Royal Greenwich; Van de Veldes Exhibition
For many centuries the best way to travel to the royal palace and park at Greenwich was by boat, Greenwich being in the countryside and ill-served by roads. Greenwich is still ill-served by roads, because of traffic congestion, and the quickest way to go from central or northern London is by the frequent trains. However, there are still boats.
Thames Clippers has operated a river bus service since the late 1990s. Disconcertingly, the boats now display the prominent logo of Uber, the omnipresent minicab service. This is not because the clippers are watery ubers, which you can summons on the app. No, it’s another example of that strange, but presumably lucrative , practice of selling “naming rights” (popular with football clubs).
Thames Clippers are now owned, Uber badge notwithstanding, by a US investment company. But the boats still deliver you gracefully to Greenwich, mostly past miles of riverside apartment conversions.
Tudor Greenwich, much favoured by Henry VIII, is long gone apart from the Park and some recovered foundations of the Tudor palace once sprawled by the Thames. It is replaced, more magnificently, by the grand squares, or quads, of the Old Naval College. It was built over a period of some decades from the end of the C17 to original designs by Christopher Wren, executed at first by Nicholas Hawksmoor.
For the first nearly two hundred years the complex was the “Naval Hospital”: a place of retirement for veterans and invalids of the Navy. It was also, in its grandeur a propaganda celebration of Britain’s burgeoning naval might. This is most obvious in the Painted Hall, a bombastic, triumphalist Last-Night-of-The-Proms in paint (but without the European contribution). The Painted Hall was the refectory for the Hospital, but soon became a tourist attraction instead, an extravagant tour de force of painted ceilings and walls, extolling sea power and Georgian royalty.
In the later C19 the Hospital became the Naval College, teaching the Art of Sea War to generations of officers. Some 30 years ago, the officers cleared out, and the site is now the home of Youth – the students of Greenwich University and the Trinity College of Music.
The naval tradition is no more, apart from the boastful murals of the Painted Hall and the memorials to bold but tragically doomed officers in the Chapel opposite.
There is another building that, set back and above a little way, presides over the College quads. This is the Queen’s House. It is an elegant Jacobean structure, designed by Inigo Jones in the early 1600s for James l, as a country residence for his queen. It thus predates the College and survived the ruin of the old Tudor Palace. Wren was told not to obstruct the House’s river view in his designs for the College. He contrived that it stands proudly at the top of a vista between the quads.
There’s a curious fact about the House. When built, it stood hard against the then London to Dover road (the Blackheath plateau where the modern road runs was dangerously lawless). The House was soon extended over the road, which thus ran underneath the House. The course of the road, now extinct, is remembered by the colonnades on either side of the House.
At the time of my visit, the Queen’s House was hosting an exhibition of the work of two Dutch artists, father and son, Van de Welde the Elder and the Younger. They came to England in the late C17 under the patronage of Charles ll. They were skilled marine artists – the Elder in drawing, the Younger in oils.
In order to appreciate their works, and indeed the artists’ ambivalent position, it is necessary to open the door (hitherto closed to me) on the Anglo-Dutch wars at the end of the C17.
These conflicts were mostly caused by colonial and mercantile competition between two nations with growing global ambitions. Rival naval power was key; the wars were not existential struggles – hence not central to one’s school curriculum. Nonetheless, many sea battles were fought on a pretty large scale in the North Sea and Eastern Channel, often near innocent sounding locations such as Lowestoft and Chatham (where a British fleet was thoroughly bested by a surprise attack).
The Elder Van de Welde worked on both sides, during different conflicts. His bold speciality was proto-photo war journalism. With permission, he would “inbed” himself in a warring fleet, on a small vessel, and make rapid sketches of the action, working the sketches up in detail later. This he did first for the Dutch, then for the British. No one seemed to mind the change much. He and the Younger were given studio space in the Queen’s House.
Like the best of war artists and photographers, the Elder did not turn away from war’s horrors. In an age when very few could swim, the panicked abandonment of a sinking vessel usually resulted in a great deal of drowning. There were no lifeboats, and the few skiffs in tow were often overwhelmed by desperate numbers and capsized.
Such horrors are depicted in images that prefigure Gustav Dore.
Van de Welde the Younger painted an intriguing landscape showing the Queen’s House before the College was built. There is one white rectangular structure between the House and the River. This was the “King’s House”, the first phase of a new palace for Charles ll.
Other phases never followed. Instead, the King’s House was incorporated into Wren’s design for the College, and is now the Eastern side of the quad known as King Charles’s Court. This is the home of the Trinity students, making sweet music, near to where the Sweet Thames Flows Softly.
October 2023
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