From Reynolds to Wren in London

300th anniversaries for both — Wren gets a bash, Reynolds a mere nod.

I’ ve been writing so many anniversary stories. What is it about years ending in three to make such momentous events? Last week, I saluted the 50th birthday of the Kimbell Art Museum, and off and on I’ve been writing about Picasso, who died 50 years ago. Then there’s the 60th anniversary of JFK’s murder, the 25th anniversary of the Pequot Museum in Connecticut, the 100th birthday of both the Barnes Foundation and the Morgan Library, the 100th anniversary of Joaquín Sorolla’s death, and my tenth wedding anniversary.

I like to write about institutional anniversaries since places, if run by smart people, strut their stuff, salute their audience, and stage a gala.

And 2023, drawing to a close, is the 300th anniversary of the end of Christopher Wren (1632–1723) and the 300th anniversary of the appearance on this planet of Joshua Reynolds, the third son of a Devon minister. Reynolds was George III’s court painter, a job for which he made less than the king’s rat catcher, but he’s best known as the all-round image-maker to the great, the good, and the famous.

Wren, of course, rebuilt much of London after the Great Fire in 1666 left cinders in its wake. “Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you,” sayeth the plaque above his grave, and “around you” is St. Paul’s Cathedral, which he designed and which was finished in 1711. I’d say if you seek his monument, look around London.

Wren gets a splashy commemoration called “Wren300.” Reynolds, alas, gets a single, small show. When I was in London in October, I dived into the work of both giants.

Wren is a massive topic. St. Paul’s alone is tome-and-tomb rich, but 50 other churches came from Wren’s three architectural offices, as did libraries, hospitals, and palace renovations. So, I visited three Wren buildings I’d never seen. All are involved in Wren300, the very good, yearlong Wren tribute enlisting around 50 organizations living and working in Wren buildings.

One of the three Wrens I visited is a monument, but it’s a monument to the incineration of much of London in the Great Fire of 1666. Wren was already on Charles II’s payroll to either renovate — or redesign, as Wren wished — St. Paul’s, but he was known less as an architect and more as a professor of astronomy and a math whiz, physicist, and weekend inventor. He came from a devoted, connected Royalist family.

Within a week of the fire, Wren presented Charles with a plan for a new city. It was a city of boulevards, squares, and Classical order rather than the maze that was medieval London. It didn’t fly. Charles believed it despotic, and the last king found to be too bossy — Charles’s father — had lost his head. Still, Wren got the job to rebuild.

The fire started in Thomas Farriner’s bakery on Pudding Lane, with sparks from an oven baking bread, and is thought to have destroyed 13,000 houses, many old and shabby, and most of London’s public buildings. The packed, medieval city was not a towering inferno but a squat one. Those who lived through it compared it to the destruction of Troy or of Sodom. Almost all of what’s called the City burned. That’s London along the Thames from Tower Hill in the east to Chancery Lane in the west and running north to the old Roman walls.

I’d seen Wren’s monument to the fire, a single Doric column, but never looked at it, or went inside. I was in the hood, getting a haircut, saw the thing, asked my barber what it was, read Wren300’s website, and changed my plans for the day. I did Wren.

Its 202 feet of Portland stone topped, I learned, with a viewing platform and then, above it, an urn in which gilded flames lap the sky. If laid on its side, with the point toward Pudding Lane, the monument’s fiery urn would reach what was then thought to be Farriner’s oven.

I didn’t know much about Wren as an inventor and nothing about his vision of his column as a memorial and a space for science experiments. The thing was planned as the tallest zenith telescope, helping Wren study astronomic latitude. He used its 345 steps, each one six inches high, to divine barometric pressure by height. Wren and his colleague Robert Hooke built a laboratory in the basement. Through their lifetimes, they took temperature measurements from the viewing platform, then the highest, most unobstructed spot in London. Wren also invented a transparent beehive, thermometer technology, medical equipment, and machines for sowing seed.

A busy, visually gabby stone relief on one side of the memorial’s base depicts an active fire, fainting women, allegories of Peace and Plenty in the sky, and Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York and later James II, directing the making of a new London. A long inscription on another side initially blamed “Popish frenzy” for the fire. This was chiseled out in 1830 when English Catholics got the right to vote.

Wren300 was organized by Square Mile Churches, a loose consortium of the 40 or so churches in the square-mile part of London called the City. It’s no revelation to say that church attendance in the UK circles the drain. Life is no more a marathon through a minefield than it has ever been, but today’s organized religion is unusually and doggedly out of sync with even those who hunger for wisdom.

Most of the new churches that Wren and his design shop built are in the City. Wren300 developed into a vehicle to attract people, heathens or not, through the doors. If God doesn’t do the trick, then art, architecture, gardens, quiet spaces, and music might. Collaborations are difficult, but Wren300 excelled in music programs, special tours, and lectures and raised visibility. With a small grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and lots of volunteer time, Wren300 produced a fantastic program.

London now has higher vantage points than the one at the top of the Great Fire Memorial, but it was a nice day, and I wasn’t the only tourist to make the climb.

The church of St. Stephen Walbrook staged a Vivaldi concert for Wren300, a nice choice since 2023 is thought to be the 300th anniversary of The Four Seasons. I wasn’t there for Vivaldi but to visit the church that Nikolaus Pevsner called one of the ten greatest buildings in England. The sculptor Antonio Canova (1757–1822), no slouch when it came to architecture, said, “Italy has nothing that could touch it.” St. Stephen’s, finished in 1679, is Britain’s first domed church. It was among the first of Wren’s post-apocalypse buildings to open. It was also his own parish church.

Wren is considered the architect of about 120 buildings, most still standing and some proposed but never done. He was the visionary and entrepreneur behind Wren, Inc. and brought with him endless connections and the confidence of Charles II and the kings and queens who followed him. He was brilliant at quality control. Did Wren design all of these projects himself? Surely not. Hooke designed, as did Nicholas Hawksmoor and others. We don’t know who did what, but we know St. Stephen’s was his personal project.

The exterior is vanilla. Inside, a short nave leads to an enormous, central dome decorated with plaster laurel, roses, and palms, each element set in the center of a square so things don’t go giddy. The dome is subtly carried on eight windowed arches supported by eight of the space’s twelve Corinthian columns. Natural light floods the space, which is a church-in-the-round. In the 1970s, church elders decided to nix the old altar, placed against a wall, with a round, stone altar in the center of the domed space and made by Henry Moore (1898–1986).

Was this church an experiment for St. Paul’s? Yes and no. St. Stephen Walbrook did premiere a central dome in England that Wren later adapted to the cathedral. Decorating a small parish church, St. Stephen’s dome could be built on a carpentry frame. Windows are ample. St. Paul’s huge dome required masonry, meaning its arches had to be smaller and windowless. So its interior is darker. Still, St. Stephen has to be considered the pioneer.

Later that week, I went to St. Bride’s Church on Fleet Street for a Wren300 lecture on Wren’s influence on modern city design, especially in India. I’d never visited the church but knew its impressive steeple, tiered in four octagons, each smaller than the one below it, so it looks like a wedding cake. It’s the tallest of Wren’s spires. It’s the eighth church on this site, starting in the sixth century, though the ruins of a Roman building foundation are in the crypt. Wren’s church opened in 1675. The steeple, designed by Wren and, probably, Nicholas Hawksmoor, dates to around 1702. German incendiary bombs burnt it to rubble in 1940. It was rebuilt by 1957 according to the original Wren design.

In 1501, St. Bride’s housed England’s first moveable-type printing press, used for a parishioner’s business. Thus started its links to the printed word. Fleet Street is the ancestral home for England’s newspapers, though almost all have fled, and the church is still “the spiritual home of all in the news and media industries,” it says. No such space is more needed, and none seems more empty, but not for a lack of serenity and style, and not for a lack of ministry.

The Journalists’ Altar memorializes journalists who’ve died, some in the call of duty, or who were taken hostage. Each framed tribute has a photo and a short biography. The church takes the lead in preparing and displaying these. During my visit, there were new memorials to reporters and crew killed in the Ukraine war. Journalism can be a dangerous business, but today, for most, it’s a paycheck for hacks.

There’s a journalists’ prayer, composed, we think, by St. Francis de Sales. “May we be bold in confronting evil and injustice . . . rejecting alike the half-truth that deceives, and the slanted word that corrupts.” A not-very-exacting gospel but still an abused one. May it be tattooed on foreheads.

St. Bride’s is confidently Protestant. It’s a Portland stone rectangular box with big, clear windows proposing that it’s a transparent, perceivable experience. Interior columns are Doric. Here and there are cherub’s heads, egg-and-tongue patterns, and a swag or two. Other than that, ornamentation is based on geometric shapes and the use of materials. There’s lots of wood for coziness. It feels as much like a library as a church.

So Wren gets the spotlight he deserves. Via Wren300, his churches might have saved some souls, too.

Spotlight on Reynolds gathers Kenwood House’s 17 portraits together in a nice, focused exhibition. Kenwood, in Hampstead Heath, is a stately, Robert Adam–designed house built in the 1760s for the Earl of Mansfield. Edward Guinness, he of Irish-stout fame, bought it in the 1920s. Guinness, created the Earl of Iveagh, collected Old Master paintings that he pried from aristocratic homes during the depths of a farming depression in the 1880s. The art, his bequest to Britain, is at Kenwood. Adam’s extravagant plasterwork and Guinness’s Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, and Van Dyke are a feast in themselves, but then there’s Reynolds, and more Reynolds.

Reynolds (1723–1792) rescued high-end British portraiture from the doldrums of the Commonwealth, bridging the aesthetics of empire and prosperity in his era to the Grand Manner of Van Dyke and Charles I. Banish Puritan black, banish that dour Dutch look, banish those gloomy thoughts of the afterlife, his style proposes. Let’s be material girls, boys, duchesses, and dukes.

Spotlight on Reynolds is a mini survey starting with his portrait of Catherine Moore from 1752, just when he came back to London after studying in Rome. It ends with Miss Cocks and Her Niece, from 1790, the year Reynolds lost most of his sight and two years before he died. Reynolds’s Self-Portrait from 1788 is there. It’s one of the frankest self-portraits I know. He look is both attentive and inquiring — he’s wearing thick spectacles — and kind, which seems to have been everyone’s take during his lifetime.

Reynolds painted the 1st Earl of Mansfield in 1785 while he was a judge and still William Murray. Murray’s ruling in the Somerset v. Stewart case of 1722 had already put slavery in Britain on the flight path to abolition. As chief justice of the English court system, he renovated England’s common law, dating from Norman times, to suit a mercantile, manufacturing economy. Reynolds’s portrait? Murray looks like a fat and happy Afghan hound.

The exhibition’s good but, let’s face it, the guest list at Reynolds’s party is heavy on too-cute kids and too-coy women, which is neither Kenwood’s nor Reynolds’s fault. Spotlight on Reynolds is what Guinness owned. Kitty Fisher as Cleopatra, from 1759, is in a league of its own. Fisher was her day’s Paris Hilton. Famous for being famous and a tart, she was a feature in London’s earliest tabloid gossip columns. She posed for Reynolds dressed as the Egyptian queen as she dissolves a giant pearl in vinegar, before drinking it. Pliny says it happened, so it must be true. Fisher’s renown had legs. Paulette Goddard played her in Kitty, a potboiler from 1945.

I had assumed that the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate, the Wallace Collection, and all and sundry would give Reynolds’s a big-ass birthday bash. To its credit, the NPG, along with the Getty, bought Portrait of Mai (Omai) for $62 million. That’s Reynolds’s 1776 swagger portrait of the first Pacific Islander to visit London. He’s the centerpiece of the museum’s grandest gallery.

No, I’m sorry to say. All and sundry, except for Kenwood, let Reynolds’s big year come and go.

The Guardian called Reynolds a “well-connected hack” in its jeering, sulfurous review of Spotlight on Reynolds. He painted the trappings of seriousness — the splendid costumes and props — but couldn’t perceive much less portray, the soul. Reynolds was the first president of the Royal Academy, which, from 1768 to today, preserves, protects, and defends establishment artists and the taste to which they cater. So sayeth the Guardian critic, who didn’t want to sour the birthday party entirely. He gave Spotlight on Reynolds a single, sad star.

“You would cry, too, if it happened to you,” as the philosopher Leslie Gore sang.

Among Reynolds’s close friends were Dr. Johnson, David Garrick, James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, Adam Smith, Charles Fox, and Edward Gibbon. That’s a recherché crowd and over the heads of most critics and curators today. Reynolds might have been portraitist to London’s rich or famous or titled, sometimes all three, but he’s a dead white man, and that’s the crime of the century. Kenwood has the chronological range for Reynolds but not the heavy-hitter pictures such as his portraits of Colonel Tarleton or John Musters or Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse. Or Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hyman and The 4th Duke of Marlborough and His Family, both of which left Sargent spellbound.

The NPG should have done the show, but it would have thrown too many a monkey wrench into its reopening. Or the Tate should have. Or the Huntington, which has nearly 20 Reynolds portraits. Or Yale’s British Art Center, if it ever reopens.

In Reynolds’s day, critics, collectors, patrons, and fellow artists considered him a risk taker. Gainsborough revered him. Whenever he deployed a new trick, The Blue Boy’s painter learned that Reynolds had already played it. “He’s so various,” he said, teeth grinding.

May 2042, the 250th anniversary of Reynolds’s death, be more auspicious. He’s an artist who deserves a big bash.