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Queen’s House is a former royal residence built between 1616 and 1635 near Greenwich Palace, a few miles down-river from the City of London and now in the London Borough of Greenwich. It presently forms a central focus of what is now the Old Royal Naval College with a grand vista leading to the River Thames. Its architect was Inigo Jones, for whom it was a crucial early commission, for Anne of Denmark, the queen of King James VI and I. Queen’s House is one of the most important buildings in British architectural history, being the first consciously classical building to have been constructed in the country. It was Jones’s first major commission after returning from his 1613–1615 grand tour of Roman, Renaissance, and Palladian architecture in Italy.
Some earlier English buildings, such as Longleat and Burghley House, had made borrowings from the classical style, but these were restricted to small details not applied in a systematic way, or the building may be a mix of different styles. Furthermore, the form of these buildings was not informed by an understanding of classical precedents. Queen’s House would have appeared revolutionary to English eyes in its day. Jones is credited with the introduction of Palladianism with the construction of Queen’s House, although it diverges from the mathematical constraints of Palladio, and it is likely that the immediate precedent for the H-shaped plan straddling a road is the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano by Giuliano da Sangallo.
Today the building is both a Grade I listed building and a scheduled monument, a status that includes the 115-foot-wide (35 m), axial vista to the River Thames. The house now forms part of the National Maritime Museum and is used to display parts of its substantial collection of maritime paintings and portraits.
Early history
The Queen’s House is located in Greenwich, London. It was built as an adjunct to the Tudor Palace of Greenwich, previously known, before its redevelopment by Henry VII as the Palace of Placentia, which was a rambling, mainly red-brick building in a more vernacular style. This would have presented a dramatic contrast of appearance to the newer, white-painted House, although the latter was much smaller and really a modern version of an older tradition of private ‘garden houses’, not a public building, and one used only by the queen’s privileged inner circle. The original building, in fact, was intended as a pavilion with a bridge over the London-Dover road, which ran between high walls through the park of the palace.
Construction of the house began in 1616 but work on the house stopped in April 1618 when Anne became ill and died the next year. Work restarted when the house was given to the queen consort Henrietta Maria in 1629 by King Charles I, and the house was structurally complete by 1635.
However, the house’s original use was short—no more than seven years—before the English Civil War began in 1642 and swept away the court culture from which it sprang. Of its interiors, three ceilings and some wall decorations survive in part, but no interior remains in its original state. This process began as early as 1662, when masons removed a niche and term figures and a chimneypiece.
Paintings commissioned by Charles I for the house from Orazio Gentileschi, but now elsewhere, include a ceiling Allegory of Peace and the Arts, now installed at Marlborough House, London, a large Finding of Moses, now on loan from a private collection to the National Gallery, London, and a matching Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife still in the Royal Collection.
The Queen’s House, though it was scarcely being used, provided the distant focal centre for Sir Christopher Wren’s Greenwich Hospital, with a logic and grandeur that has seemed inevitable to architectural historians but in fact depended on Mary II’s insistence that the vista to the water from the Queen’s House not be impaired.
Construction of the Greenwich Hospital
Although the house survived as an official building – being used for the lying-in-state of Commonwealth Generals-at-Sea Richard Dean (1653) and Robert Blake (1657) – the main palace was progressively demolished from the 1660s to 1690s and replaced by the Royal Hospital for Seamen,[12] built 1696–1751 to the master-plan of Sir Christopher Wren. This is now called the Old Royal Naval College, after its later use from 1873 to 1998. The position of the house, and Queen Mary II’s order that it retain its view to the river (only gained on demolition of the older Palace), dictated Wren’s Hospital design of two matching pairs of ‘courts’ separated by a grand ‘visto’ exactly the width of the house (115 ft). Wren’s first plan, which was blocking the view to the Thames, became known to history as “Christopher Wren’s faux pas”. The whole ensemble at Greenwich forms an impressive architectural vista that stretches from the Thames to Greenwich Park, and is one of the principal features that in 1997 led UNESCO to inscribe ‘Maritime Greenwich’ as a World Heritage Site.
19th-century additions
From 1806 the house itself was the centre of what, from 1892, became the Royal Hospital School for the sons of seamen. This necessitated new accommodation wings, and a flanking pair to east and west were added and connected to the house by colonnades from 1807 (designed by London Docks architect Daniel Asher Alexander), with further surviving extensions up to 1876. In 1933 the school moved to Holbrook, Suffolk. Its Greenwich buildings, including the house, were converted and restored to become the new National Maritime Museum (NMM), created by Act of Parliament in 1934 and opened in 1937.
The grounds immediately to the north of the house were reinstated in the late 1870s following construction of the cut-and-cover tunnel between Greenwich and Maze Hill stations. The tunnel comprised the continuation of the London and Greenwich Railway and opened in 1878.
Recent years
In 2012, the grounds to the south of the Queen’s House were used to house a stadium for the equestrian events of the Olympic Games. The modern pentathlon was also staged in the grounds of Greenwich Park. The Queen’s House itself was used as a VIP centre for the games. Work to prepare the Queen’s House involved some internal re-modelling and work on the lead roof to prepare it for security and camera installations.
The house underwent a 14-month restoration beginning in 2015, and reopened on 11 October 2016. One controversial feature was a new ceiling in the main hall created by artist Richard Wright, a Turner prize winner. The house had previously been restored between 1986 and 1999, with contemporary insertions that modernised the building. In some quarters, it provoked some debate: an editorial in The Burlington Magazine, November 1995, alluded to “the recent transformation of the Queen’s House into a theme-park interior of fake furniture and fireplaces, tatty modern plaster casts and clip-on chandeliers”. It is now largely used to display the Museum’s substantial collection of marine paintings and portraits of the 17th to 20th centuries, and for other public and private events. It is normally open to the public daily, free of charge, along with the other museum galleries and the 17th-century Royal Observatory, Greenwich, which is also part of the National Maritime Museum.
(Wikipedia)
Das Queen’s House ist ein ehemaliges königliches Schloss im Londoner Stadtteil Greenwich.
Geschichte
Inigo Jones entwarf das Haus 1616 ursprünglich für Anna von Dänemark, die Frau von König Jakob I. Nach dem Tod der Königin wurde der Bau jedoch 1619 eingestellt, und Jones baute für den königlichen Palace of Whitehall das Banqueting House. 1629 beauftragte Karl I. Jones, das Haus für seine Gemahlin Henrietta Maria zu vollenden. Die Königin nutzte das 1635 fertiggestellte Haus als Rückzugsraum vom nahegelegenen Palace of Placentia für ihre engere Hofgesellschaft.
Nur sieben Jahre später (1642) beendete der Englische Bürgerkrieg die königliche Nutzung des Hauses. Unter der Regierung von Maria II und Wilhelm III. erfolgte der Abriss des alten Palace of Placentia. Christopher Wren erhielt den Auftrag, an dieser Stelle das Greenwich Hospital für Seeleute zu errichten. Maria II. gab Wren jedoch die Anweisung, das Queen’s House in diese Anlage miteinzubeziehen und die Blickachse zur Themse freizuhalten. Die heutige Anlage mit zwei gegenüberliegenden Gebäudekomplexen, welche das Queens House einrahmen, entstand zwischen 1696 und 1752.
Seit 1807 diente Queen’s House als Seemannsschule. Seit 1937 ist es Teil des National Maritime Museums. In dem Gebäude werden vorwiegend Marinegemälde und Porträts von Persönlichkeiten der Seefahrtsgeschichte ausgestellt.
Der Park von Greenwich einschließlich aller Gebäude wurde 1997 als Maritime Greenwich zum Weltkulturerbe der UNESCO ernannt.
Architektur
Oberhalb des alten Palace of Placentia verlief durch den königlichen Park die öffentliche Straße von Deptford nach Woolwich. Um vom Schloss in den oberen Teil des Parks zu gelangen, ohne jedoch diese Straße überqueren zu müssen, entwarf Inigo Jones einen geistreichen Plan. Parallel zur Straße sollten zwei rechteckige Gebäudeteile das Erdgeschoss bilden, während der erste Stock durch eine Art überdachter Brücke verbunden wird. Die Straße verlief also durch das Erdgeschoss des neuen Hauses. Nachdem die Straße verlegt wurde, ließ Karl II. 1661 durch John Webb die Seiten verschließen, so dass Queen’s House nun eine kubische Form hat. Für die neue Nutzung als Seemannsschule wurden 1807 von Daniel Asher Alexander neue Seitenflügel östlich und westlich des Gebäudes errichtet, die mit dem Queen’s House durch Kolonnadengänge verbunden wurden.
Queen’s House ist eines der bedeutendsten Gebäude der britischen Architekturgeschichte, da es das erste Bauwerk des Palladianismus in England war. Mit dem Bau wurde 1616 begonnen, durch die Bauverzögerung wurde es allerdings erst nach dem Banqueting House fertiggestellt, so dass dieses als das erste Bauwerk im Stil des palladianisch geprägten Klassizismus in England gilt. Inigo Jones hatte zwar die Architektur von Andrea Palladio studiert, aber das Vorbild für Queens House scheint eher Giuliano da Sangallos Villa Medici in Poggio a Caiano gewesen zu sein. Während der weitläufige Palace of Placentia mit seiner Fassade aus roten Ziegelsteinen eher unscheinbar wirkte, strahlte das viel kleinere Queen’s House in frischgestrichenem Weiß und ergab so einen beeindruckenden Kontrast. Das Bauwerk gilt mit seinen symmetrischen Proportionen, der hervorragenden Ausführung und der reichen Innenausstattung als ein Meisterwerk des Klassizismus. Das Verständnis für klassizistische Architektur war seinerzeit in Großbritannien wenig verbreitet und Queen’s House erschien den Zeitgenossen als revolutionär. Das Gebäude wirkte stilbildend und galt während der nächsten zwei Jahrhunderte als Vorbild für klassizistische Bauten und Herrenhäuser in ganz England.
Inneneinrichtung
Hauptraum des Hauses ist die kubusförmige Great Hall mit einem prächtigen, von Nicholas Stone gefertigten Marmorfußboden und einer geschnitzten Holzdecke. Die ursprünglich in der Decke vorhandenen Gemälde von Orazio Gentileschi vermachte Königin Anne ihrer Hofdame und zeitweiligen Vertrauten Sarah Churchill, die sie in ihrem Londoner Stadthaus Marlborough House einbauen ließ. Von der Great Hall führt die berühmte Tulpentreppe in das Obergeschoss. Die Treppe wurde von Jones entworfen und gilt als erste freitragende Wendeltreppe in England. Der Name rührt von der Dekoration im Geländer her, die jedoch keine Tulpen darstellen sollen, sondern Lilien als Reminiszenz an Königin Henrietta Maria aus dem Haus Bourbon. Im Obergeschoss befinden sich das Schlafzimmer der Königin und das Schlafzimmer des Königs, eine Treppe führt von dort hinunter in die Orangerie.
(Wikipedia)
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Publish date : 2025-01-21 10:27:52
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