The plan is as different from the traditional plan of English houses
as are those in Kent’s “Designs of Inigo Jones,” a collection which
will be dealt with more particularly later on. There is no great hall
connecting the parlours with the kitchens, and serving itself as one
of the chief living-rooms. The servants are relegated to the basement,
the whole of the ground floor is given up to the family, the hall is
more of a vestibule than a living-room. In former times the staircase,
although often handsomely treated, consisted of a single series of
flights occupying a compact space. At Coleshill a vast hall is devoted
to the staircase, or rather to two staircases, each equally eligible,
starting from the same place and terminating at either end of the same
landing (Fig. 30).
Although the servants were sent half underground, some of the
stateliness followed them, and the approach to the back door is flanked
by two massive pillars, each of which contains a coved niche.
[Illustration: FIG. 32.--Raynham Park, Norfolk. Ground Plan.]
The building is attributed to Inigo Jones on the testimony of a tablet
in the house, and its date, according to the same authority, is 1650.
In the absence of any other evidence this assertion, although not
contemporaneous with the building, may be accepted;[21] but it should
be remembered that Jones died in 1652, and that the last years of his
life, or almost the last, were spent in the turmoil of the Civil War.
So much did the unrest disturb his life that he appointed John Webb
to be his deputy in the office of surveyor of the works.[22] In any
case it must have been either Jones or Webb who designed Coleshill,
for there was nobody else who had at that time received the training
necessary to produce it.
There are several fine ceilings (Fig. 31) wrought in Jones’s bold
fashion, which was as different from that which produced the busy and
slender patterns of Elizabethan work, as was the general treatment
of plan and elevation from that of an Elizabethan mansion. It is
interesting to find one of the smaller rooms panelled in an earlier
style, Jacobean in character, with panelling designed for its position,
not imported from elsewhere; and as it is difficult to suppose that
Jones would have departed from his usual manner in this particular
case, it is probable that the room was left to the unaided skill of
some local craftsman, who relied on his own traditions.
[Illustration: FIG. 33.--RAYNHAM PARK, NORFOLK,
_cir._ 1636. GARDEN FRONT.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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