A flash in the pan

One of Britain’s outstanding Baroque houses vanished in 1747, having been sold within three years of its patron’s death. William Aslet looks at the tantalising fragments that survive and what they tell us about this prodigy building

- William Aslet

STANDING today in Cannons Park, at almost the very end of the Jubilee Line, it is hard to believe that a house stood here, of which Daniel Defoe could write in 1725 that ‘as the firmament is a glorious mantle filled with, or as it were made up of a concurrence of lesser glories the stars; so every part of this building adds to the beauty of the whole’. But, just over 20 years after the publication of these remarks, the house had been stripped of all salvageable material, its contents sold at auction and the remains pulled down. Today, what was once countryside has become Metroland.

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.