feeling of having traveled far from the modern world. Yet as one enters the front gates of Lövstabruk, a beautifully preserved eighteenth-century mining estate, it becomes apparent this was in its time no remote backwater but that, instead, it kept in touch with the most current continental developments in the sciences and arts.

Truthfully, the realization didn’t come entirely as a surprise when I visited Lövstabruk in May. Virtually every Swedish dix-huitièmiste speaks of the town with great affection, and many conveyed the belief that one finds there something very Swedish indeed. That interested me greatly, since one of Sweden’s more remarkable eighteenth-century qualities was its cosmpolitanism, its participation in cultural developments we associate mostly with other places. The best known to art historians is the Swedish connection to France. Yet that’s just the beginning of a much larger history of Swedish cultural exchange, of which Lövstabruk is a prime example.

To understand this place, one needs to be familiar with the Swedish institution of the bruk. The word has no exact English equivalent; it can mean forge, mine, or mill. In Sweden the bruk was a major impetus for small-scale civic development based on Sweden’s immensely rich mineral and metal deposits. The largest of the nation’s many mines was the Great Falun Mine (Stora Kopparberg), which operated for a millennium and at its peak supplied Europe with two-thirds of its copper. Lövstabruk was an ironworks that processed ore from the nearby mine at Dannemora. Interestingly, the region’s miners were a mixture of native Swedes and émigré Walloons who relocated to work in the industry. One can find in Sweden today the legacy of mass Walloon migration in the occasional French or French-sounding name.

For art historians, Lövstabruk is most interesting because of its material legacy. The nobles overseeing the estate originated in the Netherlands, and it was they who expanded Lövstabruk’s footprint after a 1719 fire. Notable among them was Charles de Geer (1720–1778), who began collecting books and natural specimens for the library at Lövsta. De Geer published a comprehensive multivolume study of insects—modeled after Réaumur and Linnaeus—and oversaw an extensive building campaign that resulted in many of Lövstabruk’s architectural glories. The manor house contains a series of rococo rooms hung with dozens of beautiful eighteenth-century portraits. The musical culture at Lövstabruk was also world-class; the de Geers collected musical scores from Amsterdam and Paris for use in local concerts. But the jewel of Lövstabruk is unquestionably the library, designed by Swedish architect Jean-Eric Rehn (1717–1793). Housed in a separate little building immediately overlooking the central waterway and garden, the library gives the impression of having been left untouched since 1780. It
perfectly evokes the nobleman–scholar–entrepreneur ideal so
cherished during the Enlightenment.

Postal deliveries to this little Swedish town must have been incredible indeed, containing as they did drawings by Watteau and Boucher, scores by Handel and Vivaldi, and the latest volumes of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. I spotted Mme de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une péruvienne and books by Montesquieu and Rousseau on the library’s shelves. This give-and-take between such a distinctively local institution, the bruk, and the larger international culture is what makes Lövstabruk so distinctive. Recently, historian Göran Rydén has described Lövstabruk as an architectural metaphor for eighteenth-century Sweden as a whole: “a local community reaching out to a much wider global setting,” as well as “a place consuming commodities from other global places.”¹ That interaction between the local and the global produces a “provincial cosmpolitanism,” to use Rydén’s term, the effects of which shaped the formation of Swedish society. To a visitor like me, it seems correct to claim that Lövstabruk was a microcosm of the eighteenth-century world.

1. Göran Rydén, “Provincial Cosmopolitanism: An Introduction,” in Sweden in the Eighteenth-Century World, ed. Göran Rydén (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), p. 5.

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Michael Yonan is the president of HECAA and author of Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art (Penn State Press, 2011). From January to June 2014 he was research fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala.

Historic Royal Palaces press release (11 June 2014). . .

Made legendary by Henry VIII, undisputed king of the joust, Hampton Court Palace’s enormous tiltyard saw some of the most significant moments of his long and often scandalous reign. Horses thundered, colours fluttered in the breeze, and the court gathered in their finery to watch the displays of pride and chivalry. By 1702 however, with the passion for royal tournaments long faded, Queen Anne had ordered the site to be dug up and cropped with “severall varietys of Eatables, the most proper for Her Majesty’s Use.” The kitchen garden, covering six acres, fed the Queen and her court not only at Hampton Court, but at royal residences across the capital.

This summer, Historic Royal Palaces will be turning back the clock at Hampton Court to return the garden to its eighteenth century heyday, recreating the pathways and planting pattern laid down by the palace’s Georgian gardeners. Based on historic evidence and John Roque’s plan of 1736, it will be as true to the period as possible, right down to the now rare heritage varieties of fruit and vegetables which will be grown there.

This new addition to the palace’s world famous gardens will allow visitors to explore the untold history of food production at Hampton Court, with on-site displays helping to showcase some of the traditional techniques employed by royal gardeners to tend crops fit for a king. Herbs and vegetables familiar to the palace’s Georgian cooks will be reinstated, from Italian celery to borrage, skirret and swelling parsnips. Apricots, nectarines and even peaches will return to the garden in their original fan shapes, while the garden’s very own melonry, complete with hot beds of straw and manure, will also be recreated by the palace’s team of expert gardeners.

Importantly, the garden will be open to the public free of charge, and will provide a valuable educational resource for the local community, as well as the hundreds of visitors and school groups who enjoy the palace every day. As the garden matures, Historic Royal Palaces hopes to be able to run vegetable growing classes at the palace—reconnecting the Great Kitchens at Hampton Court with the locally sourced produce which once stocked them.

Vicki Cooke, Hampton Court Palace’s Kitchen Garden Keeper, said: “The reinstated Kitchen Garden at Hampton Court is the realisation of a massive amount of research, planning and labour by the team, and will give visitors a real taste of the work involved in supplying a royal kitchen. Our ambitious planting scheme showcases a whole range of less well known fruit, vegetables and herbs which would have gone into the lavish meals prepared for the monarchs who lived here, and will mean that each passing season brings new crops waiting to be discovered.”

The opening of the Royal Kitchen Garden is part of a wider celebration of the Georgians across Historic Royal Palaces in 2014, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Hanoverian Accession to the British throne.

Geneva’s Maison Mallet (to the left), built between 1772 and 1725, houses the International Museum of the Reformation; it stands next to the thirteenth-century St. Pierre Cathedral, the front of which is dominated by a mid-eighteenth-century portico. The photo comes from the museum’s website.

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The Other Side of the Story: The International Museum of the Reformation in Geneva
By Tobias Locker

Art historians are—at least to generalize from my own experience—rarely surprised by museums. And yet, sometimes we visit an institution where subject, setting, and presentation complement each other so favorably that they transform the visit into an inspiring experience. I was recently surprised in such a way at Geneva’s International Museum of the Reformation. The visit expanded and enriched my view of the Reformation, which is sometimes cast as less important than Roman Catholicism for understanding the Baroque, even as it was the trigger for the Counter Reformation. The Museum tells the other side of the story, the one of an influential religious movement inspiring the arts and mentality of the early modern period.

The International Museum of the Reformation was inaugurated in 2005, next to St. Pierre Cathedral in the Maison Mallet, a hôtel particulier, modelled entre court et jardin and built between 1722 and 1725, after plans of the architect Jean-François Blondel (uncle and mentor of Jacques François Blondel, the architectural theorician and author of the famous multivolume works De la distribution des maisons de plaisance… and l’Architecture Française…). At its opening, the museum still had much in common with the original nineteenth-century project of presenting Geneva as the seat of the Calvinist Reformation. But today the focus is—as its name suggests—much wider, extending the narrative of historic Protestantism into the twenty-first century.

Besides offering a fine impression of a prestigious home of a wealthy eighteenth-century Genevan citizen, the museum’s presentation succeeds on multiple fronts. While relatively small, it gives a good idea of the different currents of the Reformation. On its ground floor figures like Martin Luther, John Calvin, the Huguenots, and John Knox are explained while the lower level addresses the development of reformed religions from the nineteenth century to the present in a global context.

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I was particularly impressed by installations allowing visitors to experience the rooms of the Maison Mallet while also employing a varied array of media to make the visit fresh and exciting. The Grand Salon, for example, presents chairs grouped around tables with imbedded screens. A film explaining the essential ideas of the Reformation alternates between these screens and two pier-glasses, which themselves turn into screens during parts of the presentation. I found the multimedia display entertaining and clever; the process of watching the film was made more active as the eye was forced to also experience the room, and, for me, the installation provides a rare case in which Philippe Starck’s translucent ‘Louis Ghost’ chairs serve as an appropriate solution, lightening the density of the room while still acknowledging the eighteenth-century setting.

I was also intrigued by the way the exhibition works well for very different intellectual levels. From a scholarly point of view, the information is satisfying, even as the presentations (in both French and English) are easy to understand. The film in the Grand Salon, for instance, is narrated from the point of view of a child, a ‘customer group’ that in my eyes often is not considered sufficiently. Likewise, some dioramas with cutout copies of engravings animated by the turn of a crank handle are positioned at the height of small children.

The efforts of the museum were rewarded in 2007 with the prestigious Museum Prize of the Council of Europe. The International Museum of the Reformation is well worth a visit, and the quick 45-minute walk-through you originally had in mind might extend into a longer visit. If you have energy and time left afterward, you could visit the adjoining St. Pierre Cathedral and the archaeological site under the present thirteenth-century structure, with ruins of earlier churches dating back to the fourth century (the site’s importance was recognized with a Europa Nostra Award in 2008).

Tobias Locker is an art historian and lecturer based in Barcelona/Spain. His research focuses on furniture and decorative arts of the eighteenth century in Europe.

Press release (23 April 2014) from the Royal Collection Trust:

Frogmore. Photo by Gill Hicks from Wikimedia Commons, 2006.

Frogmore House and Garden—the charming royal retreat set within Windsor Castle’s magnificent private Home Park—will open to the public on 3, 4 and 5 June, as part of the annual Charity Garden Open Days, and on 16, 17 and 18 August 2014.

Built in the 17th century, Frogmore became a royal residence in 1792 when George III purchased it for his wife, Queen Charlotte. Since then successive monarchs have enjoyed the tranquil surroundings and delightful interiors. Although it is no longer an occupied royal residence, it is frequently used today by the Royal Family for private entertaining.

The interior of Frogmore House bears testimony to the interests and talents of the generations of the royal family who have resided there. Queen Charlotte’s passion for botany is particularly evident. She commissioned Mary Moser, the renowned 18th-century flower painter, to decorate one of Frogmore’s principal rooms to resemble an arbour open to the skies. The result was said to be the Queen’s favourite room in the house. George III and Queen Charlotte’s third daughter, Princess Elizabeth, continued the floral theme and decorated The Cross Gallery, which spans the entire breadth of the building, with painted flower garlands.

Victoria, Duchess of Kent, lived at Frogmore for almost 20 years and works by the Duchess and her daughter, Queen Victoria, can be seen on display within the house. Queen Victoria was a frequent visitor during her long widowhood. Watercolours painted by her daughters, the Princesses Victoria and Louise, can also be seen at Frogmore.

The gardens at Frogmore House are one of its most enduring attractions. In 1867, Queen Victoria wrote “this dear lovely garden. . . all is peace and quiet and you only hear the hum of the bees, the singing of the birds.” First laid out for Queen Charlotte in the 1790s with 4,000 new shrubs and trees, it is based on a model ‘picturesque’ landscape. Garden features such as a Gothic Ruin, designed with the assistance of her daughter, Princess Elizabeth, were added shortly afterwards.

The design and planting scheme seen today incorporates additions made during Queen Victoria’s reign, and that of Queen Mary’s, who redesigned the gardens and introduced numerous flowering trees, shrubs and grasses, and some 200,000 bulbs. Numerous trees and shrubs, presented on the occasion of Her Majesty The Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, were subsequently added. Today, visitors can enjoy gentle garden walks and views of Queen Victoria’s Tea House, the white-marble Indian Kiosk, and the 18th-century lake.

Frogmore House and Garden are open on 3, 4 and 5 June in aid of the National Gardens Scheme, The Leprosy Mission and Parkinson’s UK respectively, and on 16, 17 and 18 August. Tickets and visitor information: www.royalcollection.org.uk.