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The genesis of Sutton Scarsdale
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
Extract
Ever since the famous lead plate of Sutton Scarsdale was found (and lost again) we have known that its architect was Francis Smith, but the genesis of the design has been something of a mystery. Howard Colvin, for example, is disinclined to believe that Smith could have done it on his own: ‘the contrast between the confident grandeur of Sutton Scarsdale and Stoneleigh’s gauche assemblage of overcrowded windows and leggy pilasters is so striking that one cannot help suspecting a helping hand from Gibbs himself’. The influence at least of Gibbs seems incontestable, and the date when Sutton Scarsdale was begun, 1724, sorts well with this: since 1720 Smith had been surveyor at Ditchley — his earliest known collaboration with Gibbs — and since 1723 was in charge of the rebuilding of All Saints, Derby. Colvin has suggested the 1721 engraving of Gibbs’s (or Burrough’s) design for the University buildings at Cambridge as a source of several elements in the east front of Sutton Scarsdale, though there is no evidence that Smith had anything to do with the building of the Senate House, the completed design of which moves somewhat away from Smith’s elevation, which indeed is far from being a copy of any other known work. A fairly obvious source of general influence is Chatsworth, close enough to Sutton for Smith to have seen it on journeys to the site, confirming what he might have noticed in the first volume of Vitruvius Britannicus: the long unpedimented south façade of Chatsworth is not very unlike the north front of Sutton, both of whose principal elevations show the characteristic frown induced by leading the keystones of the upper windows to meet the lowest fascia of the main architrave — a feature given almost excessive prominence at Chatsworth but, so far as I know, only once used by Gibbs — at Cannons, where the effect is softened by sculptured heads in all the keys. The two main façades of Cannons, however, and John Price’s related design for Chandos’s house in Cavendish Square may nevertheless have something to do with the making of Sutton Scarsdale.
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- Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1981
References
Notes
1 The plate was first reported by Jourdain, Margaret (Country Life, XLV (1919), 171)Google Scholar; its details were reprinted in Colvin, Dictionary (2nd edn), p. 751.
2 Colvin, op. cit., p. 748.
3 Loc. cit. The engraving is reproduced in Summerson, Architecture in Britain 1530-1830, pl. 115b.
4 The severe effect of banded rustication as on the east front of Sutton Scarsdale is indeed quite unlike that of masonry in which all the joints, vertical as well as horizontal, are deeply channelled.
5 Plates 75-76.
6 The evidence of pediments on the end elevations not only indicates that the building was intended to stand free on at least three sides but suggests a presumably accidental relationship with the Senate House; by a further coincidence the main elevation would have been of exactly the same length (120 ft, which is also the approximate length of the elevations shown in the other three drawings). The Senate House may indeed have been a half-remembered influence on this design, which — if I am right in my suggestions about the other three — there may be some reason to associate with plans in the early 1720s to rebuild Derby town hall. In view of the previous home of these drawings it should perhaps also be pointed out that there is a certain similarity between this design and the appearance on the south front of Compton Verney of a balustraded centrepiece interrupting (though without an extra storey) otherwise continuous eaves: this and the pedimented end elevations seem to be the only points of resemblance.
7 Only E 6 and E 8 have a scale, but the identity of so many features shows that E 6 and 7 were clearly drawn to the same scale. E 7 is inscribed (faintly) ‘The new Front’. (Parts of the previous Sutton Scarsdale were retained when the new house was built, and fragments remain on the south side.)
8 V. & A. D 129-1891; illustrated in Downes, Vanbrugh, pl. 86, and dated by him c.1715.
9 Smith will have been building the Venetian window at All Saints, Derby, at about this time.
10 It has not been possible to measure the entablature and parapet, and details of the balustrade — which has been destroyed, though the dies remain — are in the Sutton Scarsdale drawings somewhat a matter of guess-work. The vertical proportions have, however, been calculated from photographs and are, I think, fairly accurate; the façades up to architrave level were measured.
11 If E 5 was to be a façade at right angles to E 6 or 7 the resulting house would have been square, assuming a symmetrical plan. (E 5 may on the other hand have been a third version of the others.) The plan of Sutton Scarsdale is in fact very irregular with a deep courtyard to the west and a conglomerate south side incorporating fragments of an earlier house. The plan in Jourdain’s article (p. 172) is very inaccurate.
12 The precise form of the doorcase may possibly owe something to plates in volume 1 of Rossi’s Studio d’ Architettura Civile (1702) which there is good reason to believe Smith owned or had access to (see e.g. pls 130 and 138). But in fact the whole unit of door and window is simply a more fluent and assured version of the central features of the main front of William Smith’s Stanford Hall, built in the early 1700s. (Compare the related frontispiece at Hanbury, dated 1701.)
13 See, for example, Lees-Milne, English Country Houses: Baroque, pl. 189.
14 Vitruvius Britannicus, vol. 11, pls 32-34.
15 See the detailed study in Book 1, Chapter XVII, though this lacks the feature of the Vitruvian basketwork incorporated at Sutton Scarsdale but not on the Senate House. Smith might have picked up something like this from the Michelangelesque capital illustrated by Rossi (vol. 1, pl. 20). Hulsbergh’s engraving of Cholmondely is not precise enough to show in detail what the capitals were like. Capitals at Chicheley are identical with those on the exactly contemporary Sutton.
16 See Badeslade, & Rocque, , Vitruvius Britanniens, vol. IV, pls 11–12 Google Scholar.
17 Ibid., pls 24-27.
18 Ibid., pls 28-29.
19 If my speculations about the nature of these drawings are correct, their having been at Compton Verney unfortunately does nothing to support Kerry Downes’s attribution of that house to Smith (English Baroque Architecture, p. 95), for it was built in 1714, ten years before Sutton Scarsdale. Sutton now belongs to the Department of the Environment: the ruins have been cleared of encroaching vegetation and the outer walls can be easily seen, but the house is not yet ready for opening to the public.