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Cannons was a stately home in Little Stanmore, Middlesex, built by James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos, between 1713 and 1724 at a cost of £200,000 (equivalent to £ today) but which in 1747 was razed and its contents dispersed. The name "Cannons" is an obsolete spelling of "canons" and refers to the Augustinian canons of St Bartholomew-the-Great, London, who owned the estate before the English Reformation. Cannons was the focus of the first Duke's artistic patronage – patronage which led to his nickname "The Apollo of the Arts". Brydges filled Cannons with Old Masters and Grand Tour acquisitions, and also appointed Handel as resident house composer from 1717 to 1718. Such was the fame of Cannons that members of the public flocked to visit the estate in great numbers and Alexander Pope was unjustly accused of having represented the house as "Timon's Villa" in his ''Epistle Of Taste'' (1731).〔Pope confided to Lord Burlington "that character of Timon is collected from twenty different absurditys and improprieties: and never was the picture of any one human creature"; quoted in James Lees-Milne, ''The Earls of Creation'', :148. The error was compounded in William Hogarth's satirical engraving of Lord Burlington, as a mason's apprentice, carrying a hod to Alexander Pope, whitewashing a bust of Kent and incidentally bespattering Chandos (Lees-Milne, 108).〕 The Cannons estate was acquired by Chandos in 1713 from the uncle of his first wife, Mary Lake. Mary's great-grandfather Sir Thomas Lake had acquired the manor of Great Stanmore in 1604. Following the first Duke's death in 1744, Cannons passed to his son Henry Brydges, 2nd Duke of Chandos. Due to the cost of building Cannons and significant losses to the family fortune in the South Sea Bubble there was little capital in Henry's inheritance, so in 1747 he held a twelve-day demolition sale at Cannons which saw both the contents and the very structure of the house itself sold piecemeal leaving little more than a ruin barely thirty years after its inception. The subsequent villa built by William Hallett is now occupied by North London Collegiate School. ==Architecture== Chandos soon began to remodel the existing Jacobean house built by Thomas Lake (which is believed to have been designed by John Thorpe). The new three-storey house took 10 years to complete and was designed as a square block with four new pedimented facades and a large internal courtyard. The Duke went through several architects beginning with William Talman in 1713 who produced twelve plans but was dismissed in 1714 before starting any building on the main house. Next was John James who designed the north and west ranges (and also rebuilt the local parish church, St Lawrence, Whitchurch, with a baroque interior). On advice from Sir John Vanbrugh the Duke appointed James Gibbs in 1715. Gibbs is known as an architect who worked in a baroque idiom but incorporated palladian elements. He designed the chapel (consecrated 29 August 1720) as well as the final designs for the four new facades. The designs for the interiors did not meet with approval from Vanbrugh who commented "The fronts v.fine... But the inside is of poor Invention" and Gibbs was dismissed in 1719. Cannons was completed under the supervision of the Duke's surveyors John Price and latterly Edward Shepard. A contemporary account from a 1722 visitor at the time that the finishing touches were being made to the interiors records: Due to having five different architects working on the house and the Duke's constantly changing vision, Cannons encompassed both Palladian and Baroque elements and has been described both as one of the last great Baroque houses and also as contributing towards the development of Palladianism in England.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Cannons (house)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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