Inigo Jones
Inigo Jones, (born July 15, 1573, Smithfield, London,
Eng.—died June 21, 1652, London), British painter,
architect, and designer who founded the English classical
tradition of architecture. The Queen’s House (1616–19) at
Greenwich, London, his first major work, became a part of
the National Maritime Museum in 1937. His greatest
achievement is the Banqueting House (1619–22) at Whitehall.
Jones’s only other surviving royal building is the Queen’s
Chapel (1623–27) at St. James’s Palace.
Jones was the son of a cloth worker also
called Inigo. Of the architect’s early life little is
recorded, but he was probably apprenticed to a joiner. By
1603 he had visited Italy long enough to acquire skill in
painting and design and to attract the patronage of King
Christian IV of Denmark and Norway, at whose court he was
employed for a time before returning to England. There he is
next heard of as a “picture maker” (easel painter).
Christian IV’s sister, Anne, was the queen of James I of
England, a fact that may have led to Jones’s employment by
her in 1605 to design the scenes and costumes of a masque,
the first of a long series he designed for her and later for
the king. The words to these masques were often supplied by
Ben Jonson, the scenery, costumes, and effects nearly always
by Jones. More than 450 drawings by him, representing work
on 25 masques, a pastoral, and two plays ranging in date
between 1605 and 1641, survive at Chatsworth House,
Derbyshire.
From 1605 until 1610 Jones probably
regarded himself as primarily under the queen’s protection,
but he was patronized also by Robert Cecil, 1st earl of
Salisbury, for whom he produced his earliest known
architectural work, a design for the New Exchange in the
Strand (c. 1608; demolished in the 18th century). Though a
somewhat immature design, the work was more sophisticated
than anything being done in England at the time. Some
designs (later superseded) for the restoration and
improvement of Old St. Paul’s Cathedral also date from this
period, and in 1610 Jones was given an appointment that
confirmed the direction of his future career. He became
surveyor of works to the heir to the throne, Henry, prince
of Wales.
This appointment, with all its promise,
was short-lived, and Jones did little or nothing for the
prince before the latter’s death in 1612. In 1613, however,
he was compensated by the guarantee of still higher office
on the death of the king’s surveyor of works, Simon Basil.
To this office Jones succeeded in 1615, in the meantime
having taken the opportunity offered him by Thomas Howard,
2nd earl of Arundel, to revisit Italy. Arundel and his
party, including Jones, left England in April 1613 and
proceeded to Italy, spending the winter of 1613–14 in Rome.
In the course of the visit Jones had ample opportunity to
study works by modern masters as well as antique ruins. Of
the masters, the one to whom he attached the greatest
importance was Andrea Palladio, the Italian architect who
had gained wide influence through his The Four Books of
Architecture (1570; I quattro libri dell’architettura),
which Jones took with him on his tour. Returning to England
in the autumn of 1614, Jones had completed his
self-education as a classical architect.
Jones’s career as surveyor of works to
James I and Charles I lasted from 1615 to 1643. During most
of those 28 years he was continuously employed in the
building, rebuilding, or improvement of royal houses. His
first important undertaking was the Queen’s House at
Greenwich, based to some extent on the Medici villa at
Poggio a Caiano, near Florence, but detailed in a style
closer to Palladio or Vincenzo Scamozzi (1552–1616). Work
there was suspended on the death of Queen Anne in 1619 and
completed only in 1635 for Charles’s queen, Henrietta Maria.
The building, considerably altered, now houses part of the
National Maritime Museum.
In 1619 the Banqueting House at Whitehall
was destroyed by fire; and between that year and 1622 Jones
replaced it with what has always been regarded as his
greatest achievement. The Banqueting House consists of one
great chamber, raised on a vaulted basement. It was
conceived internally as a basilica on the Vitruvian model
but without aisles, the superimposed columns being set
against the walls, which support a flat, beamed ceiling. For
the main panels of this ceiling, allegorical paintings by
Peter Paul Rubens were commissioned by Charles I and set in
place in 1635. The exterior echoes the arrangement of the
interior, with pilasters and regular columns set against
rusticated walling.
The Banqueting House has only two complete
facades. The ends were never completed, and this has given
rise to the supposition that the building was intended to
form part of a larger whole. This may have been so, and it
is certain that Charles I, nearly 20 years after the
Banqueting House was built, instructed Jones to prepare
designs for rebuilding the whole of Whitehall Palace. These
designs exist (at Worcester College, Oxford, and at
Chatsworth House) and are among Jones’s most interesting
creations. They owe something to the palace of El Escorial
near Madrid but are worked out in terms deriving partly from
Palladio and Scamozzi and partly from Jones’s own studies of
the antique.
Jones’s work was not confined to royal
palaces. He was much involved in the regulation of new
buildings in London, and out of this activity emerged the
project that he planned in 1630 for the 4th earl of Bedford
on his land at Covent Garden. This comprised a large open
space bounded on the north and east by arcaded houses, on
the south by the earl’s garden wall, and on the west by a
church with flanking gateways connecting to two single
houses. The design probably derives partly from the piazza
in Livorno, Italy, and partly from the Place Royale (now the
Place des Vosges) in Paris. None of the original houses
survive, but the church of St. Paul still stands, though
much altered. Its portico is an instance, unique in Europe
at its date of construction, of the use of the primitive
Tuscan order of architecture.
With Covent Garden, Jones introduced
formal town planning to London—it is the first London
“square.” He was probably instrumental, from 1638, in
creating another square by planning the layout of the houses
in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, one of the houses (Lindsey House,
still existing at No. 59 and 60) being attributed to him.
The most important undertaking of Jones’s
later years in office was the restoration of Old St. Paul’s
Cathedral in 1633–42. This included not only the repair of
the 14th-century choir but the entire recasing, in
rusticated masonry, of the Romanesque nave and transepts and
the building of a new west front with a portico (56 feet [17
metres] high) of 10 columns. This portico, among Jones’s
most ambitious and subtly calculated works, tragically
vanished with the rebuilding of the cathedral after the
Great Fire of London in 1666. (In 1997 more than 70 carved
stones from the portico were excavated from the building’s
foundations.) Jones’s work at St. Paul’s considerably
influenced Sir Christopher Wren and is reflected in some of
his city churches as well as in his early designs for
rebuilding the cathedral.
At the outbreak of the English Civil Wars
in 1642, Jones was compelled to relinquish his office as
surveyor of works and left London. He was captured at the
siege of Basing House in 1645. His estate was temporarily
confiscated, and he was heavily fined. In the following
year, however, his pardon was confirmed by the House of
Lords and his estate restored. In the year of Charles I’s
execution, 1649, he was doing work at Wilton for the earl of
Pembroke, but the great double-cube room there is probably
mostly the work of his pupil John Webb, who survived to
reestablish something of the Jones tradition after the
Restoration in 1660. Jones was buried with his parents in
the church of St. Benet, Paul’s Wharf, in London.
Sir John Summerson
Encyclopædia Britannica
