Description
Perhaps designed by Richard Temple (later to become Earl Temple) and built between 1747-49. It was initially known as the 'Grecian Temple, based on the Roman temple of the 1st century BC at Nimes in southern France, known as the Maison Carree, which in turn was a copy of the Graeco-Roman temple at Balbec in Syria. It was modified by the architect Borra between 1751-55 in the interests of archaeological accuracy. The eastern end was given a monumental porch or 'pronaos' and the side windows were blocked. The roof covering was also changed, from black-glazed clay tiles to Westmoreland slate.
It was re-edified in 1764 as the Temple of Concord and Victory in honour of the victory over the French in the Seven Years War. As part of this re-edification the sculpted tympanum of The Four Quarters of the World bringing their various products to Britania, carved by Peter Scheemakers, was moved from the Palladian Bridge in 1762 and inserted over the pronaos. The lead statue of Victory was added over the tympanum and flanking statues on the corner acroteria. Inside the 'cella' of the building a statue of Public Liberty was inserted and the walls were decorated with terracotta medallions commemorating the various battles of the wars against the French.
The Temple was restored to its 1760s appearance by the Trust in 1994-95. It is a rectangular building, the principal element consisting of a rectangular chamber or 'cella' with an 'aedicule' or shrine against the west wall originally housing the statue of Public Liberty (removed in 1845, the present statue - the 'Duchess' - was recovered from the quarry behind Home Farm). The cella is flanked externally by a 'peristyle' of 28 Ionic columns. Sixteen of these columns were removed in 1927 to create the school chapel and these columns were therefore recreated as part of the Trust's restoration programme. The whole construction - the cella and peristyle - is carried on a raised plinth faced with ashlar of local Helmdon stone. The plinth is actually a hollow construction, consisting of a series of arched stone vaults which carry the construction above. The pronaos leading to the door into the cella is therefore approached by a flight of stone steps, restored as part of the work in 1994-95.
(10) Ionic Temple 1749 by Earl Temple, as the Grecian Temple, renamed 1763 to celebrate the Peace of Paris. 6 fluted columned pedimented portico approached by flight of steps. Relief carving in pediment by Scheemakers. Peristyle columns removed to school chapel (q.v.).
(12) The designer of the largest and by far the grandest of Stowe’s temples remains unknown. The Grecian Temple, as it was first called, was begun in 1747 and roofed in 1749 within months of Lord Cobham’s death at the age of 74. Seeley’s 1788 guidebook ascribes the design to Kent, and goes on to say that the temple ‘was designed from the measurements, which it nearly follows, of the Maison Carree at Nismes’. Kent died in 1748, and neither documentary evidence nor stylistic grounds support the attribution. There are resemblances between the temple and the Maison Carrée, a Roman temple of the late first century bc, but this is not only not ‘Grecian’ but also pseudoperipteral (having an engaged peristyle, whereas the columns surrounding the Temple of Concord are free-standing) and of the Corinthian order, and therefore built on a quite different system of proportion from the Ionic temple at Stowe. (For their recent restoration, see p. 86.)
In fact the Temple of Concord is not a copy of any known Greek or otherwise ancient temple, but rather a conflation of elements perhaps gathered from books available at the time, of which the Abbé Montfaucon’s L’Antiquité expliquée (1722) and the Rev. Richard Pococke’s A Description of the East and Other Countries (1745) are the most likely. The great series of publications which inspired the Neo-classical style in England – by Dawkins and Wood, and Stuart and Revett – were not published until the 1750s.
The Temple of Concord can thus best be called the first English building of Greek intention. It has been suggested that Lord Cobham’s nephew and heir, Richard Grenville, later Earl Temple, may himself have designed it. In his portrait by William Hoare of Bath of 1760, he holds a plan of the Temple of Concord, and on his return from the Grand Tour in 1732 he may well have visited Nîmes. Two years later he was one of the founders of the Society of Dilettanti, which later promoted Stuart and Revett’s publication.
The first recorded use of the term ‘Grecian’ at Stowe is a reference to the ‘Grecian diagonal’ in a bill in the garden accounts for 1747. This was the vista created from the Cobham Monument to the Grecian Temple, which must at that time have been under construction. There was no widespread fashion for ‘Grecian’ architecture at this time, but stylistic diversity is a notable characteristic of Lord Cobham’s garden buildings. He had already built in the Palladian, Antique Roman, Gothic, Chinese and Egyptian styles, and it may simply be that he wanted to add what was thought to be the style of ancient Greece to the collection.
The temple underwent almost immediate modification in order to render it more truly ‘Grecian’. A letter from Borra to Earl Temple dated 3 July 1752 marks his employment by Temple for the next two years to incorporate a pronaos (the vestibule formed at the eastern, entrance, end by the massive flanking inner walls), and to block the windows which had originally pierced the walls of the cella (principal space) of the temple and must have seemed incongruous from the start. In 1755 six of the many lead figures supplied to Lord Cobham by Van Nost for his parterre some years earlier were raised to ornament the four corners of the roof and the two pediments. At the same time the black glazed pantiles with which the roof had first been covered were replaced with lakeland green slates.
In the late 1750s Earl Temple derived great satisfaction from the progress of the Seven Years War, not least because its political direction was largely conducted by members of his own extended family (see p. 72). Between 1761, the year in which he resigned as Lord Privy Seal from the Pitt-Newcastle Ministry, and 1764, the Grecian Temple was once again in the hands of the builders, gradually assuming a new and powerful political significance and the dedication to Concord and Victory.
This process began in 1761 with the removal from the Palladian Bridge of Scheemakers’s massive rectangular stone relief, The Four Quarters of the World bringing their Various Products to Britannia. In 1761–2 it was reassembled by the mason William Emberly as a triangle to fit the eastern pediment, with additional sculpture including that to fit the tapering corners supplied by William Stevenson.
The colossal stone figure of Victory bestowing a garland of laurel, which stands on the apex of the sculptural pediment, was probably carved by James Lovell, who carved the models for the plasterers employed on the temple. In this position it supplanted what was probably one of Van Nost’s lead figures from the earlier garden, which is shown in the engraved views of the temple before its rededication. A number of different configurations of statues are shown on the roof in the many engravings and it is impossible from these or from other sources to tell whether a figure of Concord was added at the opposite end, or whether one of the lead figures persisted in that position. Lovell’s statue has now been reinstated and is accompanied by casts of the four original lead pediment figures, which are now at Anglesey Abbey in Cambridgeshire. The missing sixth figure has been cast from a roughly contemporaneous statue at Castle Howard in Yorkshire.
Next, the blank walls of the pronaos and cella were furnished with a series of sixteen medallions, the majority of them based on subjects chosen by the Society of Arts for medals commemorating British victories. Most of these were designed by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, and although as a member of the Society Earl Temple would have had known about this project, he is thought to have consulted Stuart directly in making this selection. Those on the walls of the pronaos were cast in terracotta by Lovell and represent Concordia civium (National Concord) and Concordia foederatum (Concord of the Allies: a British and a Prussian soldier hold between them a globe supporting a Victory). Over the door is an inscription from the Roman historian Valerius Maximus: "Quo Tempore Salus eorum in ultimas Augustias deducta nullum Ambitioni Locum relinquebat. The Times with such alarming Dangers fraught, Left not a Hope for any factious Thought. "Seeley’s 1762 guidebook
In the nineteenth century the exterior of the temple was painted with an ochre limewash which unified the Helmdon and Ashendon stones of the columns and walls with the stucco of the brick walls to the cella; Scheemakers’s Portland stone relief, and the pediment statues (variously Portland stone and lead) were also blended in by this method. The colour of the wash must have heightened the effect of the setting sun on the building described by Whately.
Within, the medallions were executed in terracotta and set into the walls within circular plaster frames ‘suspended’ from ribbon bows formed from strips of lead. The internal medallions are inscribed with lead lettering as follows (from the left of the door, clockwise), according to Seeley: "Quebec, Martinico &c., Louisbourg, Guadeloupe, &c., Montreal, Pondicherry, &c., naval victory off Belleisle, naval victory off Lagos, Crevelt and Minden, Felinghausen, Goree and Senegal, Crown Point, Niagara, and Fort du Quesne, Havannah and Manilla, Beau Sejour, Cherburgh, and Belleisle – executed from several of the Medals."
The ceiling was renewed in 1753–4 to a design by Borra based on those he had drawn for Dawkins and Wood’s publication on the ruins of Palmyra. The interior was an entirely neutral, stone-coloured room, relieved only by the blue and gold colouring of the great doors, noticed by M. Latapie in 1771 and recently reinstated according to the results of cross-sectional analysis of the paintwork.
In the recent restoration, the Trust has recreated the aedicule which completed the interior and formed the true focus of the building. Before it, on a low base, there stood from 1763 a figure of Public Liberty, in the place of honour reserved in classical temples for the deity, but this no longer survives at Stowe. Above the aedicule is an inscription from Valerius Maximus: "Candidis autem animis voluptatem praebuerint in conspicuo posita qua cuique magnifica merito contigerunt, A sweet Sensation touches ev’ry Breast Of Candour’s gen’rous Sentiment possest, When public Services with Honour due, Are gratefully mark’d out to public view." Seeley’s 1762 guide
A mutilated eighteenth-century draped torso discovered in a disused quarry on the newly acquired Home Farm Estate has been placed in the aedicule as a substitute for the missing figure of Public Liberty.
Seeley’s 1763 guidebook mentions for the first time two further statuary marble groups, both of which had been supplied originally for the 1st Duke of Chandos’s great house at Canons, near Edgware, in 1725. They were Scheemakers’s Venus and Apollo and Vertumnus and Pomona by his partner Laurent Delvaux, and they stood in the pronaos to either side of the doors. By the time of Nattes’s view of 1805 they had been replaced by two massive urns.
From the steps two oblique views complete the theme of political and imperial domination to the north, the soaring obelisk devoted to the memory of General Wolfe, military architect of the British victories over the French in Canada, and across the valley (via the Grecian Diagonal) the column celebrating one of its political architects, Lord Cobham.
The embellishment of the temple continued well into the nineteenth century. In the 1840s the 2nd Duke abolished the aedicule and its statue in favour of a new dais with a screen of granite columns. A plan to place bronze statues of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert on the dais to mark their visit in 1845 was abandoned in view of the Duke’s debts; the royal couple planted a pair of trees outside.