Everything about Sir Christopher Wren totally explained
Sir Christopher Wren (
20 October 1632 –
25 February 1723) was a 17th century
English designer,
astronomer,
geometer, and one of the greatest English
architects of his time. Wren designed 53
London churches, including
St Paul's Cathedral, as well as many secular buildings of note. He was a founder of the
Royal Society (president 1680–82), and his scientific work was highly regarded by
Sir Isaac Newton and
Blaise Pascal.
Biography
Early life and education
Wren was born at
East Knoyle in
Wiltshire, the only surviving son of
Christopher Wren DD (1589-1658), at that time the rector of East Knoyle and later
Dean of Windsor. A previous child of Dr Wren, also named Christopher, was born on
22 November 1631, and had died the same day.
John Aubrey’s confusion of the two persisted occasionally into late twentieth-century literature.
As a child Wren "seem'd consumptive". Although a sickly child, he'd survive into robust old age. He was first taught at home by a private tutor and his father. After his father's appointment as
Dean of Windsor in March 1635, his family spent part of each year there. Little is known about Wren’s life at Windsor and it's misleading to say that Wren and the son of
Charles I became childhood friends there and "often played together".
Wren’s schooling isn't at all definitive. The story that he was at
Westminster School from 1641 to 1646 is unsubstantiated.
Parentalia, the biography compiled by his son, a third Christopher, places him there "for some short time" before going to Oxford (in 1650). Some of his youthful exercises preserved or recorded (though few are datable) showed that he received a thorough grounding in
Latin; he also learned to draw. According to
Parentalia, he was "initiated" in the principles of
mathematics by Dr.
William Holder, who married Wren’s elder sister Susan in 1643. During this time period, Wren manifested an interest in the design and construction of mechanical instruments. It was probably through Holder that Wren met
Sir Charles Scarburgh, with whom he assisted in the anatomical studies.
Wren entered
Wadham College, Oxford, on
25 June 1650. At Wadham, Wren’s formal education was conventional. The curriculum was still based on the study of
Aristotle and the discipline of the
Latin language, and it's anachronistic to imagine that he received scientific training in the modern sense. However, Wren became closely associated with
John Wilkins, who served as warden in Wadham. Wilkins was a member of a group of distinguished scholars. This group, whose activities led to the formation of
Royal Society, consisted of a number of distinguished mathematicians, original and sometimes brilliant practical workers and experimental philosophers. This connection probably influenced Wren’s studies of science and mathematics at college. He graduated B.A. in 1651, and three years later received M.A.
Middle years
Receiving his
A.M. in 1653, Wren was elected a fellow of
All Souls College in the same year and began an active period of research and experiment in Oxford. His days as a fellow of All Souls ended when Wren was appointed Professor of Astronomy at
Gresham College,
London in 1657. He was provided with a set of rooms and a stipend and was required to give weekly lectures in both
Latin and
English to all who wished to attend; admission was free. Wren took up this new work with enthusiasm. He continued to meet the men with whom he'd frequent discussions in
Oxford. They attended his London lectures and in 1660, initiated formal weekly meetings. It was from these meetings that the
Royal Society,
England’s premier scientific body, was to develop. He undoubtedly played a major role in the early life of what would become the Royal Society; his great breadth of expertise in so many different subjects helping in the exchange of ideas between the various scientists. In fact, the report on one of these meetings reads:
* (Sometime earlier, Faith had dropped her wrist watch into a pool of water. It had been sent to Wren in London for it to be repaired. This letter was part of a package.)
This brief marriage produced two children: Gilbert, a sickly child given to convulsions fits, born October 1672; the infant died not quite a year-and-a-half old. The second child, also a son, named Christopher after his father, was born February 1675. The younger Christopher was trained by his father to be an architect. It was this Christopher that supervised the topping out ceremony of
St Paul'sChristopher Wren in 1710 and wrote the famous
Parentalia. Faith Wren died of small pox on
3 September 1675. She was buried in the
chancel of St.-Martin-in-the-Field beside the infant Gilbert. A few days later Wren's mother-in-law, Lady Coghill, arrived to take the infant back with her to Oxfordshire to raise.
In 1677, seventeen months after the death of his first wife, Wren married once again. He married Jane Fitzwilliam, a woman even more of a mystery than the first Mrs. Wren; especially to Wren's friends and companions.
Robert Hooke, who often saw Wren two or three times every week, had, as he recorded in his diary, never even heard of her, and wasn't to meet her till six weeks after the marriage. All that's know about the second Mrs. Wren was that she was the daughter of Lord Fitzwilliam of
Lifford on the Irish peerage, and that her mother had been the daughter of a prosperous London merchant. As with the first marriage, this too produced two children: a daughter Jane, (1677-1702); and a son William, "Poor Billy" born June, 1679, was developmentally delayed.
Like the first, this second marriage was also brief. Jane Wren died of
tuberculosis in September 1680. She was buried alongside Faith and Gilbert in the chancel of St.-Martin-in-the-Field. Wren was never to marry again; he lived to be 90 years old and of those was married only nine.
Bletchingham was the home of Wren's brother-in-law William Holder who was rector of the local church. Holder had been a Fellow of
Pembroke College, Oxford. An intellectual of considerable ability, he's said to have been the figure who introduced Wren to arithmetic and geometry.
After the death of Charles II in 1685, Wren's attention was directed mainly to
Whitehall. The new king,
James II, required a new chapel and also ordered a new gallery, council chamber and a riverside apartment for the Queen. Later, when James II was removed from the throne, Wren took on architectural projects such as
Kensington Palace,
Hampton Court and
Greenwich Hospital, which was his last great work and the only one still in progress after St Paul’s had been completed in 1711.
Late life
Wren's later life wasn't without criticisms and attacks on his competence and his taste. In 1712, the
Letter Concerning Design of
Anthony Ashley Cooper, third
Earl of Shaftesbury, circulated in manuscript. Proposing a new British style of architecture, Shaftesbury censured Wren’s cathedral, his taste and his long-standing control of royal works. Although he was appointed to the Fifty New Churches Commission in 1711, he was left only with nominal charge of a board of works when the surveyorship started in 1715. On
26 April 1718, on the pretext of failing powers, he was dismissed in favour of William Benson.
Contrary to popular belief, Wren didn't die at his son’s house. The Wren family estate was in the area of
Hampton Court. It had been bought by Wren many years before as part of a legacy for his son Christopher Wren, Jr. For convenience Wren also leased a house on St. James street in London. According to a nineteenth-century legend, he'd often go to London to pay unofficial visits to St. Paul's, to check on the progress of 'my greatest work'. On one of these trips to London he caught a chill. Over the next several days the illness became increasingly worse. On
25 February,
1723 a servant tried to awaken Wren from his nap, but found that Wren had died.
Wren was laid to rest on
5 March,
1723. His remains were placed in the south-east corner of the crypt beside those of his daughter Jane, his sister Susan Holder, and her husband William. The simple stone marker reads:
Subtus conditur Hujus Ecclesias et Urbis Conditor, CHRISTOPHERUS WREN; Qui vixit annos ultra nonaginta,
Non sibi, sed bono publico. Lector, si monumentum requiris,Circumspice. Obiit 25 Feb. MDCCXXIII., aetat. XCI.
The translation of it is:
"Underneath lies buried Christopher Wren, the builder of this church
and city; who lived beyond the age of ninety years, not for himself,
but for the public good.--Reader, if you seek his monument, look
around you.--He died on the 25th of February, 1723, aged 91."
The last lines, which were written by Wren's eldest son and heir, Christopher Wren, Jr., are one of the most famous epitaphs of all time.
Scientific and architectural works
One of Wren's friends, another great scientist and architect in his time,
Robert Hooke said of him "Since the time of
Archimedes there scarce ever met in one man in so great perfection such a mechanical hand and so philosophical mind."
Scientific achievements
As a fellow of
All Souls, he constructed a transparent beehive for scientific observation; he began observing the
moon, which was subsequent to the invention of
micrometers for the
telescope. He experimented on terrestrial
magnetism and had taken part in
medical experiments, performing the first successful injection of a substance into the bloodstream (of a dog).
In
Gresham College, he did experiments involving determining
longitude through
magnetic variation and through lunar observation to help with
navigation, and helped construct a telescope with Sir Paul Neile. Wren also studied and improved the
microscope and telescope at this time. He had also been making observations of the planet
Saturn from around 1652 with the aim of explaining its appearance. His hypothesis was written up in
De corpore saturni but before the work was published,
Huygens presented his theory of the rings of Saturn. Immediately Wren recognized this as a better hypothesis than his own and
De corpore saturni was never published. In addition, he constructed an exquisitely detailed lunar model and presented it to the king. Also his contribution to
mathematics should be noted; in 1658, he found the length of an arc of the
cycloid using an exhaustion proof based on dissections to reduce the problem to summing segments of chords of a circle which are in geometric progression.
A year into Wren's appointment as a
Savilian Professor in
Oxford, the
Royal Society was created and Wren became an active member. As a Savilian Professor, Wren studied thoroughly in
mechanics, especially in
elastic collisions and
pendulum motions, which he studied extensively. He also directed his far-ranging intelligence to the study of
meteorology, and fabricated a "weather-clock" that recorded temperature, humidity, rainfall and barometric pressure, which could be used to predict the weather. In addition, Wren experimented on muscle functionality as well, hypothesizing that the swelling and shrinking of muscles might proceed from a fermentative motion arising from the mixture of two heterogeneous fluids. Although this is incorrect, it's at least founded upon observation and may mark a new outlook on medicine: specialization. Another topic to which Wren contributed was
optics. He published a description of an engine to create perspective drawings and he discussed the grinding of conical lenses and mirrors. Out of this work came another of Wren's important mathematical results, namely that the
hyperboloid of revolution is a ruled surface. These results were published in 1669. In subsequent years, Wren continued with his work with the Royal Society, however, after the 1680s, his scientific interests seem to have waned: no doubt his architectural and official duties absorbed all his time.
Mentioned above are only a few of Wren’s scientific works. He also studied in other areas not mentioned ranging from
agriculture,
ballistics, water and freezing, to investigating light and refraction only to name a few.
Thomas Birch's
History of the Royal Society is one of the most important sources of our knowledge not only of the origins of the Society, but also the day to day running of the Society. It is in these records that the majority of Wren’s scientific works are recorded.
Architectural career
First steps to architecture
In Wren's age, the profession of architect as understood today didn't exist. Since the early years of the 17th century it wasn't unusual for the well-educated gentleman, (
virtuosi), to take up architecture as a gentlemanly activity; a pursuit widely accepted as a branch of applied mathematics. This is implicit in the writings of
Vitruvius and explicit in such sixteenth-century authors as
John Dee and
Leonard Digges. When Wren was a student at Oxford, he became familiar with Vitruvius'
De architectura and absorbed intuitively the fundamentals of the architectural design there. In the past, buildings had been constructed to the needs of the patron and the suggestions of building professionals, such as master carpenters or master bricklayers.
Through the Royal Society and his use of optics, Wren came particularly to the king's notice. In 1661 he was approached by his cousin Matthew with a royal commission, as "one of the best Geometer in Europe", to direct the refortification of Tangier. Wren excused himself on grounds of health. Although this invitation may have arisen from Charles II's casual opportunism in matching people to tasks, Wren is believed to have been already on the way to architecture practice. Before the end of 1661 Wren was unofficially advising the repair of
Old St Paul's Cathedral after two decades of neglect and distress; his architectural interests were also evident to his associates at the time. Two years after, he set his only foreign journey to
Paris and the
Île-de-France, during which he acquired the firsthand study of modern design and construction. By this time, he'd mastered and thoroughly understood architecture. Unlike several of his colleagues who took it up as a set of rules and formulas for design, he possessed, understood, and exploited the combination of reason and intuition, experience and imagination.
Wren and St Paul's
St Paul's has always been the touchstone of Wren's reputation. His association with it spans his whole architectural career, including the thirty-six years between the start of the new building and the declaration by parliament of its completion in 1711.
Wren had been involved in repairs of the old cathedral since 1661. In the spring of 1666, he made his first design for a dome for
St Paul's. It was accepted in principle on
August 27,
1666. One week later, however, The
Great Fire of London reduced two-thirds of the City to a smoking desert and old St Paul's to a ruin. Wren was most likely at Oxford at the time, but the news, so fantastically relevant to his future, drew him at once to London. Between 5th and 11th September he ascertained the precise area of devastation, worked out a plan for rebuilding the City and submitted it to Charles II. Others also submitted plans. However, no new plans proceeded any further than the paper on which it was drawn. A rebuilding act which provided rebuilding of some essential buildings was passed in 1667. In 1669, the King's Surveyor of Works died and Wren was promptly installed.
It wasn't until 1670 that the pace of rebuilding started accelerating. A second rebuilding act was passed that year, raising the tax on coal and thus providing a source of funds for rebuilding of churches destroyed within the City of London. Wren presented his initial "First Model" for St Paul's. This plan was accepted, and demolition of the old cathedral began. By 1672, however, this design seemed too modest, and Wren met his critics by producing a design of spectacular grandeur. This modified design, called "Great Model", was accepted by the King and the construction started in November, 1673. However, this design failed to satisfy the chapter and clerical opinion generally; moreover, it has an economic drawback. Wren was confined to a 'cathedral form' desired by the clergy. In 1674 he produced the rather meager Classical-Gothic compromise known as the Warrant Design. However, this design, called so from the royal warrant of
14 May 1675 attached to the drawings, isn't the design upon which work had begun a few weeks before.
The cathedral that Wren started to build bears only a slight resemblance to the Warrant Design. In 1697, the first service was held in the cathedral when Wren was 65. There was still, however, no dome. Finally in 1711 the cathedral was declared complete, and Wren was paid half of his salary that, in the hope of accelerating progress,
Parliament had withheld for fourteen years since 1697. The cathedral had been built for 36 years under him, and the only disappointment he'd about his masterpiece is the dome: against his wishes the commission engaged Thornhill to paint the inner dome in false perspective and finally authorized a balustrade around the proof line. This diluted the hard edge Wren had intended for his cathedral, and elicited the apt parthian comment that "ladies think nothing well without an edging".
Major architectural works in the 1670s and 1680s
During the 1670s Wren received significant secular commissions which manifest both the maturity and the variety of his architecture and the sensitivity of his response to diverse briefs. Among many of his remarkable designs at this time, the
monument commemorating the Great Fire, the
Royal Observatory, and
the library at
Trinity College, Cambridge were the most important ones. The former two of the three works also involved
Robert Hooke, but Wren was in control of the final design.
By historical accident, all Wren's large-scale secular commissions dated from after 1680s. At the age of fifty his personal development, as was that of English architecture, was ready for a monumental but humane architecture, in which the scales of individual parts relates both to the whole and to the people who used them. The first large project Wren designed, the
Chelsea Hospital, doesn't entirely satisfy the eye in this respect, but met its belief with such distinction and success that even in the twentieth century it fulfills its original function. The reconstruction of the state room at
Windsor Castle was notable for the integration of architecture, sculpture, and painting. This commission was in the hand of
Hugh May, who died in February, 1684, before the construction finished. Wren assumed his post and finalized the works.
Wren didn't pursue his work on architectural design as actively as he'd before the 1690s, although he still played important roles in a number of royal commissions. In 1696 he was appointed Surveyor of
Greenwich Naval Hospital, and three years later Surveyor of
Westminster Abbey. He resigned the former role in 1716 but held the latter until his death.
Achievement and reputation
At his death, Wren was 90. Even the men he'd trained and who owed much of their success to Wren's original and leadership were no longer young. Newer generations of architects were beginning to look past Wren's style. The
Baroque school his apprentices had created was already under fire from a new generation that brushed Wren’s reputation aside and looked back beyond him to
Inigo Jones. Architects of the 18th century couldn't forget Wren, but they couldn't forgive some elements in his work they deemed unconventional. The churches left the strongest mark on subsequent architecture. In France, where English architecture rarely made much impression, the influence of St Paul's Cathedral can be seen in the church of Sainte-Geneviève (now the
Panthéon); begun in 1757, it rises to a drum and dome similar to St Paul's, and there are countless versions of it, from
St Isaac's (1840-42) in
St Petersburg to the
Capitol at
Washington, D.C. (1855-65).
In the twentieth century the potency of the influence of Wren's work on English architecture was reduced. The last major architect who admitted to being dependent on him was
Sir Edwin Lutyens, who died in 1944. With the purposeful elimination of historic influences from
international architecture in the early 20th century, Wren's work gradually stopped being perceived as a mine of examples applicable to contemporary design.
Sir Christopher Wren was also a
Freemason and Master of Lodge Original, No. 1, now the Lodge of Antiquity No. 2 "adopted"
May 18,
1691.
Commemorations
The crater Wren on
Mercury was named in his honour.
Trivia
At one time Wren was credited with the design of the King's House at Newmarket. The attribution gave rise to an apocryphal story in which Charles II, who was over six feet tall, complained about the low ceilings.
Wren, who wasn't, replied that 'they were high enough', at which the king crouched down until he was on a level with his Surveyor and strutted about saying, 'Ay, Ay, Sir Christopher, I think they're high enough.'
Footnotes
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