Inigo Jones, (born July 15, 1573, Smithfield, London, Eng.—died June 21, 1652, London), British painter, architect, and designer who founded the English classical tradition of architecture. The Queen’s House (1616–19) at Greenwich, London, his first major work, became a part of the National Maritime Museum in 1937. His greatest achievement is the Banqueting House (1619–22) at Whitehall. Jones’s only other surviving royal building is the Queen’s Chapel (1623–27) at St. James’s Palace.
Jones was the son of a material employee additionally known as Inigo. Of the architect’s youth little is recorded, however he was in all probability apprenticed to a joiner. By 1603 he had visited Italy lengthy sufficient to amass talent in portray and design and to draw the patronage of King Christian IV of Denmark and Norway, at whose courtroom he was employed for a time earlier than returning to England. There he's subsequent heard of as a “picture maker” (easel painter). Christian IV’s sister, Anne, was the queen of James I of England, a truth that will have led to Jones’s employment by her in 1605 to design the scenes and costumes of a masque, the primary of a protracted sequence he designed for her and later for the king. The phrases to those masques had been typically equipped by Ben Jonson, the surroundings, costumes, and results practically at all times by Jones. More than 450 drawings by him, representing work on 25 masques, a pastoral, and two performs ranging in date between 1605 and 1641, survive at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire.
From 1605 till 1610 Jones in all probability regarded himself as primarily beneath the queen’s safety, however he was patronized additionally by Robert Cecil, 1st earl of Salisbury, for whom he produced his earliest recognized architectural work, a design for the New Exchange within the Strand (c. 1608; demolished within the 18th century). Though a considerably immature design, the work was extra refined than something being carried out in England on the time. Some designs (later outdated) for the restoration and enchancment of Old St. Paul’s Cathedral additionally date from this era, and in 1610 Jones was given an appointment that confirmed the route of his future profession. He turned surveyor of works to the inheritor to the throne, Henry, prince of Wales.
This appointment, with all its promise, was short-lived, and Jones did little or nothing for the prince earlier than the latter’s dying in 1612. In 1613, nonetheless, he was compensated by the assure of nonetheless increased workplace on the dying of the king’s surveyor of works, Simon Basil. To this workplace Jones succeeded in 1615, within the meantime having taken the chance supplied him by Thomas Howard, 2nd earl of Arundel, to revisit Italy. Arundel and his occasion, together with Jones, left England in April 1613 and proceeded to Italy, spending the winter of 1613–14 in Rome. In the course of the go to Jones had ample alternative to review works by fashionable masters in addition to vintage ruins. Of the masters, the one to whom he hooked up the best significance was Andrea Palladio, the Italian architect who had gained large affect by means of his The Four Books of Architecture (1570; I quattro libri dell’architettura), which Jones took with him on his tour. Returning to England within the autumn of 1614, Jones had accomplished his self-education as a classical architect.
Jones’s profession as surveyor of works to James I and Charles I lasted from 1615 to 1643. During most of these 28 years he was repeatedly employed within the constructing, rebuilding, or enchancment of royal homes. His first necessary endeavor was the Queen’s House at Greenwich, primarily based to some extent on the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano, close to Florence, however detailed in a mode nearer to Palladio or Vincenzo Scamozzi (1552–1616). Work there was suspended on the dying of Queen Anne in 1619 and accomplished solely in 1635 for Charles’s queen, Henrietta Maria. The constructing, significantly altered, now homes a part of the National Maritime Museum.
In 1619 the Banqueting House at Whitehall was destroyed by fireplace; and between that 12 months and 1622 Jones changed it with what has at all times been thought to be his biggest achievement. The Banqueting House consists of 1 nice chamber, raised on a vaulted basement. It was conceived internally as a basilica on the Vitruvian mannequin however with out aisles, the superimposed columns being set towards the partitions, which assist a flat, beamed ceiling. For the principle panels of this ceiling, allegorical work by Peter Paul Rubens had been commissioned by Charles I and set in place in 1635. The exterior echoes the association of the inside, with pilasters and common columns set towards rusticated walling.
The Banqueting House has solely two full facades. The ends had been by no means accomplished, and this has given rise to the supposition that the constructing was meant to kind half of a bigger complete. This could have been so, and it's sure that Charles I, practically 20 years after the Banqueting House was constructed, instructed Jones to organize designs for rebuilding the entire of Whitehall Palace. These designs exist (at Worcester College, Oxford, and at Chatsworth House) and are amongst Jones’s most fascinating creations. They owe one thing to the palace of El Escorial close to Madrid however are labored out in phrases deriving partly from Palladio and Scamozzi and partly from Jones’s personal research of the vintage.
Jones’s work was not confined to royal palaces. He was a lot concerned within the regulation of latest buildings in London, and out of this exercise emerged the mission that he deliberate in 1630 for the 4th earl of Bedford on his land at Covent Garden. This comprised a big open area bounded on the north and east by arcaded homes, on the south by the earl’s backyard wall, and on the west by a church with flanking gateways connecting to 2 single homes. The design in all probability derives partly from the piazza in Livorno, Italy, and partly from the Place Royale (now the Place des Vosges) in Paris. None of the unique homes survive, however the church of St. Paul nonetheless stands, although a lot altered. Its portico is an occasion, distinctive in Europe at its date of building, of the usage of the primitive Tuscan order of structure.
With Covent Garden, Jones launched formal city planning to London—it's the first London “square.” He was in all probability instrumental, from 1638, in creating one other sq. by planning the format of the homes in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, one of many homes (Lindsey House, nonetheless present at No. 59 and 60) being attributed to him.
The most necessary endeavor of Jones’s later years in workplace was the restoration of Old St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1633–42. This included not solely the restore of the 14th-century choir however your complete recasing, in rusticated masonry, of the Romanesque nave and transepts and the constructing of a brand new west entrance with a portico (56 ft [17 metres] excessive) of 10 columns. This portico, amongst Jones’s most bold and subtly calculated works, tragically vanished with the rebuilding of the cathedral after the Great Fire of London in 1666. (In 1997 greater than 70 carved stones from the portico had been excavated from the constructing’s foundations.) Jones’s work at St. Paul’s significantly influenced Sir Christopher Wren and is mirrored in a few of his metropolis church buildings in addition to in his early designs for rebuilding the cathedral.
At the outbreak of the English Civil Wars in 1642, Jones was compelled to relinquish his workplace as surveyor of works and left London. He was captured on the siege of Basing House in 1645. His property was quickly confiscated, and he was closely fined. In the next 12 months, nonetheless, his pardon was confirmed by the House of Lords and his property restored. In the 12 months of Charles I’s execution, 1649, he was doing work at Wilton for the earl of Pembroke, however the nice double-cube room there's in all probability principally the work of his pupil John Webb, who survived to reestablish one thing of the Jones custom after the Restoration in 1660. Jones was buried along with his mother and father within the church of St. Benet, Paul’s Wharf, in London.