The Garden Pavilion at Buckingham Palace

From The Artizan 3 (1845): 182-83.

 

Widely as mathematics and æsthetics differ in all other respects, they agree in one, namely, in having no royal road to them; no wonder, therefore, if royal taste be sometimes greatly at fault, more especially as very few ever care to tell it honestly of its faults. Rarely does the truth come out until is begins to break forth in the shape of ridicule or reproaches; as when George III. amused himself by building a plaything Gothic castle at Kew, which was so absurd that it was afterwards sentenced to be razed to the ground by the very same hands that had reared it. Royal cottages and Chinese fishing-houses have drawn down quite as much of satire as of compliment; and hardly need we observe that Buckingham Palace is scarcely ever spoken of or referred to as a building, except for censure, abuse, or contempt. To this last-mentioned most unlucky pile an appendage has lately been added, which, in our opinion, is no indication of any improvement in taste having taken place within that courtly precinct: we allude to the "Summer-house" which has of late been the subject of so much gossip, and of some scandal also, among the newspapers, on account of the frescoes in it, and of the summary and cavalier treatment which the production of one of the artists received. A good deal has been said about the "prudery" and "squeamishness" that ordered the removal of that unlucky performance; yet, knowing the predilections of the pencil from which it proceeded, we can readily conceive it to have been not particularly edifying, nor exactly in place. Unsuitableness as to place applies also to the building itself,—at least with regard to the exterior of it; for the taste is surely of a questionable kind, which could erect as an ornamental structure immediately facing the garden front of a royal palace, and directly before the windows of the principal suite of state-rooms, a building affecting to be externally in a sort of nondescript Swiss-cottage style. As a distant object in the grounds around a mansion, or else, if a near one, so situated as not to come forcibly into view from the residence itself, a sham cottage of the kind may be an allowable caprice; but even then, only provided the scene of which it forms the architectural feature be in keeping with it. Whereas, to put a cottage and a town-palace in actual propinquity with each other, even though the former be quite as smart and coquettish as a cottage upon the stage of an opera house, does surely savour very strongly of affectation and conceit, of the pride that apes humility. As a mere temporary erection for an al fresco fête, it would not have been amenable to criticism, since it would have disappeared and have been forgotten within a very few days. But now, there it stands, and probably will be allowed to stand, till some fresher whim pushes it aside.

 

To introduce anything assuming the appearance of a cottage at all, as a professedly ornamental object, where studied embellishment is naturally looked for, and pervades the spot itself, seems to us to be nearly as great a solecism in taste, as it would be to introduce patches of kitchen-garden into a parterre, or to make a dining-room sideboard resemble a kitchen-dresser, only a little spruced-up. A cottage may be a very picturesque object, and a very pleasing one, but it cannot possibly to rendered an æsthetic piece of architecture,--it cannot give us the artlessness of the one with the perfect refinement of art essential to the other; and, in our opinion, if anything was to be done at all, the particular occasion called most strongly for the display of the latter. There was here a most favourable opportunity of exhibiting, although upon a small scale, a specimen of the utmost degree of luxuriance which the Grecian style is susceptible of. A professedly ornamental façade characterized in every part of it by the same exquisite richness of embellishment, both as to design and execution, that stamps the ornamental details, as far as they go, of the Lysicrates monument and the Erechtheion, would have constituted an architectural bijou well befitting the garden attached to a royal abode, and what would, moreover, have been a decidedly architectural novelty; for in not one of our numerous copies or imitations of Greek architecture have we attempted either to restore, or to add any equivalent substitute for those embellishments which time has either partially or entirely obliterated from the structures professed to be taken as models. On the contrary, we pique ourselves upon buildings things after the Parthenon, without any sculpture at all. Thus, notwithstanding our excessive scrupulousness in many petty matters, we are both license-taking and unfaithful in the extreme, with regard to many of the most important and characteristic ones. To omit the sculpture of the Parthenon is nothing less than to omit its poetry; it is akin to the doing Homer into bald English prose; for it is leaving in the soi-disant imitation gaps and blanks, where the original presented surfaces embossed with the most exquisitely sculptured forms. Nay, we may consider ourselves fortunate if we are offended by nothing worse than sins of omission, because far more frequently than not are we shocked by the incongruous and vulgar feature that are admitted into and serve still further to degrade our pseudo-Greek edifices.

 

A thing of mere fancy and luxury, the pavilion in the garden of Buckingham Palace ought to have been rendered a bijou; at present it is merely a toy. It contains merely a small octagon room, between fifteen and sixteen feet in diameter, and a lesser one, (or rather a mere closet, it being barely nine feet square,) on each side of it. The description given in the Times professed to be exceedingly exact indeed with regard to the dimensions of the rooms, for it stated even the odd inches; notwithstanding which seeming painstaking accuracy, a strange blunder or contradiction is in it, for after telling us that the height of those two little rooms is twelve feet, it went on to say that the walls are painted for the height of twelve feet in imitation of grey marble, and over the "wainscotting,"--a strange term to apply to marble, or the imitation of it,--there is a series of bas-relief compartments. The most curious piece of information of all, and as to which there could have been no mistake unless it were an intentional one, is that besides these three rooms there is also a kitchen! Conceive the idea of a kitchen being considered indispensable to a small summer-house, within a few yards of the palace and its kitchen offices! However, that kitchen is certainly a very strong proof that royalty is not devoid of taste,--more especially that kind of it which can be liberally ministered to by the culinary artistes of the royal household.