Q&A with Charles Saumarez Smith
John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture
Next year, John Vanbrugh’s extraordinary career – as playwright, architect, spy and herald – will be celebrated at six of his houses to mark the tercentenary of his death on March 26th 1726; there will also be a major exhibition of his drawings in London and a symposium at the University of Cambridge.
As a prelude to Vanbrugh 300, Charles Saumarez Smith will launch his new biography: John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture at the Wigmore Hall on November 20th 2025. It provides a reappraisal of Vanbrugh’s life and career alongside that of his colleague, Nicholas Hawksmoor, with whom he collaborated on many celebrated buildings. It also considers what Vanbrugh’s drawings tell us about his development as an architect.
Annette Rubery: I know you wrote your PhD thesis on Castle Howard – and you’ve already published a book about that building. How did the biography of John Vanbrugh come about?
Charles Saumarez Smith: As you say, I worked on Castle Howard from roughly 1978 through to 1990 when my book [The Building of Castle Howard] was published. And the book wasn’t really about Vanbrugh – it was more about the gestation of the house. But during the 1980s, when I was working at Castle Howard, [the late architectural historian] Kerry Downes was doing his biography of Vanbrugh, which came out in 1987, and I was asked to review it by a magazine, Building Design. I thought it tells you everything you need to know about Vanbrugh, but in a curious way, it doesn’t give you a good sense of his personality. I also felt that Kerry Downes had worked on Hawksmoor throughout the 1950s and he had rightly realised that Hawksmoor was a very interesting and important figure, but my view is that he somewhat exaggerated Hawksmoor’s role.
In about 1983, just before I went to work at the V&A, I spent a month or so in the British Library going through the correspondence between Vanbrugh and Henry Joynes, the Clerk of the Works at Blenheim, because the British Library had acquired the Blenheim papers relatively recently. I was left with this very strong impression that at Blenheim, Vanbrugh had been incredibly involved in all aspects of the construction besides the drawing and the design. So, I had in the back of my mind the sense that somehow Hawksmoor had gained international reputation to some extent at Vanbrugh’s expense.
AR: I feel that [Iain Sinclair’s book about Hawksmoor] Lud Heat has contributed to his popularity. It’s also interesting how people often describe Vanbrugh as an amateur and yet they don’t really describe Hawksmoor in those terms.
CSS: Well, in a way, Hawksmoor was the first professional because he was trained up in the Office of Works [i.e., the organisation responsible for civic architecture in the 18th century]. And so, in a conventional way, he was more professional. I wouldn’t dispute that.
And I think Hawksmoor is popular because his architecture is accessible: people can go to Christ Church, Spitalfields, but it’s harder to get to [Vanbrugh’s] Seaton Delaval [in Northumberland]. Vanbrugh is, in a way, more culturally interesting but he’s also more complicated.
AR: What really interested me about your book is the focus you put on the drawings. Kerry Downes believed that Hawksmoor did most of them, so it was refreshing to see illustrations of Vanbrugh’s own drawings.
CSS: Basically, I was asked to be curator for an exhibition of Vanbrugh, which is happening at the [Sir John] Soane’s Museum in February 2026. I asked a friend who is an architect, Roz Barr, to help with the exhibition, and we went to the V&A to go through the drawings, and she looked at them as an architect, not as an architectural historian. She was incredibly interested in these freehand sketches of small buildings, and it made me think about them too. It happens that – because I’ve been chairing the Royal Drawing School – I’m interested in the nature of drawing and how people get taught to draw. You can tell that Vanbrugh draws in a free and inventive way, and he thinks through a drawing. They’re not what you would call finished works.
In the 1990s – after Downes had done his biography – some of Vanbrugh’s drawings had surfaced in the Marquess of Bute’s collection. Two of them are outline drawings of Castle Howard. And then there’s a third which is a kind of bird’s-eye sketch. Downes didn’t attach much significance to them – nor did anybody else. But because the idea of the exhibition in the Soane Museum is to show Vanbrugh’s drawings, I suddenly started thinking – hang on a minute – these must be the drawings in which he was trying to figure out the look and feel of Castle Howard’s façade.
AR: I like your focus on the drawings because I was a bit frustrated with Vanbrugh’s letters. I feel they are very clever and amusing, but a bit of a performance. I wonder if the drawings are a way of delving behind the façade and seeing more of his thought processes?
CSS: The letters are quick, aren’t they? The best ones are to [the bookseller and publisher] Jacob Tonson, who he was obviously friendly with. And when Tonson goes off to Amsterdam, Vanbrugh writes to keep him in touch with what’s going on. The big groups of letters – to people like the Earl of Manchester – are full of political and theatrical gossip. With Tonson, you get a glimmer of a personality, but not a huge amount of it. It’s jovial, but quite superficial.
AR: I think what comes through in your book is how Vanbrugh’s buildings gradually became more about form than decoration. Thinking about the entrance front to Castle Howard, with its sculptures, it’s quite different from his other buildings. What do you think is going on there?
CSS: Well, Vanbrugh had been in Paris for three months.When he was let out of the Bastille in 1692 [imprisoned as a spy], he has time on its hands, and that’s where the drawings do become significant because – assuming they’re from 1699 – they’re pretty skilful. They show a lot of the decorative elements of the garden front, and they show a version of the dome, and you have to assume that they were things which only survived by accident in a pile of office drawings. Now, that idea of a façade – which is very sculptural – is, to me, more French. Of course, you could say St. Paul’s has sculptural facades, but I think some of what gave Vanbrugh confidence was probably the fact that he knew about French architecture.
AR: Moving on to Blenheim, that building is so entwined with the story of the argument – and legal case – between Vanbrugh and the Duchess of Marlborough. I was interested in your views on the Duchess.
CSS: I tried to be fair to her, and I tried to convey the narrative of the breakdown in their relationship. To me, that was the big revelation of writing the book – that people always say the quarrel between Vanbrugh and the Duchess of Marlborough is well-known, but I don’t think I had registered that it survives in such detail.
Vanbrugh doesn’t kowtow to her, but, at the same time, you can see the Duchess of Marlborough’s point of view. In 1708 she gets frustrated because she wants them to be able to move in and the house is still under construction. Just at that point, Vanbrugh starts doing the bridge. You can see why that would have been annoying to her.
I did get the feeling that Vanbrugh was a bit wilful about ignoring her comments and complaints. He regarded [Sidney] Godolphin and Marlborough as the clients and the Duke of Marlborough – because he’s not there – obviously relies on the Duchess, but Vanbrugh never really accommodates himself to that relationship. It starts off badly and it gets worse.
But Vanbrugh is incredibly determined. You get this long defence of keeping the ruins of the Manor of Woodstock [in the grounds of Blenheim], which is very unusual. He’s a person of determination and not a dilettante.
AR: I think the ruins of Woodstock are such an interesting topic. As you point out, it reveals a lot about his respect for old buildings.
CSS: He was obviously passionate about the Woodstock ruins. When I did the book about Castle Howard, I don’t think I’d realised that there are a lot of fortifications. It’s not just the Carrmire Gate, he constructed fortifications all around the approach to the estate. And then also, of course, Vanbrugh Castle. When it comes to building his own house, he creates a castle. Well, that was a strange thing to do in 1720.
AR: We should finish off by mentioning the tercentenary celebrations in March 2026. Your book comes out on November the 20th, 2025. What are you looking forward to next year?
CSS: Well, at the moment, I’m focused on the publication of the book which is being launched in a lunchtime lecture at the Wigmore Hall. And there’s also the exhibition [at the Sir John Soane’s Museum] which will open in early March. But because Vanbrugh 300 has been given National Lottery Heritage Funding, many of the Vanbrugh houses will also be doing things.
It’s very exciting because, when I was writing the book, I was slightly burdened by this sense that Hawksmoor was the real person and Vanbrugh was a dilettante. And weirdly, I can’t help but notice – now that the National Lottery Heritage Fund has decided that Vanbrugh is worth commemorating – a change in mood and attitude. So, we can all look forward to celebrating Vanbrugh in 2026!
Charles Saumarez Smith is a freelance writer, curator and art historian. He is an author of books and articles, a lecturer, and former academic, with regular appearances on television and radio. He is former chairman of The Royal Drawing School, a trustee of the Garden Museum, and an Emeritus Trustee of ArtUK and Charleston.
To coincide with the launch of John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture, he will be giving a talk at the Wigmore Hall, London, on November 20th 2025 (book here). He has also co-curated (with architect Roz Barr) a new exhibition of Vanbrugh’s drawings at Sir John Soane’s Museum, running from March 4th to Jun 28th 2026.