It’s lunchtime on James Miller’s sculpture tour in Warwickshire and Northants. (Why do some English counties have an abbreviation and others don’t? It is not the case in Ireland.) Cars roll onto the greensward outside the Private Chapel of St James at Great Packington. Following instructions we park in a huge circle, car bonnets facing out and sit inside the circle. It looks like a scene from Wagon Train.
The chapel is unlike any church I have seen in the British Isles. The brick exterior is forbidding, those bits not obscured by trees. Four corner towers are topped by shallow domes giving it an Eastern aspect. It could have been designed by Soane, but it wasn’t. It was built at the end of the 18th century (1789-90). It is unusual and I had time to contemplate it eating home-made sausage rolls, salmon-mayo baps, quiche and strawberries accompanied by appropriate wines.
What does Pevsner make of it? “If one were to name the most important and the most impressive English church of the ending C18, Great Packington would be the first to come to mind. Moreover, here is the one building in England, not by Soane, which deserves to be grouped with those by Ledoux in France and Gilly in Prussia. Joseph Bonomi for the sake of this one church deserves to be a household word of English architecture, which he is not.” Pevsner approves.
Bonomi was born in Rome in 1739, where he was educated and studied architecture. He came to London in 1767 to work for Robert and James Adam and shuttled between Rome and London until 1784 when he stayed put in England. Great Packington was not his only ecclesiastical commission but he designed many more country houses, including Packington Hall. A paper read at RIBA in the 19th century explains his technique.
The style adopted by him was the Italian or modernised Roman; and he sought to obtain the characteristic effect appropriate to the object of his design, rather by just proportions and good details than by unnecessary ornamentation and littleness of parts, thus exhibiting his preference for the “Architecturesque” over the “Picturesque.”
Time to take a look inside and I was astounded. Pevsner’s description:
“After this rudely utilitarian, completely and totally unornamented exterior, the interior is overwhelming. It is all faced in smooth, painted ashlar stone, walls as well as vaults. Set in the corners of the centre, as if to carry the vault, are four rose-coloured sandstone columns, and they are of the Greek Doric order, excessively sturdy, with an excessive entasis and weighed down by a piece of triglyph frieze.”
The picture gives some idea but fails to create the Wow! factor when seen as a whole. Note, the walls are painted to create the patchwork effect. Bonomi did a make-over at Packington Hall in 1782 designing the Pompeian Room to exhibit the 4th Earl of Aylesford’s Etruscan vases and it is interesting to see how far he has come since this earlier work; a braver more confident, minimalist Bonomi with an equally uncompromising patron. No sculpture in sight, so why did James Miller bring us here?
To be continued.
Bertie’s favourite radio programme: Farming Today.