London - Hampton Court Palace view from air - HMSO official postcard c.1970s

Postcard
• Picture / Image:  Hampton Court Palace, London - air view from the South East
• Publisher:  Department of the Environment / HMSO
• Postally used:  no
• Stamp:  n/a
• Postmark(s): n/a
• Sent to:  n/a
• Notes / condition: 

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Text from the free encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA may appear below to give a little background information (internal links may not  work) :

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Hampton Court Palace is a royal palace in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, Greater London, and the historic county of Middlesex; it has not been inhabited by the British Royal Family since the 18th century. The palace is located 11.7 miles (18.8 kilometres) south west of Charing Cross and upstream of central London on the River Thames. It was originally built for Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, a favourite of King Henry VIII, circa 1514; in 1529, as Wolsey fell from favour, the palace was passed to the King, who enlarged it.

The following century, King William III's massive rebuilding and expansion project intended to rival Versailles was begun.^[1] Work halted in 1694, leaving the palace in two distinct contrasting architectural styles, domestic Tudor and Baroque. While the palace's styles are an accident of fate, a unity exists due to the use of pink bricks and a symmetrical, albeit vague, balancing of successive low wings.^[2]

Along with St. James's Palace, it is one of only two surviving palaces out of the many owned by King Henry VIII.

Today, the palace is open to the public, and a major tourist attraction. It is cared for by an independent charity, Historic Royal Palaces, which receives no funding from the Government or the Crown.^[3]

Apart from the Palace itself and its gardens, other points of interest for visitors include the celebrated maze, the historic real tennis court (see below) and the huge grape vine, claimed to be the largest in the world.

The palace's Home Park is the site of the annual Hampton Court Palace Festival and Hampton Court Palace Flower Show.

Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York, Chief Minister and favourite of Henry VIII, took over the site of Hampton Court Palace in 1514.^[4] It had previously been a property of the Order of St John of Jerusalem.^[2] Over the following seven years, Wolsey spent lavishly to build the finest palace in England at Hampton Court, a figure of 200,000 gold crowns.^[5] Wolsey rebuilt the existing manor house to form the nucleus of the present palace. Today, little of Wolsey's building work remains unchanged. The first courtyard, the Base Court,^[6] (B on plan), was his creation, as was the second, inner gatehouse (C) which leads to the Clock Court (D) (Wolsey's seal remains visible over the entrance arch of the clock tower^[7]) which contained his private rooms (O on plan).^[4] The Base Court contained forty-four lodgings reserved for guests, while the second court (today, Clock Court) contained the very best rooms – the state apartments – reserved for the King and his family.^[8] Henry VIII stayed in the state apartments as Wolsey's guest immediately after their completion in 1525.

In building his palace, Wolsey was attempting to create a Renaissance cardinal's palace featuring rectilinear symmetrical planning with grand apartments on a raised piano nobile, all rendered with classical detailing. The historian Jonathan Foyle has suggested^[9] that it is likely that Wolsey had been inspired by Paolo Cortese's De Cardinalatu, a manual for cardinals that included advice on palatial architecture, published in 1510. The architectural historian Sir John Summerson asserts that the palace shows ""the essence of Wolsey—the plain English churchman who nevertheless made his sovereign the arbiter of Europe and who built and furnished Hampton Court to show foreign embassies that Henry VIII's chief minister knew how to live as graciously as any cardinal in Rome.""^[10] Whatever the concepts were, the architecture is an excellent and rare example of a thirty-year era when English architecture was in a harmonious transition from domestic Tudor, strongly influenced by perpendicular Gothic, to the Italian Renaissance classical style. Perpendicular Gothic owed nothing historically to the Renaissance style, yet harmonised well with it.^[11] This blending of styles was realised by a small group of Italian craftsmen working at the English court in the second and third decades of the sixteenth century. They specialised in the adding of Renaissance ornament to otherwise straightforward Tudor buildings.^[11] It was one of these, Giovanni da Maiano who was responsible for the set of eight relief busts of Roman emperors which were set in the Tudor brickwork.^[12]

type=printed postcards

theme=topographical: british

sub-theme=england

county/ country=middlesex

number of items=single

period=1945 - present

postage condition=unposted