

ASTON HALL, WARWICKSHIRE 7 



It has no trace of traditional English design about it (see 

 Fig. 22). To us it appears a beautiful building, but by no 

 means abnormal, because we can see many others of the same 

 type. But to those who saw it when it was just built, it was 

 something entirely novel, something in which they sought in 

 vain for any of the customary devices for producing archi- 

 tectural effect. Doubtless it was a stimulant, but it did not 

 revolutionise English architecture. Indeed, it was only Inigo 

 Jones, and after him his pupil John Webb, who could pretend 

 to work on such learned lines. The ordinary surveyors of 

 whom there must have been a large number, although their 

 names have not survived still worked in the hybrid style in 

 which they had been trained, with the result that such a house 

 as Aston Hall, near Birmingham, which was completed in 1635, 

 is thoroughly Jacobean in character (Fig. 2), although of sufficient 

 importance to have warranted the adoption of the latest ideas in 

 design, had they been at all widespread. 



There is one point, however, in which Aston Hall shows the 

 impending change in house-planning, and that is the disposition 

 of the great hall. It is entered in the middle of one side, instead 

 of through screens at the end, thus making a large vestibule of 

 it instead of a living-room. The same treatment is to be found 

 in some of the plans of John Smithson, an eminent architect of 

 the time ; and an examination of his drawings will presently 

 be undertaken, in order to illustrate the steps which led from 

 the Jacobean style to the more fully developed classic. 



Nothing illustrates this change more aptly than a comparison 

 between Smithson's drawings and those of Inigo Jones and 

 John Webb. The first are Jacobean, the second are classic. In 

 the Jacobean are seen efforts to sever the ties which ancient 

 traditions still imposed ; a striving after Italian detail, which 

 was never thoroughly achieved ; a mixture of a little old- 

 fashioned romance, with a little new-fashioned learning. In 

 the classic are seen an ignoring of tradition ; a mastery of 

 Italian methods ; a mixture of sound knowledge with a feeling 

 for good proportion. As an illustration of the first large 

 building in England conceived in the fully developed classic 

 style, nothing could be better than the drawing made by 

 Thomas Sandby about the middle of the eighteenth century, 

 showing how the great palace designed for Charles I. would have 

 appeared (see Fig. i). It is also interesting in connection with 



