Papendieck and Hullmandel might sound like an obscure German plant nursery  or perhaps a Victorian music hall double act but they were actually the people behind a collection of colour images of the royal gardens at Kew  in the final days of Georgian England.  While no-one who has visited Kew can have missed the pagoda or failed to see any of the remaining classical buildings dotted around the gardens, they probably don’t realise how cluttered the place was  two hundred years ago.  Amongst many other things  littering the gardens were ten temples, several ruins, and a huge royal palace resembling a medieval fort, that cost a fortune, was never lived in and was demolished about 25 years later.

Unless otherwise acknowledged all the images in this post come from Kew Gardens : a series of twenty-four drawings on stone, 1820, in the Yale Centre for British Art

George Papendieck was the son of German immigrants, Christopher Papendieck, one of George III’s court-musicians  and his wife Charlotte,  who arrived as part of the retinue of the future Queen Charlotte. She was to become a lady-in-waiting to Charlotte and later Assistant Keeper of the royal wardrobe. Her memoirs are a really valuable source of information about the period, and especially of court life.  George was born in 1788 and clearly was a reasonably talented amateur artist particularly in watercolours.  Little more is known about him except that he died in 1835.

Charles Joseph Hullmandel was born in London, again to German parents.   He trained as an artist in Paris, and in 1817 met J. A. Senefelder, the inventor of lithography, in Munich. That meeting changed the course of his career. He soon  set up a lithographic press at his home in Great Marlborough Street in central London and became the British expert in the field, during  the 1820s and ‘30s.

 

The book was published by Rudolph Ackermann [see this earlier post for more on him] but came without any accompanying text, so what do the images tell us?

The first surprise,  even if you knew of its existence, is the so-called New Palace. George III had wanted a grand new residence  at Kew since he inherited his mother’s share of the gardens, after she died in 1772.  But it took until 1794  before James Wyatt, who had already worked at Frogmore for Queen Charlotte, drew up plans in the  fashionable mock mediaeval style. The site  was close to the Dutch House,   the red-brick building today known as Kew Palace, looking out over the Thames towards Brentford. Maybe not such a good choice  as George later described  what he could see as “smokey and dusky [and] one of the most detestable places in the vicinity of London”.

At the same time  the new palace was being built the royal family’s then home at Kew,   the White House, Princess Augusta’s former home,  was being demolished. In the  interim the family moved into the Dutch House, which, after Wyatt’s castle was finished  George intended to pull down as well.

The  new palace had a  four-storey keep in the middle surrounded by crenellated towers, turrets and a high curtain wall (and if one’s honest)  looked rather like a child’s toy fort. Although it could have been  a mediaeval throwback it was very modern because Wyatt adopted a very modern means of construction. His brother Samuel had recently invented hollow cast-iron tubular units  so the palace became a very early example of using them as a framework for a large building.   A budget of £40,000 was set originally, although work did not start until 1801. By 1806 costs had reached £100,00, and when the roof was finished in 1811 they had reached £500,000 and the king was virtually bankrupted. He was also extremely ill and so all the interior work was left unfinished  and the building abandoned.

 

Dry rot set in and in 1827, although it had never been inhabited,  George IV ordered its demolition.  While a few elements, notably the staircases and flooring were taken off to be used in the refurbishment of Buckingham Palace, most was sold at auction and the rest eventually blown up! Luckily there are quite a few  surviving images to show what we have lost.

The image above shows how close Wyatt’s palace  was to the Dutch House, the present Kew Palace.  These days that sits in fairly splendid isolation surrounded by beautiful gardens, but in 1820 as you can see, from that  it was not quite so isolated with an extensive range of service buildings, which were largely taken down in the 1880s.

 

I presume that somewhere in all of that mass of buildings were the less-than-formal,  indeed rather ramshackle, palace gates which appear in another image. Royal security doesn’t appear to have been a major issue!

Papandiek also painted  two other bits of royal buildings, now both lost.

The brick-built Clock Tower formed part of the White House. Designed by the royal architect William Chambers it was not part of the original palace and only dates from 1773, with the clock installed even later in 1777. The tower survived the demolition of the rest of the palace but was clearly dilapidated by the time Papendieck drew it about 1820. When the tower was eventually taken down the clock was re-used at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

The other fragment of a royal building, described as the remains of Kew Palace, are I think probably part of the outbuildings or service wing of the White House, with what looks like the clock tower in the background. This  image is not mentioned in Ray Desmond’s  History of Kew.

Another set of ruins were deliberately designed by Chambers, and he included two detailed engravings in his 1763 compilations of Plans, elevations, sections, and perspective views of the gardens and buildings at Kew, in Surry.  They survive today and I’d guess most people would think they were either the remains of a larger building or perhaps a deliberate folly. In fact, and much to my surprise, the Ruined Arch also had  a practical use serving as a bridge for  cattle and sheep to cross from the road outside  into the pasture grounds which formed part of the royal garden at the time.  

It was part of the cult of ruins that swept through Georgian Britain, with Chambers choosing to create “a Roman antiquity of brick with incrustations of stone” reminiscent of ruins he had seen in Rome.

He began by building a mock triumphal arch with three openings but later converted the two side ones into small rooms, although these were later reopened. Papendieck’s painting is of the north side and so does not show anything like the full extent of the structure which can be seen in both Chamber’s engraving and this photo  taken during the recent repair and conservation project.

Papanediek also records two more good examples of the cult of ruins. The first is  The Cave, which is thought to have been constructed from the remnants of  the Hermitage designed by William Kent for Queen Caroline.  [see this earlier post for more] lThe other is the Stone House which was apparently built by the sons of George III. Both were swept away by William Thistleton-Dyer, Kew’s third director, in 1881 when he wanted a lot of stone to create a  new rockery.

Other buildings are clearly recognisable, and indeed have hardly changed. Queen Charlotte’s Cottage had started life as a home for the keeper of Queen Caroline’s menagerie but by 1772 had been given a second floor and had become a summerhouse for and what  The London Magazine in 1774  described  as  “a pretty retreat”.  It was given to Kew by Queen Victoria in 1898.

The orangery was clearly being used for its original purpose, although there don’t seem to be many orange trees as one might expect.

 

 

It’s also worth taking a closer look at  the pagoda, especially at its decoration and colouring, and comparing it with both William Chamber’s original version, the later modifications made during the later 19thc and the recent renovation [for which see this earlier post]

Papendieck went on to paint several buildings now long vanished. These included   a small and not particularly elegant aviary, which  originally stood near the castellated palace. One of several around the gardens it was demolished probably at the same time as the palace  because it does not appear on the estate plan of  1837.

What Papendieck described as  Chinese Temple is now more usually referred to as the House of Confucius. It predates the more famous pagoda as it was built for Frederick Prince of Wales around 1750 when it  was described as “his new Chinesia Summer house, painted in their stile and ornaments [with] the story of Confusius & his doctrines etc.”    

It must have been quite a fragile structure because ten  years later  William Chambers who designed the pagoda, order the temple to repaired and moved to a new lakeside position.  It survived and was even used as an exemplar by John Soane in one of his Royal Academy Architecture lectures in 1806-1819 but was so dilapidated by the time Kew was taken over by the government that one of the first moves the office of Works did was sell it for building material.

 

The Temple of Eolus [these days usually spelled Aeolus] seen in the background was built  in 1763 on an artificial mound. However the present structure named that  – a domed rotunda with eight columns – is a replacement in 1845 by Decimus Burton of “the decaying temple … by a very chaste structure of similar kind, in stone, from the original design of Sir William Chambers.” (Colvin’s History of the Kings Works Vol VI, p.441.)

The Temple of Eolus was just one of Chambers many classical garden structures.  These were mainly built of wood, and introduced, according to Ray Demond, “to counterbalance the exoticism of the East.”  They  also showed off his mastery of Greek and Roman architectural orders and styles.

While Eolus’s temple  was built in the elaborate Composite order elsewhere he used Doric for the Temples of Bellona and Pan, Ionic for those of Arethusa, Peace and Victory, and Corinthian for the Temple of the Sun.

As you can see several of these were painted by Papendieck and can be compared with the engravings in the Chambers book of Kew plans.

 

Chambers’ rather strange design for  Temple of the Sun was based on the drawing of  a ruined temple in Baalbek, Lebanon, that he had seen in  Richard Wood’s The Ruins of Balbec, otherwise Heliopolis in Cœlosyria published in 1757.

It stood in open woodland near the Orangery but  was crushed by a falling Cedar of Lebanon  during a ferocious storm in 1916.

Papendieck also included a painting of a more unusual  “behind the scenes” building:  the water engine, designed by John Smeaton. This was built around 1761 and  hidden away behind the House of Confucius. Its pump, powered by  a pair of horses walking around a circular track,  could raise 70,000 litres an hour from a 12 foot deep well, using an Archimedes Screw.  This was to provide water  to maintain the levels of the lake and ponds as well for watering plants.

What is perhaps surprising is that there are only two images of the gardens themselves, and even these are of very specific trees rather than more general scenes.   One shows some of the seven elm trees reputedly planted by George III’s daughters, although it’s difficult to tell from the painting how many had survived until 1820. What is known is that the final one was felled during a storm in 1916.

The other shows a Cedar of Lebanon in the Arboretum.  [According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word arboretum is first used by John Claudius Loudon in 1838, but this use by Papendieck predates that by 18 years and suggests it may have been in more general use by the time he was writing].  There were many Cedars throughout the garden, but especially around the pagoda and in the arboretum so I wonder if this one was the tree that destroyed the Temple of the Sun?

There remains just one more image to include, and I’ve left it until last because I knew virtually nothing about the building it shows, although in fact it still survives in extremely good shape. That’s largely because it’s not within the current confines of the Royal Botanic Gardens and is not generally accessible to the public.

The King’s Observatory was commissioned by George III  because he  was fascinated by  science. Designed by William Chambers  it was completed just in time for the king and Queen Charlotte to witness the  transit of the Planet Venus across the face of the Sun, in 1769. This was the same astronomical phenomenon that had led to the Navy sending out Captain Cook, accompanied of course by Joseph Banks, to the Pacific to witness the event first hand there.

The Observatory was built in  the Old Deer Park, then part of the royal estate,  roughly on the site of the old village of West Sheen which had to be  demolished to make way for it. Part from the king’s personal enjoyment of the space it served as a laboratory, workshop and even as a schoolhouse for the  royal children.  It also housed ‘some excellent mathematical instruments, a collection of subjects in natural history, well preserved, an excellent apparatus for philosophical experiments, and a collection of ores from His Majesty’s mines in the forests in Germany’. Landscaping the Deer Park around the Observatory was entrusted to Capability Brown as part of his work remodelling the royal estate, and allowed him to open up sweeping views across the Thames to Syon and the Norman church at Isleworth.

 

When Kew was transferred from royal to government hands in 1840 the Observatory was given first to  the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and then in 1871 to  the Royal Society while  between 1910 to 1980, it was home to the Meteorological Office.  It is now in private hands and open for just a few weeks each summer.  In the 1890s a lease of most of the Old Deer Park was granted to a golf club who are still there. [But wouldn’t it be nice if it was eventually reunited with Kew to almost double the size of the gardens?] The most recent landscaping for the building completed in 2018 in line with the Thames Landscape Strategy Study has restored some of the views of the  Observatory to what they would have been like 250 years ago.

There is very little else by way of further er information about Papendieck but the various buildings can be tracked through the index of Ray Desmond’s The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, first published in 1995, with an updated version in 2009. and for more on the King’s Observatory  check out John Cloake’s very detail led history of the site