The painted oak model of Easton Neston, circa 1690, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor

the exterior of the model painted a stone colour, with a dark blue roof, the sanded platform now painted a sand colour, the roof with two dome-covered apertures opening to reveal parts of the interior, the whole top removable to show firstly the rooms and staircases of the upper floor which is removable in its entirety to reveal the ground floor rooms including the pillared hall and the saloon with its niches for sculpture and mantelpiece with a an arched-over mantel carved with an Earl’s coronet above drapery, this floor also lifting-out in its entirety, the whole in varnished natural oak. Bearing a pasted label of the Royal Institute of British Architects inscribed in ink, 'Easton Neston Model/1971-6'; minor losses and replacements, some re-touching to the decoration

Commissioned by Sir William Fermor, 1st Baron Lempster (1648-1711)

The Royal Institute of British Architects, 9 Conduit Street, London, W1, and then at 66 Portland Place, London, 1935-1970;
The Triumph of the Baroque Architecture in Europe 1660-1750, Venice, 1999, exhibit no. 252T

H. Avray Tipping, 'Easton Neston, Northamptonshire, the seat of Sir Thomas Fermor-Hesketh Bt.', Country Life, 27 August 1927, p.264, illus. fig.5;
H. Avray Tipping & Christopher Hussey, English Homes, Period IV - vol. II, 1928, Easton Neston, p.120, fig. 162;
John Kenworthy-Browne, 'Easton Neston, Northamptonshire: 2', Connoisseur, September-December 1964, p.74, fig.4;
Nigel Nicholson, Great Houses of Britain, 1965, p.198, illus.;
John Wilton-Ely, ‘The Architectural Model – I. English Baroque’, Apollo, October, 1968, pp. 250-259, figs.9,10;
Howard Colvin, 'Easton Neston Reconsidered', Country Life, 15 October 1970, pp.968-971, illus. fig.7;
Kerry Downes, Hawksmoor, 1979, fig.3a;
Kerry Downes, ‘Hawksmoor’s House at Easton Neston’, Architectural History, Jnl. of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, vol. 30, 1987, 50-76;
John Heward and Robert Taylor, The Country Houses of Northamptonshire, 1996, p.190, fig.243;
John Wilton – Ely, catalogue no. 252 in The Triumph of the Baroque Architecture in Europe 1600-1750 (ed. Henry A. Millon), Washington, 1999, pp. 500-01;
Vaughan Hart, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Yale, 2002, chapter 5, pp.105-111, fig.141

This model is a very rare survival.  Although models for domestic buildings seem to have been made in the seventeenth century in England hardly any have come down to us.  This is by far the most complex to have done so and also by the most highly regarded architect.

The use of architectural models for both secular and ecclesiastical buildings seems to have been common practice in Europe in the fifteenth century, although in England the earliest reference seems to be one of Longleat House made in 1567 by Adrian Gaunt. By 1624, Sir Henry Wotton, in his Elements of Architecture, considered that models were an important factor in avoiding making costly alterations whilst the building of a house was in progress; an early example of their usefulness in this respect is seen by the cessation of work at Raynham in Norfolk in 1622 by Sir William Townsend until a model of the proposed house was completed by William Edge and Thomas Moore, a joiner.

The architect Roger Pratt (1620-1685) declared in his notebooks that an architectural model should show ‘all things both external and internal with all their divisions, connections, vanes, ornaments etc….there to be seen exactly, and in their due proportions, as they can  afterwards be in the work of which this is composed to be the essay,..’. In order to make the model he advised that boards be prepared ‘of  some fine grained wood, as deal, pear tree, etc.’ exceedingly well smoothed, and so seasoned likewise, and upon them you are to draw just after the same manner as you did upon paper, and afterwards give them to some joiner to be nearly cut out, and to be put altogether,….and afterwards all the ornaments to be made, and fastened upon it in their proper places; and lastly all things be coloured after the same manner as they will appear in the building….’. Pratt also suggested that the internal floors should be completely removable’, a device which is used in the present model which  John Wilton-Eley remarks (op. cit.), ‘offers considerable scope for isolating visual and technical and technical factors……….it conveys with marked economy the skilful sequence of projecting surfaces and window rhythms on the façade The relation of internal space and lighting to this sculptural composition becomes immediately clear when the outer structure is removed’. The rhythm of these interiors closely follows that of the house as originally built, although subsequent alterations to the entrance hall in the early 20^th  century have somewhat changed its original strongly baroque character.

It is believed that the building of Easton Neston for Sir William Fermor, 1st Baron Lempster, commenced in the mid 1680s, although, regrettably, no actual drawings or papers have survived which might have indicated the original architect. An undated design believed to depict Easton Neston has been attributed to the architect Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723), who was in fact a relation of Sir William’s by marriage. This shows a house with a pitched roof surmounted by a cupola above a pedimented front with two wings flanked by pavilions. Two red brick flanking pavilions were certainly built in the 1680s in the style of Wren, of which one still survives, although the drawing as a whole does not relate to this or to the design of  the present model. Wren’s interest in the early building of Easton Neston is confirmed by a letter written by him to Sir William, undated but probably 1687, in which he refers to garden walls and the hope that ‘you provide to carry one story at least of the great house next yeare’ but it is to Nicholas Hawksmoor that overall credit must be given, not only for the design of this model, but also to the subsequent changing design and construction of the house.

Hawksmoor (1661-1736), was firstly employed by Wren, being ‘associated with the Surveyor-General in nearly all his architectural works from c. 1684 onwards, either as a draughtsman, measurer or clerk of the works’ (Colvin op. cit. ). From the end of 1694 he became actively involved with the building of Easton Neston, the present model probably dating from this time and illustrating his first completed design of the house. An earlier date is unlikely, as the over mantel in the hall is carved with a baron’s coronet reflecting Fermor’s elevation to Baron Lemster in 1692. Although the building of the exterior of the house was largely finished by 1702, the interiors were still not fully completed in 1731; Hawksmoor writing to Carlisle that he ‘went to my Ld. Pontefracts. The Body of ye House has some virtues, but is not quite finished, the Wings are good for nothing. I had the honor to be concerned in ye body of ye house, it is beautifully and strongly built with durable stone. The State and the Conveniencys are as much as can well be in soe small a pavilion. One can hardly avoy’d loveing ones owne children (Walpole Society op. cit.).

As previously mentioned, the interior of the model clearly follows the final design of the house, with its four large rooms on each of two floors, a two storey hall, a grand staircase and a central gallery across the upper floor. However, the completed exterior façade of Easton Neston shows extensive changes; now with Composite pilasters and columns, the model indicates astylar façades, the doorways with columns. A drawing by Thomas Colepeper, annotated ‘Easton Neston’, although sketch and incomplete, also reflects the design of the model (see: Hart, op. cit. fig. 139). The reasons for these changes are unclear, although Vaughan Hart speculates that the ‘embellishments to the façade was compatible with the recent ennoblement of the patron, Lord Leominster, in 1692, Indeed this context is suggested by the fact that a lion’s head(signifying Leominster) replaces the ‘canonic’ rosette between the volutes in the Composite capitals’.

Hawksmoor’s inspiration for using models in his work almost certainly came from his Master, Christopher Wren, who’s Great Model for St. Paul’s Cathedral was conceived in 1673-74. He continued to use them in his work, an entry in an account book of the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches  dated June 6th 1717 recording ‘Mr Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Bill for Modells Deliver’d ‘, but the present model is undoubtedly his finest, reflecting the nascence of an innovative young architect whose ‘mature works form a unique contribution to English architecture ‘ (Sir Reginald Blomfield).

Related Literature:
John Cornforth, Country Life, ‘Architects, Patrons and Models’, March 4, 1965, pp.466-467;
Howard Colvin, Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1660-1840, 1st ed. 1954

An Appreciation of the Hawksmoor Model
by John Harris, former Keeper of the R.I.B.A. Drawings Collection and author of The Artist and the Country House

Two recent international exhibitions have revealed the beauty and fascination of architectural models. The triumphal centrepiece of the first in 1994 was Antonio da Sangallo the younger’s model for St Peter’s Rome; that in the second in 1999 should have been Wren’s great St Paul’s model. Alas it was not available, but England was represented by models for the Wren – Hawksmoor Greenwich Hospital, c. 1691; Hawksmoor’s Fellows’ Building at Kings College, Cambridge, 1713; James Gibbs’s for St Mary le Strand, 1714; Gibbs’s for St Martins in the Fields 1721; William Kent’s for the Richmond Palace model, c. 1730; and of course,  Hawksmoors’s great model for Easton Neston.

In truth models were made for various reasons : Greenwich Hospital, maybe because of its necessarily protracted building history; the KIngs' College Building to appease disputatious Fellows; St Martins in the Fields and St Mary le Strand to raise subscriptions ; Richmond Palace to attract a reluctant George II. All these can be explained by relatively straightforward statements of architectural history. Behind their construction lie many evolving architectural designs. But no model could be as contentious as that for Easton Neston.

The contention, and my goodness it has rumbled on, revolves around Wren’s acknowledged design in All Souls’ College, Oxford, a project that relates to what we know of Wren’s and Hawksmoor’s involvement with a new house and garden for Sir William Fermor about 1686. Work on a new house had not begun in 1694, although someone had already designed and built wings that look suspiciously like those at Kiveton House, Yorkshire, the seat of the Duke of Leeds, the home of his daughter Sophia, whom Fermor married in March 1692, bringing him a dowry of £10,000. Then possibly in 1697 a Colonel Thomas Colepeper visited Sir William Fermor’s London house in Dover Street and copied details from designs for Easton Neston. These appear to prefigure Hawksmoor’s astylar model, whose fenestration is based upon engraved Roman Mannerist sources. It may be that between the All Souls’ design and the model there was considerable dispute and changes of mind, so a model was needed to clear the air. If constructed about 1698 this would still allow for the conversion from an astylar building to one embraced by a noble giant pilastered Corinthian order, and dated 1702.

Among the few surviving English models for a country house, Easton Neston is pre-eminent, and exceptional in the way Hawksmoor’s detailed intentions for the interior are revealed once the roof is lifted off. The excitement is palpable, for it is possible to extract a room or a group of rooms, delve down floor by floor, almost to juggle them about, and even to judge how Hawksmoor calculated the light coming through the Great Staircase window. It is as if paper architectural designs were unnecessary. The model is all the more precious for the fact that no paper designs for this great house survive.