Colen Campbell

During a Grand Tour of Europe, Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington was seized by a consuming passion for Italian architecture. On returning to England in 1715 to celebrate his coming of age, he was then deeply impressed with the work going forward at Wanstead for Sir Richard Child and subscribed to the forthcoming publication of its architect Colen Campbell.

 

It was probably a consequence of these events and of the Earl's ensuing patronage of the style that Neo Palladianism, after the sixteenth century Venetian architect Andrea Palladio, was to become the dominant architectural fashion in Great Britain for most of the eighteenth century.

 

Published from 1715 to 1725, Vitruvius Britannicus is essentially a work of architectural illustration and propaganda. Campbell deplored the excesses of Italian baroque but accepted with unbound enthusiasm, ‘the Great Palladio, who has exceeded all that were gone before him and seems to have arrived at a Ne plus ultra of his Art’. Campbell was the draughtsman throughout, whilst the much sought after Henry Hulsbergh of Amsterdam but based in London executed the bulk of the engraving. Subscribers to the 300 plates of the Vitruvius were a cross-section of the British nobility, gentry and imminent architects including Christopher Wren, John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor.

 

Carefully compiled and finely executed, Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus was highly acclaimed. It became the guidebook to the Neo Palladian style of architecture and stands as an important record of some of the finest achievements in British architecture of the eighteenth century.