James Wyatt and John Penn: Architect and Patron at Stoke Park, Buckinghamshire

Abstract

James Wyatt (1746–1813), architect to George III, was the most celebrated English architect of his day, but his fame was not based on a strongly personal manner. Wyatt’s use of a wide variety of historical styles baffled contemporaries and posterity alike. The architect William Porden sniffed that ‘Wyatt had no principles in his art’ ; nineteenth-century writers excoriated his lack of historical accuracy. Both attitudes fail to understand that scenic effect and innovation within historicism were crucial to James Wyatt’s work. His approach was pragmatic, not aligned solely with archaeology or the Picturesque, although deeply aware of both. Wyatt’s work for one patron in particular, John Penn, demonstrates the complexity of his attitudes toward historical styles and toward the process of design.