The Queen’s House at Greenwich was built for Anne of Denmark, the queen of King James I. Work started in 1616, but Anne died in 1619 and never lived there. The building was completed in 1635 and briefly occupied by King Charles I’s queen consort Henrietta Maria before Civil War brought to an end the House’s royal occupancy.
Those details soon fade because what is wholly memorable is that The Queen’s House is Britain’s first classical building. Fresh from a grand tour of southern Europe, fired with a passion for Palladian architecture, Inigo Jones came up with the House’s radical design. White-painted - as opposed to red brick - this relatively diminutive symmetrical villa must have seemed novel in the extreme. It still retains this distinction some four hundred years later. After all, a marble-floored salon that is not only perfectly square, but also perfectly cubic, is more than noteworthy. That the black and white design of the floor is mirrored by the timbers of the ceiling exemplifies the new importance of geometry in defining a built space.
The original ceiling above the salon (whose massive oak timbers were carved by shipwrights) had a circular central panel painted for Queen Henrietta Maria by Orazio Gentileschi in about 1636-8. The subject is an allegory of Peace reigning over the Arts. The entire ceiling was removed to Marlborough House, London (now the Commonwealth Secretariat) in the early eighteenth century. It can be viewed through this link to the Royal Collection Trust website.
The House’s upper rooms serve as galleries for the some of the treasures of the Royal Museums Greenwich, most of which have a naval flavour.
The Queen’s House from the Old Royal Naval College upper court
The view north from the Queen’s House, Greenwich
The Queen’s House, Greenwich - south façade
The Queen’s House, Greenwich, from the Greenwich Observatory
The Queen’s House, Greenwich - the marble-floored, perfect cube salon
The Queen’s House, Greenwich - the ceiling of the perfect cube salon
The Queen’s House, Greenwich - detail of the ceiling of the cubic salon
The Queen’s House, Greenwich - the salon’s marble floor from above
The Queen’s House, Greenwich - the Tulip Stairs, the first self-supporting spiral staircase built in Britain
The Queen’s House, Greenwich - detail of the salon
The Queen’s House, Greenwich - the Tulip Stairs
The Queen’s House, Greenwich - the Queen’s Presence Chamber
The Queen’s House, Greenwich - the painted ceiling of the Queen’s Presence Chamber
Portrait of Queen Elisabeth I, owned and possibly commissioned by Sir Francis Drake, painted around 1590, one of three surviving Armada Portraits, purchased for the nation at a cost of £10.3 million in 2016, now hanging in the Queen’s Presence Chamber in the Queen’s House at Greenwich.
An exhibition room in the Queen’s House, Greenwich, showing Henri Gascar’s late 17th century Baroque portrait of a swaggering James, Duke of York dressed to represent the Roman god of war, Mars
An exhibition room in the Queen’s House, Greenwich
The Royal Museums Greenwich hold some 45,000 maritime images in trust for the nation, some of which are displayed in The Queen’s House here at Greenwich. Their on-line Picture Library can be viewed though this link.
Blue balustrades
Navy blue (or indigo) appears to be the in-vogue colour for cast or wrought iron balustrades in some of London’s prestigious historic buildings. The Tulip Stairs, above, in the Queen’s House was built in the early 1600s. Somerset House in central London was built 150 years later. Its Nelson staircase (not pictured) is also serene in navy blue. The main staircase in Somerset House’s Cortauld Gallery, below, is the same colour. All have naval origins - naturally!
