Cannons was the project of one James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos (from 1719), Marlborough’s paymaster general during the War of Spanish Succession. Chandos had made a vast fortune out of the war—some £600,000 at the time of his resignation in 1713. He decided to spend this remodelling the Jacobean house at Cannons, to which he had laid claim following the death of his wife in 1712, in order to transform it into one of the greatest houses of the land (Fig 1).
Chandos employed only the most fashionable architects on the project, whose names read as a veritable roll call of the foremost architects working in early-18th-century London—William Talman, John James, Sir John Vanbrugh and James Gibbs. Lesser figures were similarly barred from the interior, which was decorated with canvases by Louis Laguerre, Antonio Bellucci, Sir James Thornhill and William Kent, as well as stuccowork by Giuseppe Atari and Giovanni Bagutti (this was the first project of the Ticinese stuccatori in England). With Handel serving as Chandos’s Kapellmeister from 1717, the house was a complete expression of the Arts.
This story is from the March 04, 2020 edition of Country Life UK.
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This story is from the March 04, 2020 edition of Country Life UK.
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