Dazzling displays and Georgian extravaganzas

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Clare Finn is dazzled by the lavish and spectacular decoration was part of every Georgian celebration and public entertainment - as described in Magnificent Entertainments, Temporary Architecture for Georgian Festivals, by Melanie Doderer-Winkler

Time destroys irrationally. Our picture of the past is built from what is left; it is not always the best or the worst and certainly not that intended to be temporary that survives. But with this study Doderer-Winkler's painstaking research pieces together an image of an impressive range of temporary decorations and structures for transitory events and celebrations, showing the extraordinary rich detail that does survive. She has tracked down original designs, eye-witness accounts from scrapbooks, letters, journals, newspaper reports, commemorative prints and, in some instances, rare survivals of these short-lived decorations themselves.

Beginning with the lavish celebrations for royalty and spectacles given by nobility, Doderer-Winkler paints a vivid picture of, among other events, the original premier of Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks in Green Park on 27 April 1749 to celebrate the Peace of Aix-La-Chapelle. For this event the Franco-Italian stage designer, Giovanni Niccolo Servandoni, created a 125-metre-long classical temple from wood, canvas and plaster, hiding the necessary hardware for the fireworks. Servandoni drew his sword on the Comptroller of the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich, the main coordinator of the event, when part of it burnt down.

Allied to stage and interior design as well as fine art sculpture and painting, these temporary works were often frequently designed and painted by Royal Academicians, among them Robert Adam and Sir John Soane, indicating their willingness, and that of artists, to work in areas beyond the fine arts.

Sculptures were made in plaster. Paintings were on a colossal scale. Painted both front and back, they were transparencies, a technique enabling a rendition of a faux marble bas-relief to burst into colour when lit from behind. Used for ephemeral occasions, transparencies were not themselves transient, as descriptions of the commercial public pleasure gardens at Vauxhall make clear.

Vauxhall Gardens, established before Charles II's Restoration in 1660, would remain open for 200 years. While much of its architecture was not temporary, it was redecorated regularly, changing the style of the gardens' main structure, the rotunda, from rococo to neo-classical and even, at one point, into a Hindu temple. But Vauxhall displayed transparencies both for one-night galas and longer-term decorative displays. Often these transparencies had debuted elsewhere first, such as one by William Hamilton painted for  the Bank of England in 1789 to celebrate His Majesty, George III's recovery from his first serious bout of what is now thought to have been porphyria.

If Vauxhall Gardens' transparencies were impressive, at a time when artificial light was precious and sparingly used, its illuminations were legendary and never failed to impress first-time visitors.

But much more than the gardens were illuminated... Cassone subscribers click here to read on

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