Biography

Sir John Vanbrugh

The great playwright-turned architect, John Vanbrugh, was born in London in 1664. His father, Giles Vanbrugh, was a successful merchant in the city who moved to Chester not long after John’s birth, maybe as a result of the Great Plague in 1665. His mother, Elizabeth, came from a well-connected political family and his grandfather, Sir Dudley Carleton, had been a minor diplomat under Charles I. Almost nothing is known of his youth and upbringing, but it has been thought (without evidence) he must have been educated at Chester Grammar School. He had clear, well-educated handwriting and given the number of drawings and sketches which survive from later in his life, it can be imagined he enjoyed drawing as a child. He started life in the wine trade, but the firm he worked for went bust, so instead he joined the East India Company and travelled to India to make his fortune but was unhappy once there and quickly returned home

vanbrugh

Political Activism

Vanbrugh joined the English army in 1685, the first year of the reign of James II. James was trying to reintroduce Catholicism, to the horror of mainly Protestant England. Vanbrugh left the army, worked for another cousin outside Oxford, and, in the summer of 1688, travelled to Holland to join forces with those who were encouraging Protestant William of Orange, James II’s brother-in-law, to invade and take the throne. Vanbrugh got himself arrested in Calais before the invasion and spent the first four years of the reign of William and Mary in prisons in France. It can be assumed Vanbrugh was a supporter of the Revolution Settlement which installed William and Mary as joint monarchs answerable to parliament. When he returned to England in 1693, he was close friends with a number of prominent Whig politicians, supporters of Protestantism, war against France and the new regime. He was made a member of their club, known as the Kit-Cat Club. The Club’s dinners were an opportunity for politicians and writers to enjoy each other’s company and this introduced Vanbrugh to many of the grandees who later employed him to design their country houses.

Playwrighting

Vanbrugh’s big break came not as an architect, but as a playwright. In January 1696, he went to see Love’s Last Shift, by a young playwright, Colley Cibber. Certain he could pen a better version of it, he wrote The Relapse which was performed at the same theatre in Drury Lane later in the year. It was a huge success and encouraged him to dig out another play, The Provoked Wife, written some time earlier, maybe when he was in gaol. Both plays were funny, clever and a bit lewd. They were attacked by a clergyman, Jeremy Collier, as immoral and profane, which probably only enhanced his reputation at the Kit-Cat Club. The plays made him well-known and, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he was regarded as just as important as a playwright as an architect.

Playwright

Architecture

Vanbrugh’s first major architectural project was the design of Castle Howard, the huge and architecturally exciting house in Yorkshire, for his friend and fellow Kit-Cat Club member, the Earl of Carlisle. Nobody knows why the Earl entrusted such an ambitious commission to someone who, so far as is known, had never designed anything. But Vanbrugh had enormous self-confidence and in summer 1699 travelled round the north of England staying with other members of the nobility who had recently built country houses, showing off his preliminary drawings and seeking their advice.

His work was publicly recognised and rewarded when Queen Anne was succeeded by a cousin, the Protestant George of Hanover, and Vanbrugh was the first person to be knighted in the new reign. After this he designed more houses and an array of magnificent garden buildings for his old friends.

One of his commissions was for George Dodington at Eastbury, near Blandford Forum in Dorset. Dodington had made a fortune from profiteering during Marlborough’s wars (1702 - 13), and asked Vanbrugh to design a huge house for him. No expense was to be spared in either the interior of the house or its gardens and it was on a scale not much inferior to Blenheim. Dodington died in 1720, but work continued under his nephew, George Bubb Dodington and to those who visited in the 1720s, it was an astonishing house. But it was demolished in 1782 and only one of the side wings survives in private ownership.

Vanbrugh’s last big house was for Admiral Sir George Delaval on his family estate east of Newcastle. Seaton Delaval is an immensely bold, highly original design, — a stronghold for the family and a suitable reminder of Vanbrugh’s flamboyant imagination.

Legacy

Vanbrugh died on 26 March 1726. He was buried in St. Stephen’s, Walbrook, London, which had been designed by Sir Christopher Wren. During his lifetime, there was much criticism of his free and inventive style of architecture, sometimes considered too expensive and not designed in a way which followed antique and classical rules. But the next generation of architects, including Robert Adam and William Chambers, admired it for the very reasons that it had previously been disliked. It was seen as ambitious, designed with a strong sense of overall composition and a feeling of what Robert Adam described as ‘movement’.

Less than a century after his death, the architect John Soane described him as ‘The Shakespeare of Architects’, with ‘all the fire and power of Michael Angelo and Bernini’. He is one of the architects who has a statue on the Albert Memorial. In the twentieth century, he was much admired by the American architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, the designers of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. Robert Venturi used photographs of Blenheim and Grimsthorpe to illustrate his book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which is about how important it is to think of architecture not just as a way of solving problems of use, but in terms of its abstract power, originality and compositional effect.

Bibliography

Biography and Architecture

Gilbert Lovegrove, The Life, Work, and Influence of Sir John Vanbrugh (London, 1902).

Christian Barman, Sir John Vanbrugh (London: Ernest Benn, 1924)

H. Avray Tipping and Christopher Hussey, The Work of John Vanbrugh and School 1699– 1736 (London: Country Life, 1928)

Geoffrey Webb, Vanbrugh’s Complete Works (London: Nonesuch Press, 1928)

Laurence Whistler, Sir John Vanbrugh: Architect & Dramatist 1664–1726 (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1938)

Laurence Whistler, The Imagination of Vanbrugh and His Fellow Artists (London: Art and Technics, 1954)

David Green, Blenheim Palace (London: Country Life, 1951)

Kerry Downes, Sir John Vanbrugh: A Biography (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987),

Kerry Downes, ‘Vanbrugh over Fifty Years’ in Christopher Ridgway and Robert Williams (eds.), Sir John Vanbrugh and Landscape Architecture in Baroque England 1690–1730 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000),

Geoffrey Beard, The Work of John Vanbrugh (London: B.T. Batsford, 1986)

Giles Worsley, In Search of the English Baroque: English Architecture in a European Context 1660–1725 with a chapter on ‘Vanbrugh and the Search for an English Architecture’ based on ‘Sir John Vanbrugh and the Search for a National Style’ in Michael Hall (ed.), Gothic Architecture and its Meanings 1550–1830 (Reading: Spire Books, 2002)

Vaughan Hart, Sir John Vanbrugh: Storyteller in Stone (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008),

Jeremy Musson, The Country Houses of Sir John Vanbrugh (London: Aurum, 2008)

Gavin Stamp, ‘Shakespeare in Stone’, first published in Apollo, January 2009 and republished in Anti-Ugly: Excursions in English Architecture and Design (London: Aurum, 2013)

Anthony Geraghty, ‘Castle Howard and the Interpretation of English Baroque Architecture’ in M. Hallett et al. (eds.), Court, Country, City: Essays on British Art and Architecture, 1660– 1735, Studies in British Art, 24 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), pp 127–149.

Anthony Geraghty, Wren, Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor: Three Baroque Architects, Three Baroque Buildings (forthcoming)

James Legard, 'Queen Anne, Court Culture and the Construction of Blenheim Palace’ (Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 37:2, 2014, pp 185-197)

Charles Saumarez Smith, John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture (London: Lund Humphries, 2025)

Rory Fraser, Castles in the Air: John Vanbrugh and the Birth of Britain (London: William Collins, 2026)

Theatre

Bonamy Dobrée, Essays in Biography 1680–1725 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925)

Madeleine Bingham, Masks and Façades: Sir John Vanbrugh, The Man in his Setting (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974)

Judith Milhous, ‘New Light on Vanbrugh’s Haymarket Theatre Project’ (Theatre Studies, 17, 1976, pp 143–161)

Judith Milhous, Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1695– 1708 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979)

Curtis Price, ‘The Critical Decade for English Music Drama, 1700–1710’ (Harvard Library Bulletin, 26, 1978, pp 38–76).

Graham F. Barlow, ‘Vanbrugh’s Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket, 1703–9’ (Early Music, 17:4, 1989, pp 515– 21).

Frank McCormick, Sir John Vanbrugh: The Playwright as Architect (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991)

Frank McCormick, Sir John Vanbrugh: A reference guide (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1992).

Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture 1688–1715 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)

Joseph Hone, Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)

R.O. Bucholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993)

James A. Winn, Queen Anne: Patroness of the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)

Gardens

Christopher Ridgway and Robert Williams, Sir John Vanbrugh and Landscape Architecture in Baroque England 1690–1730 (Stroud: Sutton, 2000)

Tim Richardson, The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden (London: Bantam Books, 2007)

Caroline Dalton, Sir John Vanbrugh and the Vitruvian Landscape (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012)

David Jacques, Gardens of Court and Country: English Design 1630–1730 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016)

Tim Richardson, The English Landscape Garden: Dreaming of Arcadia (London: Frances Lincoln, 2024)

General Reading

David Green, Sarah Duchess of Marlborough (London: Collins, 1967)

Frances Harris, A Passion for Government: The Life of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)

Ophelia Field, The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002)

Ophelia Field, The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation (London: Harper, 2008)

Frances Harris, The General in Winter: The Marlborough-Godolphin Friendship and the Reign of Queen Anne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)

Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London: Allen Lane, 2006)

Ruth Paley and Paul Seaward (eds.), Honour, Interest and Power: An Illustrated History of the House of Lords, 1660–1715 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010)

Helen Jacobsen, Luxury and Power: The Material World of the Stuart Diplomat, 1660–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)

Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)